Will I or Won’t I?

Bringing will power back from the cold

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.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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This week at Mad in America Substack, Bob Whitaker pointed out that regular steady exercise has a singularly powerful effect in relieving and preventing depression. This has been known forever, of course, but is rarely mentioned and even more rarely studied. The reasons for this neglect are clear: there’s no money in it for psychiatrists, they lose control of the process, and it clashes with their so-called “biomedical model” that isn’t [1]. These days, you can buy a jigger to give yourself direct current stimulation of the brain that cures everything from stuttering to fallen arches. There’s always money for research on ECT, TCMS, TCDC, photonics, even pyrotherapy, although the pipeline for new drugs seems to be rather empty of late:

A major challenge for progress in novel pharmacotherapies has been our lack of a full understanding about the causes of depression.

So said a reviewer in Medscape. In English, that says: “The reason there are no new antidepressant drugs is because we haven’t got a clue what it is or why it happens.” Not everybody agrees. Some researchers are convinced they know what it is (a biological disease of the brain) and why it happens (your genes). It has led the irrepressible Ian Hickie to claim that we don’t get depressed because bad things happen to us; instead, bad things happen because we have depressive genes [2]. It seems our genes determine our lives, right down to whether we are in a war zone or not. Given that some 85% of children in Gaza say they would rather die than endure further bombing, that’s clearly nonsensical, so why would apparently sensible and highly educated people believe it? The answer, I have shown, is because psychiatry is an ideology, not a rational science [3]:

An ideology is a structured set of beliefs, values, and ideas that shapes how individuals or groups understand, interpret, and act within the social and political world.

Essentially, an ideology is a set of value-laden beliefs that followers are required to accept as a whole and without arguing. If they argue, the group will splinter into squabbling factions as do political or religious movements. The core ideology of modern psychiatry is: “All mental disorder is just a special sort of brain disorder.” So when the writer above talked about “…our lack of a full understanding about the causes of depression,” he meant “the physical causes of this brain disease.” When it’s put in those terms, it’s obviously pretty stupid because, for all the money spent on drugs and on biological research, none of those terribly clever people has ever proven why mental disorder isn’t precipitated by life events. They just believe it because their notion of science has no room for mental factors. Science, they say, deals only with observables, with things we can see or measure; if we can’t measure it, it isn’t science; we can’t see or measure the mind; therefore the mind is not a field of science. That’s all there is to it, but it doesn’t stop there. In commenting on last week’s post on free will, reader PC, from the UK (a psychologist who thinks a lot on these questions) asked whether we can construct a valid rational model of mental life without falling into into classic errors like the infinite regress. Wearing his devil’s advocate hat, he put the well-known argument against free will:

You cannot choose what you choose to choose, i.e. in what sense did I choose to write the word choose just now. Schopenhauer (said) Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills…

This says that if I choose to lift up a glass, then I must have chosen to choose to pick it up, and before that, to have chosen to choose to choose to pick it up, ad infinitum. The regress bit means going backward to try to find the answer, and it’s infinite because it constantly requires the same step with no end, as in: “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” (Darwin provided the answer: a different sort of chicken). An infinite regress is never explanatory, as in: “I will myself to close the door; but first I must will myself to will myself to close the door … etc.” The only solution is not to take the first step. This is what the positivists had in mind when they said: “We can’t see mental things like the Will, so we can’t include them in our science.” Modern science therefore doesn’t talk about the mind, from which came the long and pointless behaviorist program in psychology, the plan to write a non-mentalist psychology, which took a hundred years to go exactly nowhere [4]. It also led to a psychiatry that doesn’t talk to people about their mental lives: “Just answer those questions, take your tablets and come back in a month.”

On the one hand, the world today is teetering on the brink of catastrophe, which makes us anxious and depressed yet, on the other, all the smart people who think about these things are telling us that there’s nothing we can do, just take your tablets and watch TV. In their view, the conduct of our “leaders’” is all determined by their genes, as is our response to their appalling behaviour, so it seems we’re stuck in a predetermined doom cycle. That’s what happens when you live in a physicalist universe. Fortunately, help is on the way. The biocognitive model says that the narrow (antidualist) view of science dumped on the world in 1929 [5] has reached its use-by date and we need to turn to a new, expanded model of science of the mind based in the idea of information as a real thing [6].

In world history, the period 1929-48 provided plenty of distractions but it also saw the development of a radically new form of science, now known as computer science or information technology, etc. The idea that science consists only of studying real things that we can see and weigh and put in bottles expanded to include the concept of information as a real but invisible thing. At first, people fought the idea because it seemed the concept of information was being used in exactly the same as people had used magic, inventing something unseen to fill the gaps in our understanding. These days, everybody accepts that information is a real thing because it can act on the real world. The laws governing computation are known in detail and the physical mechanisms to generate and transmit it are reaching the limits of the material sciences. The mere existence of information as a law-governed system says the universe is governed by two completely distinct sets of laws with no points of contact. That’s what dualist means, not two substances or two metaphysical forces of good and evil.

These days, there’s nothing magic in all this but there’s one problem: somebody forgot to tell all the busy people in psychology and psychiatry they’re out of date. The big tent of science has expanded to incorporate notions like minds and will and hopes and ambitions: they can no longer be dismissed as magic. If the mind is an informational state generated by the brain’s computational capacity, then we can recast those old concepts in informational terms and start to use them again. Consider the example PC raised, the concept of free will, of being able to choose something and make it happen:

Determinism says: There is only one possible way for the universe to unfold and that’s determined by the initial state and the laws of the material universe. Any sense of free will is illusory.

Free will says: Untrue. However I acted a minute ago, I could have acted differently.

We’ll take a rock as the exemplar of the determinist system. A rock has a crystalline internal structure but no internal structure or mechanism and no motive power of its own. It heats up in the sun and cools at night, maybe fracturing in the process but there’s nothing magic about it. For that rock to decide to move, say further uphill because the view is better, external energy would have to be provided. However, that would upset the universe because it’s a closed system. Using that as the example, people then look at the brain and say it too follows all the physical rules, its chemicals and electrical gradients are not magic in any way. Therefore for that brain to change its “mind” would require external energy and, given all the people on earth, that would soon cause energy imbalances such that things would either blow up or grind to a halt. Therefore, the mind must be reducible to the brain because nothing else is possible.

That’s wrong from the beginning. The comparison is not between a thinking rock and a brain, but between two functioning brains, one coherent and the other incoherent. These days, the physiological activity of the brain is very well understood as wholly physical in nature. In humans and in all other animals, neurons fire their impulses, nerve tracts are activated, limbs and lips move, etc. without ever involving the supernatural. We can work out with great precision the energy demands of a brain. However, that’s not all there is. If all the neurons in a brain are firing randomly, they are using energy at a certain rate but there’s no coherent output. That person would be in a coma. In the alternative, the neurons are firing at the same rate and consuming the same amount of energy but they are coherent, governed by the rules of logic, so there will be an informational output. That person is awake and responding normally to the environment. The energy consumption of a healthy brain is about 20W, or 20% of the body’s needs, and this hardly changes between sleep and waking. It isn’t the energy consumption that determines the brain’s informational output but the coherence of its activity. Crucially, coherent function requires no more energy than lying in a coma. In thermodynamic terms, the computational activity of a brain is a free lunch.

In the biocognitive model, the informational activity generated by the healthy brain just is our mental life, so our mental lives are real yet do not upset the matter-energy balance in our sector of the universe. The three ring circus in my head does not breach any laws of thermodynamics so that old argument against mental life falls in a heap. Free will then is simply the process of computing possible outcomes and choosing from them according to the model of the conditional operator used in logic and IT, which says: If X is true, then Y is true. If X happens, then Y will happen. In logic notation: X → Y (material implication). There is no infinite regress. If the first element happens, then the second will automatically follow. Just a moment, you say, isn’t that just determinism in logical guise? No, because as psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird said, “Any scientific theory of the mind must treat it as an automaton” (1983). To break the determinist lock, I can choose to change all the conditions:

If this is Monday, I’ll have a sandwich for lunch. If it’s Tuesday, I’ll have a pie. No, that’s getting boring, I’ll have noodle soup for a change.

There is no choosing to choose to choose, it is simply a matter of setting up “If A happens then B will follow according to my rules.” If I don’t like the outcome, I change the rules. A decision by a human is not a metaphysical event in some magical space, it is simply cascades of rules acting on rules acting on sensory inputs to compute an outcome and then implement it. Our mental capacity to look ahead and generate a range of possible outcomes for any initial state of affairs allows us to choose the best or most suitable path and put it into effect: “If the outcome is unfavourable in terms of existing rules, then change the conditions,” i.e. another example of the logical rule of material implication: I look ahead to decide whether to change my rules. No magic, and definitely not determined by the laws of the physical universe.

Of course, not all our rules are equal, some are important and some less so. Mr Trump is a fine example of this. He has only one rule in life: “I must win everything at all times in every possible way, and everybody must know it.” That’s behind everything he does, that’s all there is to him. The rest of us have thousands of rules all jostling to be noticed, mostly consistent but sometimes a jumble. In the biocognitive model, personality, the sum total of rules governing an individual’s life, is paramount and mental disorder is the outcome of disordered or dysfunctional rules. Very simple, and it doesn’t force us into absurdities such as thinking that our DNA determines what happens to us in life.

Does any of this matter to psychiatry? I believe it does. Psychiatry’s intellectual stance was built on the idea that science must be limited to observables. Nobody is allowed to talk about unobservables; the mind is unobservable; therefore psychiatrists can’t talk about the mind. Except the business of psychiatry just is the mind, so they had to get around that hurdle and the way was to change a patient’s reports of his/her mental state from mental reports to reports about their brain’s physical state. “I feel sad” has nothing to do with severe losses in life, it’s just code for “My serotonin is low.” That leads to a search for drugs and other physical treatments but it also blinds psychiatry to the possibility that it may in fact be on the wrong path, that the search for “novel pharmacotherapies” is a search for the end of a rainbow.

This is just the briefest summary of the case for the biocognitive model, set out in [6]. It is a dualist model, i.e. it says there are two separate realms to the universe, the physical and the informational, each operating independently according to different sets of laws. Each realm is wholly rule-governed, even though we don’t yet know all the rules; and that the mind emerges from or supervenes upon the brain’s coherent function by virtue of those rules. Philosopher David Chalmers set out the general case for this process [7] but he left what he called the “laws of supervenience” blank. My suggestion is that they are the rules of a dual-valued logic which the mathematician George Boole (1815-1864) called “The Laws of Thought” [8]. These rules are the foundation of the entire IT industry, so there’s nothing magic in them. Boole has had a vast influence on the world but he died largely unknown; I think he was quite a heroic figure.

The other point about a non-magical view of mental life is that it leads to the notion of animal minds, that animals are also gifted with minds even though they may have just a few grams of brain tissue. That suggests that the emergence of mind is a software matter, not a matter of brute computing power. I don’t believe we need invoke quantum computing, partly because we don’t know what it means, partly because there is now evidence to say it has limits but mainly because it is used to “fill the gaps,” i.e. as a latter-day magic.

So back to the question of whether exercise is better for depression than drugs. In his brief article, Bob Whitaker shows how exercise is actually much better for us than drugs can ever be. Exercise is efective in relieving depression and also has a long list of positive benefits, whereas drugs may relieve depression but they come with a long list of ill effects (note he didn’t mention akathisia or suicidal ideas and urges, which are the most serious). Plus drugs are expensive and addictive so they’re a bad deal. If, however, we view depression as a reaction to life events occurring in a sentient being, we can quickly see that the psychological approach is correct. Fortunately, there is now a model of mental life which accounts for mental disorders as psychological states. That’s a vast improvement over mainstream psychiatry, which doesn’t have any models. But don’t they realise that trying to write a non-mentalist psychology is actually the more difficult path? They should just admit defeat, recognise that science has expanded into entirely new realms and start again. It’s so much easier, except they all have a rule which says: “I can’t possibly be wrong because that would push me down the hierarchy and that’s too painful to consider.”

References:

1. McLaren N (2024). Biological Psychiatry: Reductio ad Absurdum. Chap. 2 in Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon.

2. Crouse J et al (2024). Patterns of stressful life events and polygenic scores for five mental disorders and neuroticism among adults with depression. Molecular Psychiatry (2024) 29:2765–2773; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02492-x

3. McLaren N (2013). Psychiatry as Ideology. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry 15: 7-18. 10.1891/1559-4343.15.1.7

4. McLaren N (2024). Behaviorism: Not Sleeping, Just Dead. Chap. 4 in Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon.

5. 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

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

7. Chalmers DJ (1996). The Conscious Mind: in search of a fundamental theory. Oxford: University Press.

8. Boole, G. (1854). An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. Dover Classics of Science and Mathematics. New York: Dover (1958). Now available through Google Books.

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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.

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