From Animal Minds to Human Minds

It's not such a big jump

These posts examine modern psychiatry from a critical point of view. Unfortunately, mainstream psychiatrists usually react badly to any sort of critical analysis of their activities, labelling critics as “anti-psychiatry,” whatever that is. Regardless, criticism is an integral part of any scientific field and psychiatry is no different. As it emerges, there is a lot to be critical about.

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Further to the post on animal minds last week, PC from the UK asked:

How are animals classified informationally in terms of your model? As I understand it, your model says human brains contain the neurology sufficient to produce an informational space governed by a dual value calculus which means we can make decisions unaffected by the laws of physics. Is it simply brain structure that means animals are a level of abstraction different from us (as we are from them in other ways)- so they do not have access to the same informational space?

My view is that animals function in much the same way as we do when we are doing something without the clutter of language getting in the way. If you watch birds flying through trees, they are able to twist and turn through the branches without an accident, but we can’t move as fast as they can. In my garden, honeyeaters chase each other through trees much faster and more accurately than we could ever do. Similarly, monkeys racing through trees are making probably a dozen different decisions per second, yet there is no language.

Language misleads us. The real action takes place silently, instantly, and without any sense of “talking to ourselves.” For example, when driving along a narrow, rocky bush track, I do not have a running commentary in my head, as in “Now I need to change down a gear, push on clutch, reach for gearstick, decelerate, touch brakes, look right, check rear vision mirrors…” None of that happens. I just drive. When typing this, I am not “saying” each letter in my mind, I simply do it. I’m not even aware of letters although I do tend to sound words as I type, but not when in a hurry. I don’t ask myself; “What’s the time?” I just look at the clock. And when I do, I don’t “say” in my head, “Oh, nearly three, time to go,” I just see it and jump up, ready to go.

But most tellingly of all, we don’t use language to control our use of language. While speaking, I do not have an inner chatter going on that tells me what I must say, I simply say it. I don’t know in advance what will be the third next word that I use but it will be appropriate to the context. Moreover, it will be delivered by a feat of muscles and breath control that we take for granted and which only becomes obvious in people who have suffered neurological damage, for example, the minute control of breath that allows us to end a sentence when we need to take a breath (dysprosody). All of this is computed silently, in real time, and we don’t actually know how we do it. I suggest animals operate at that level all the time. They have access to memory but not in the sense of “Now where did I leave that kill yesterday?” If they feel hungry today then, without any palaver, they go straight to where they left it yesterday.

The point people struggle with is the idea that the significant mental activity takes place silently, meaning it is done without language and we can’t access the process. It is “unconscious” in the sense that we don’t make a verbal decision to act (I just made a mistake then but I didn’t “say” in my head “Looks like another mistake, backspace three times and correct it”, I just saw it and corrected it). Chomsky made the absurd suggestion that language evolved about 75,000 years ago following a single small mutation in the brain, but its survival value was via its effect on thought processes. Communication, he said, was a secondary benefit (for a detailed critique, see [1, Chap. 7, esp. S.7.2.13]). I believe this is absolutely wrong as the actual computational processes by which we make decisions do not rely on words and lie outside conscious awareness. We cannot access those processes, we are simply appraised of their outcome, the outcome becomes part of us. We don’t need words to think, or to see, or perceive, or recall, or decide. Nor do animals. Language is simply a layer on top of this universal ability that confers the inestimable advantage of having a huge, extra memory. Imagine Einstein trying to write his theories if he couldn’t record them and look over them. Same goes for these posts: I have to look up what I’ve said before. I’ve also suggested that the direct survival value of our capacity to speak lay specifically in the ability to communicate plans on how to attack and slaughter our neighbours. Originally, they were the Neanderthals but when Homo sapiens had wiped them out for no more reason than they could (I suspect that, like modern gorillas, Neanderthals were shy and retiring), they turned on each other and have never stopped (for a vision of the exquisite cruelty of humans toward each other, see this).

This brings us back to a question Descartes wrestled with but was unable to resolve: Do humans have a soul/spirit? Descartes decided we do, but that was an act of faith, not of his legendary capacity for self-critical analysis. He started with the fundamental proposition that God exists and created two independent realms containing all that is (“each of which requires nothing other than itself to exist”). That made three parts to his universe: Divine stuff, whose essence is perfection; material stuff, whose essence is extension (size, weight etc.); and mind stuff, whose essence is thought. Mind stuff, or the soul, came from God and returned to its maker when the body stopped working. The soul is not made of material stuff and is therefore not subject to the laws of the physical realm. It is unlocalised and invisible but, by some means, it was able to work through the brain.

How the immaterial soul interacted with the body was a mystery which hung around for hundreds of years and drove first philosophers and then physiologists and psychologists to distraction. Finally, as neuroanatomy and physiology gathered strength during the latter half of the 19^th Century, it became obvious that their methods of science could not be applied to the mind. Science is about justification, aka epistemic warrant, and justification came from measurements that other researchers could duplicate. This led to what is now called the positivist revolution in science, which said that because the mind/soul could not be measured, anything to do with it necessarily lay outside the field of science. Scientists could believe what they liked but if they couldn’t measure it, they couldn’t talk about it at work.

Unfortunately, this “red line,” or demarcation criterion, has been widely misunderstood. Scientists were not saying “There is no such thing as the mind,” all they meant was “We don’t have an adequate concept of it nor any tools that can deal with it, so we can’t deal with it in our labs.” In 1913, John B Watson, a brash young American psychologist threw down the gauntlet:

I do not wish unduly to criticise psychology. It has failed signally, I believe, during the fifty-odd years of its existence as an experimental discipline to make its place in the world as an undisputed natural science ... We have become so enmeshed in speculative questions concerning the elements of mind, the nature of conscious content that I, as an experimental student, feel that something is wrong with our premises and the types of problems which develop from them ... I can state my position here no better than by saying that I should like to bring my students up in the same ignorance of (the mind-body problem) as one finds among the students of other branches of science [2, pp 163,166].

This was the birth of the behaviourist revolution in psychology, which wanted to build a new human science based not on what people think of their inner experiences, because it went nowhere, but on what people do, i.e. their observable behaviour. It was formalised a few years later, in 1929, when a group of mathematicians, physicists and philosophers centred around the University of Vienna issued a manifesto declaring that science had to be separated from metaphysics, including everything that had to be accepted on faith or without formal evidence [3].

As history has shown, behaviourism went nowhere, albeit at huge cost, leaving a bit of technique and a lot of jargon but the original impetus for behaviourism hasn’t gone away. Mainstream psychology, and neuroscience, and philosophy and psychiatry still have no reliable means of coming to grips with the mind, meaning mental matters have no epistemic warrant. Therefore they don’t try openly. Psychology has quietly resurrected the mind, but this time telling everybody they’re only dealing with “cognitive functions,” meaning mind as an informational space, not as a place of experience. It means they spend their time in laboratories conducting arcane experiments on what people can know and how they perceive, or using a hybrid called “cognitive-behavioural therapy” (CBT) to try to help people feel better but that’s a fudge.

Psychiatry came to the positivist party rather later, burned by its experience with Freud’s psychoanalysis. That’s not quite right: the tradition of seeing mental disorder as the result of physical disease of the brain, which dictated physical treatments, had always been dominant. Freud, on the other hand, saw the mind as a real thing that could eventually be reduced to brain function. Meantime, we could talk about it as a machine in the head that operated on very clear physical principles, specifically, hydrodynamic laws. Again, it went nowhere, for the reasons Watson had laid out in 1913: we can talk about ids and egos and ego defences but what proof do we have that these things exist? None, of course, so psychoanalysis was declared unfit for real scientists and booted out. With it went psychiatry’s last effort to see humans as creatures with minds and not just as large laboratory rats. It should be recalled that in the real world of mental disorder and despite all the noise it made, psychoanalysis had very little effect.

So we come to today, where psychiatry sees its “consumers” as biological preparations suffering biological diseases who need biological treatments. All talk of humans as having minds that can cause distress and, in particular, all talk of humans as having “spirits” is anathema. With regard to minds, there’s good reason: until now, there has been no intellectual technology that allows us to deal in the mental realm with people’s mental problems. Mental problems are seen as signposts pointing to the underlying biological problems, for which there is a specific “cure.” Well, maybe cure is a bit strong, I mean it’s like diabetes, you’ve got it for life, haven’t you, ha ha, so take these and come back in a month. Mental problems are not dealt with in the mental realm because psychiatry can’t talk about that, it has no language for it, no theory of mind, no model of mental disorder, nothing. The cupboard is bare, so they borrow the language of the neurosciences and blather on about that. It sounds impressive, it stops people arguing and it’s great for getting huge research grants.

Refusing to deal with the mind/spirit as such also spares psychiatrists the pain of having to engage with their patients as humans, of having to take their mental matters seriously: “Feeling a bit low since your hubby died, are we? You’ve got depression, take these and come back in a month, and don’t worry, there’s plenty more fish in the sea, ha ha.” In fact, the lady is stuck, unable to move forward as she cannot envisage a new life for herself. Medical graduates may feel drawn to psychiatry because it seems to promise a way of tackling mental problems but they soon become dulled. The promise is empty, lost in a sea of what is really pseudoscience, of biomedical and biopsychosocial models that don’t exist, of brain enzymes and genes that change from year to year, of always being “on the verge of a major breakthrough” that never delivers. Eventually, most new psychiatrists give up and either chase the money or settle for being a big noise in the world of psychiatry. Those who don’t, who try to remain true to the idea of humans as being more than lab rats, get used to being called “anti- psychiatry.”

The biocognitive model for psychiatry exists to fill this huge gap [4]. It specifically says: Humans have minds. Minds are insubstantial, unlocalised, not subject to the laws of the physical universe and yet are causally efficacious. That is, the mind has all the properties of Descartes’ soul or spirit except one: it does not survive death of the brain. The biocognitive model defines a rule-governed physical mechanism by which the mind emerges from the brain as an informational state, all without inventing any weird concepts such as the Oedipus complex or penis envy. It relies on one mind-bending concept (it would be a bit boring if it didn’t have any), that the informational space generates its own medium as it develops, it exists in and of itself. Some people feel that’s a sleight of hand but they’re relying on physical constructs to understand a non-physical realm. It’s like the idea of the luminiferous ether: early modern physicists couldn’t comprehend the idea of light travelling through a vacuum, so they invented the ether as a medium for the waves to spread. That was soon left in the dust but that style of thinking persists.

The mind/soul/spirit is totally dependent on the physical integrity of the brain. It is a product of the brain’s computational capacity so if the brain starts to malfunction for any reason, then mental function will deteriorate, usually in well-known ways. However, the presence of a mental abnormality (e.g. prolonged distress, false perceptions) doesn’t necessarily indicate a brain abnormality. That’s only one of three possible sources of error, the others being false data input (misunderstandings, misperceptions) and incorrect computational rules (wrong beliefs). This provides a formal basis for the idea of self-reinforcing mental disturbances which, as I have argued, are the basis for all the anxiety states [5]. Crucially, the information which constitutes the mind, the mental contents, act back on the computational mechanism of the brain such that what I believe and want determines what I do. That is, it provides a formal mechanism for free will, so we can stop all this nonsense about having to provide a physical basis for every aspect of human life – like prolonged grief.

Last, the biocognitive model says there can be no disembodied information. Information emerges from a tightly-defined, physical computational mechanism so, without that mechanism, there’s no informational space. No body means no mind. Information can only act back on its own generative mechanism, not on some other: there has to be a connection, otherwise they’re isolated. This means … no ghosts, no moaning spirits in the dark, no telepathy or telekinesis or precognition or astra travel or any of that stuff. Meridians are out, cosmic forces for good or evil are a fantasy, life forces or energy are imaginary, no chakras, feng shui is just a fairy story, no fairies, witches, tree nymphs, spells, magic curses or anything like that. Damn. Does that mean no afterlife, no carved tablets of stone from on high, no miracles like raising the dead, walking on water or turning water into wine, no resurrections? Correct. There’s enough to understand about the world, enough to do to look after it, without leaping into the endless fever swamps of fantasy.

If you like to refer to human mental life as consciousness or spirit or soul, feel free but be ware that the concept must have limits. If you take away any of the limits outlined above (they function as demarcation criteria), then the door is wide open to any sort of fantastical nonsense – and to any sort of charlatanry or trickery. If there are no formal limits, people can be, and regularly are, cheated, abused and murdered just on the basis of what some other person has imagined.

But, the doubters say, what about morality? How can there be a system of morality without a higher authority to ordain it? In the first place, religious rules would perhaps be slightly plausible if their supporters actually kept to them. You may like to believe that God has ordained your race/religion/country/tribe/whatever to be the leaders of the world and shiners of light in dark places but that doesn’t give you the right to murder people who don’t agree with you. There are a few million people today who believe their god gave them a bit of real estate in the Middle East and so they are bombing and starving all the indigenous inhabitants until they “volunteer” to leave (with nowhere to go and no money to get there). But she also said “Thou shalt not kill,” so what happened to that bit? As Anne Lamott pointed out: “You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Despite thousands of years of propaganda (a word invented by the church for its own purposes), there is such a thing as a secular morality. It is based on the elementary principle: Do nothing to endanger the long-term safety of the planet and all its species, because this may well be the only experiment in mental life on this side of the known universe. That entails being mindful of what you do at all times. If you want to distinguish that as “spiritual,” I won’t object because it’s a distinction without a difference.

References:

1. McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon.

2. Watson JB. Psychology as the behaviourist views it. Psychological Review, 1913; 20:158-177.

3. Hahn H, Neurath O, Carnap R (1929). The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle. Ernst Mach Society, University of Vienna. http://rreece.github.io/philosophy-reading-list/docs/the-scientific-conception-of-the-world-the-vienna-circle.pdf

4. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. Amazon

5. McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

1. 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:

2. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

3. McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

4. McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.