I want to digress this week about my experiences while trying to understand and explain human behavior in terms of psychological constructs in contrast to starting with a physiological paradigm. A paradigm does not explain cognitive functioning; it sets limits on and establishes parameters for the kinds of functions that are possible. Intuitively, it may seem natural to begin with behavioral concepts that have already been developed and accepted in psychology when thinking about the human condition. It certainly seemed that way to me as I ventured into psychological theory building many times without questioning what I was doing. Over time, however, I discovered that psychological theories that begin with behavioral descriptions of human functioning remain on that descriptive surface.
Two hundred years ago, William Blake critiqued voices of reason that were only capable of comparing the “ratios” of the already known world and repeating the “same dull round” on the “mundane shell” of reality. Descriptive theories of human functioning repeat this same mistake and simply reshuffle the cards in a well-known deck.
As I looked back on my work over the past forty years, I was surprised to discover several theoretical dead ends that I proposed and developed but later abandoned and then forgot. They offered interesting ways of explaining human behavior but accomplished little more than substituting new sets of terms for the old ones. Recently, after completing The Two Tiers of Consciousness, I saw a relationship between the nature of the two tiers I had proposed and Blake’s concepts of innocence and experience. I excitedly began to develop Blake’s concepts only to quickly see that my thinking was once again constrained to the descriptive behavioral surface.
I backed away from what I had started and reimagined how to proceed. I decided to explore the first tier of consciousness, the physical core of experience, further, and I proposed a physiological paradigm. The physical domain of experience at the first tier is established without conscious mediation, and it is pre-empirical in that it involves a continuous physical flow that takes place prior to the differentiation of entities and events. I envisioned the possible components of a pre-empirical system, and this led directly to the physiological paradigm that is the basis for the present revision of my book and is the subject of this blog.
I don’t know whether my experience represents a general principle about the relationship between neurology and psychology, but it should serve as a cautionary tale for theory building in relationship to brain functioning. Too often, neuroscientists who build theories about the brain around the behavioral functions they are trying to explain are constrained by these psychological concepts to surface level explanations. They appear to be revealing underlying mechanisms, but they are only adding neurological labels to psychological concepts.
A physiological paradigm provides a framework for brain functioning independent of its connection to specific behavioral functions. It makes it possible to address these functions without the constraints of an already established psychological system of behavioral constructs.
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