These posts explore the themes developed in my monograph, Narcisso-Fascism, which is itself a real-world test of the central concepts of the Biocognitive Model of Mind for psychiatry.
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A reader recently commented on the topic of free will, a question of profound significance in psychiatry as well as in the larger world (Substack July 29th). All societies are built on the premise that humans have control over their behaviour, and can choose whether to follow the rules or not. The idea of free will says: However I acted a minute ago, I could have acted differently. Without that choice, the concept of morality disappears.
The opposite view is called determinism, which says that everything that happens is the result of what has happened before, so nothing can happen other than the way it does. Ultimately, it all goes down to the laws of physics. Determinists believe that even our sense of having a choice is an illusion, often called the illusion of free will, as one writer said: “If you’d been born with Hitler’s genes, and experienced Hitler’s upbringing, you would be Hitler – and ultimately it’s only good fortune that you weren’t.” If we look at all the trouble spots around the world, and Gaza gets a lot of attention, should we look at this as a moral matter, that the politicians and generals and financiers involved could stop the slaughter if they chose, or was this disaster fixed by the laws of physics when the universe sprang into existence?
This raises two further questions: Is determinism logically valid, and why would anybody want to believe that humans have no control? Does it even make sense? This is important as I have just submitted a paper arguing that, in endorsing something they call the biopsychosocial model, psychiatrists are either grossly neglectful of their intellectual duty, or acting fraudulently. Are psychiatrists free agents, fully responsible for their behaviour, or are they automata? Don’t answer, somebody may be watching, but this goes to the heart of whether determinism make sense. I believe it does not, starting with the point that it’s irrefutable. There is no conceivable human behaviour that can convince devout determinists they’re wrong. Tellingly, even if somebody showed that the concept of determinism is self-contradictory, it wouldn’t deter a determined determinist. Moreover, it has no explanatory value. A person who claims: “Everything that is, including asking questions about free will, was set in motion by events at the Big Bang and cannot be changed,” has added nothing to what we know. If you can explain everything by a single cause, then you’ve explained nothing. We want to know about the differences because they make life interesting. Next question: Why would anybody bother with determinism? What’s wrong with free will? I think the answer lies in history.
The French mathematician and philosopher, René Descartes (1596-1650) was one of the brightest people who ever lived but these days, a lot of his work seems quaint. This was because he started with a single firm belief and everything he developed had to fit with that belief. His starting point, the bedrock of his life’s work, was that God created the universe and all in it. God is all-knowing and perfect in every sense whereas we humans are rather miserable and mucky creatures who differ from animals only in our God-given, immortal souls. That belief goes all through his work which can’t be understood without it. Did he believe in free will? He certainly did. He made it absolutely clear that humans can choose to do the right thing or they can equally choose to do wrong, but there will be consequences. His religious beliefs preceded and shaped all his philosophy and logical work but modern philosophy has rejected his concept of mind on the basis that it is immeasurable and therefore irrefutable. We can’t see or find or measure the mind so we can’t talk about it in science.
When it comes to the modern era, I suggest that determinists are making the same mistake. They start with a set of beliefs with which their observations (of the mind and the world) have to fit, rather than shaping their beliefs to fit the observations. Their belief system starts with the notion that all talk of unobservable minds is necessarily ghostly and best kept in the nursery where it belongs. Therefore we have to build our concepts of the mind and of the universe on the laws of physics, because that’s all there is. A lot of very powerful figures line up behind this belief system. Philosopher Daniel Dennett, who died last year, was one of the loudest and most contemptuous (he gets Chapter 8 to himself in [1]) but he is certainly not alone. Eminent British physicist and Nobel laureate, Roger Penrose, stands in this tradition when he says of consciousness “Current physics does not contain a non-computable element…” (recent lecture, at 5.00). Maybe it doesn’t, but who says the mind has to obey the laws of physics? After all, they’re not the only set of laws in the universe.
Modern philosophy, and therefore psychology and psychiatry, is built on the notion that we can’t talk about unobservables, so everything must be reduced to molecules bumping into each other in the dark, as in: “If you’d been born with Hitler’s genes, and experienced Hitler’s upbringing, you would be Hitler…” I don’t believe that because it presumes that his fundamental beliefs were coded into his genes at the moment of conception and controlled all his choices thereafter. That’s patent rubbish. First, there isn’t enough space in the genome to cover all possible information, e.g. the language we learn, which is determined by geography, not genes. Second, there’s nothing in the human genome that corresponds to the concept of Greater Germany, just because there’s nothing in it that corresponds to concepts of any sort. Genes code for the proteins and the other chemicals that make our brains; the brain allows us to grasp concepts, about ourselves and the world, but whether we use those concepts for good or bad is a matter of values, and values are entirely a personal, indeterminate choice. The fact that Hitler had thick, dark hair growing on his upper lip was genetic but whether he grew a moustache and its shape was wholly his personal choice, as was his view that Jews were the root cause of all Germany’s woes and should be eliminated. The basic machinery of hatred is biological; what we hate is a personal choice.
The case for determinism rests entirely on the fact that its supporters don’t have a theory of mind. They don’t have a theory of mind because minds are insubstantial, and their ideology says there can’t be anything insubstantial in the universe. As a result, they have to fall back on the laws of physics even though Penrose, probably the most influential living physicist, says it won’t work. However, and more to our point, their pessimism has also infected fields like psychology and psychiatry, which therefore look to biology for the ultimate explanation of human behaviour. Trouble is, when it comes to mental disorder, biology explains nothing. It explains nothing in practice, in that untold billions poured into basic biological research have not yielded a single interesting fact about mental disorder, and it explains nothing in theory. For example, I find looking at the current situation around the world hugely discouraging, yet there are plenty of people who are loving the mayhem, cheering it on and begging for more. Is that biology? I don’t think so. Trying to explain mass murder by the laws of physics can only tie us in intractable knots but explaining it as a mental phenomenon throws the physicalists into hysterics for ideological reasons. They, however, see their position as properly rational and scientific, and the mentalist position as primitive and naïve. Stalemate. Is there a way out? I think there is.
The American architect, designer and futurist, Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), was optimistic: “You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Let’s start with a very common and topical matter, paranoid states. Just as a reminder, the word paranoid is an adjective, it describes a disposition to think in a certain way but it is not a thing in itself. There is no such thing as “paranoia.” A person can show a paranoid personality, or be stuck in a paranoid psychosis, while people suffering stress responses commonly develop paranoid ideas about what is happening to them, then react to those ideas as though they were real. There are different themes in paranoid thinking but they all have a common element. The themes are:
(1) an intense sense of persecution; (2) an intense preoccupation with conspiracies; (3) an intense preoccupation with matters of right and wrong, and justice; (4) an intense preoccupation with the supernatural (now includes aliens); and (5) intense or pathological jealousy.
Remember that intense means intense: preoccupied to the point of being unable to think of much else, constantly coming back to it, relating all events to the same few themes, etc. Naturally enough, these themes are all related and there’s a lot of overlap: a jealous man fears his girlfriend is conspiring to have affairs; a person who feels persecuted is constantly trying to get the law to help but, when nobody listens, starts to believe there is a supernatural conspiracy to isolate him, and so on. The common element to all these is: “I know the truth. I’m so intelligent and so powerful that I can see and understand things you can’t. I’m the centre of all the activity, I’m so important that governments have to lie about me.” These are ideas, belief states: how can we possibly provide an explanation for them?
The biological psychiatrist says “This is all due to chemical imbalances in the brain.” As we know, that is not an explanation, it’s a hope, an aspiration for a research program but that’s all. There’s a better way to look at paranoid thinking, as the expression of the person’s biological urge either to dominate and control what people think or its converse, to avoid being dominated and told what to think, or (most often) both. Paranoid people say: “You have to believe what I tell you, otherwise trouble.” They never say: “Here’s the evidence, you have a look and make your own decision.” The paranoid state is all about control and domination. It is a set of ideas the person has adopted in order either to control and dominate the surroundings, or to avoid being controlled and dominated.
There are many reasons this can happen. It may be because everything seems to go wrong, so they decide: “It’s because I’m an X, and everybody hates Xs and conspires to keep us down so I have to fight for my rights.” This was Hitler’s perception of the world, shaped during his grim years in Vienna, defeat in the Great War and then the chaos and financial collapse in Germany. There had to be a reason for these disasters. It couldn’t be because Germany had bad leaders who made bad decisions, therefore it had to be others. He chose Bolsheviks and Jews as the enemy within and set out to eliminate them. Stalin was similar. Because of his early life, he interpreted random or neutral events in the environment as hostility directed at him so he devoted his life to finding and destroying enemies. He felt totally justified because he was on an historic mission to build the workers’ paradise in the USSR. Some paradise, but that’s all it takes to create hell.
Our genes do not tell us what to believe or who to hate, but biology does tell us to try to dominate everybody and, simultaneously, to struggle to avoid being dominated. There is a clear explanation for this, we understand it very well and can confirm it in most other living species on the planet. For humans, the correct explanation of the paranoid state is this mix of ideas shaping and disposing our biological heritage. That is, ideas and beliefs count, but they have nothing to do with genetics. Similarly, we can account for territoriality (which includes possessing things and, crucially, other humans) as just the signal: “In this area, I’m dominant but over there, I’m not.” Territoriality is just applied dominance, as are pathological jealousy and misogyny, for example. These phenomena are very real, and very dangerous. While we share with most other species the drive to dominate, meaning it’s biological, we alone have the capacity to interrogate it. That is a moral matter.
The problem for mainstream psychiatry (and psychology, and philosophy and neurosciences) is that they are in the grip of the positivist ideology and refuse to give any credence to the concept of ideas. Their attitude is: “Ideas are dualism, pure metaphysical flimflam. Science can only be based on hard, measurable data so don’t waste our time with your nursery tales. Beliefs! What next, reading chickens’ entrails?” This is how they justify determinism. Free will implies ideas; ideas are verboten; everything has to reduce to physics; physics is determinist; therefore our lives were determined at the Big Bang. If you don’t have a proper theory of mind as an emergent and therefore indeterminate account of psychology, you end up in this silly position. The case against free will rests on the ideological refusal to give credit to human beliefs and ambitions just because they don’t fit with the depauperate concept of science called positivism.
Two comments to finish. First, the doctrine called ‘compatibilism,’ which says that human free will is compatible with a determinist universe. The historian Richard Carrier has this view but I can’t make sense of his account of it [2, also see Chap 14 in 1]. To me, it’s on a par with that other well-known proof, how to spot a witch in Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail (am I showing my age? Oh well). Philosopher Galen Strawson has a more detailed account but it too fades away. However, the only reason anybody would want to be a compatibilist is the same: not having a concept of mind as an emergent but causally-efficacious entity.
The last point comes from reader PC, in the UK, who said:
… even with an informational space which is not affected by the laws of thermodynamics, if it is anyway dependent on something which is affected by those laws (the brain) then it seems to me it cannot be free. Do thoughts not just arise in our minds? To say we had any involvement in the process of their coming into being is what is referred to as the illusion of free will. Hence why I suggested that true free will is the decision to act or not on those thoughts (which as you say, involves planning), whilst acknowledging that I cannot choose my thoughts (not the same as compatibilism as not all actions are predetermined).
The biocognitive model for psychiatry says that there are different levels of mental activity. First and most obvious is the three-ring circus which goes on in my head in full technicolor and stereo sound from waking to falling asleep. Beneath that is a computational level, where current sensory input is integrated with the enormous array of rules I have acquired throughout my life, governing everything from language to morals, from playing football to cooking cakes, etc. With a bit of effort, I can access most of these rules but some are buried too deep to be able to verbalise, although they still influence my behaviour. Once aware of them, I can change them if I wish. This level is never asleep, it takes current input and computes possibilities of action; from them, I choose what I want, as in: “Hey, I know, what about we…? No, that wouldn’t work. OK, I’ve got it, let’s … Hmm, probably not.” Finally, there is the actual computational level, where all the activity takes place. As far as we know, it operates on some sort of binary algebra but this is not available to introspection. I can, for example, raise my right arm but I can never see or catch myself in the instant of making the decision. That’s fully unconscious, in every sense of the word. All of this depends totally on the brain doing its job flawlessly. As soon as the brain starts to go awry, so too does the emergent mind.
So can I change my mind? Sure can, but it has nothing to do with the laws of physics and everything to do with the laws of some logic, which are an entirely different conceptual realm. Dualism does not mean two substances, it means two sets of laws, unrelated to each other. How the second, logical set of laws emerges from the physical is the subject matter of the biocognitive model of mind [3]. Whether it’s right or wrong, only time will tell but it has the real advantage of seeing humans as minded creatures, not as automatons. It also says animals have minds, but that’s for another day.
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References:
1. McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon.
2. Carrier, R. (2005). Sense and Goodness Without a God: a defence of metaphysical naturalism. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse.
3. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London: Routledge.
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My critical works are best approached in this order:
The case against mainstream psychiatry:
McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).
Development and justification of the biocognitive model:
McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London: Routledge. At Amazon.
Clinical application of the biocognitive model:
McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.
Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:
McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.
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