Reconfiguring Psychology
I have been working on a reconfiguration project for psychology over the past forty years without realizing that I was involved in anything so radical. When I began this project, I did not understand the scope of what I was doing apart from correcting misconceptions about consciousness. I was not aware of fundamental problems that required reconfiguring psychology itself. I began what has proven to be a major revision, discovering the changes needed as the task evolved. The work was intuitive from the start; I seldom knew where it was headed or felt in control of the process.
I envisioned a source within the brain-body system that generates thoughts and images in consciousness in the form of behavioral sequences. I knew that I was proposing a reduced role for consciousness, the mind, but I didn’t realize that I was removing it from its central position in psychology. At the same time, I was elevating the role of the body by focusing on the visceral processes involved in directing our choices. I thought that I was only challenging accepted but misguided ways of thinking about consciousness and never imagined that I was reconfiguring psychology itself.
As I pursued my project, I found that each of the major subject areas within psychology needed clarification and revision. I worked through them one by one, intimidated by the task of revising the basic concepts involved in perception, memory and emotion. The corrections I had made to consciousness impacted all of psychology.
I incorporated my initial insights into thinking processes in the first guidebook I completed twenty years ago. I knew that I needed to address perception but didn’t know how until I discovered J. J. Gibson’s theory of affordances. These ideas led to a series of premises about the brain that became the basis for a text and a new way of thinking about memory. When I revised this text, I addressed the complex issues of emotion in a theory of affects. I summarized these two texts in a second guidebook that I reorganized in terms of the two tiers of consciousness.
I now see that I have been reconfiguring psychology throughout the time that I’ve been working on my project. This process felt strange to me because I hadn’t planned to address topics in psychology like memory, perception and emotion that pushed me beyond my comfort zone of expertise. I was led through this process intuitively, away from the familiar terms and concepts I had learned in psychology. I didn’t know where my intuitions were taking me, but I gradually learned to trust their direction.
The mind is no longer a term I use in relationship to the brain or consciousness. I talk instead about thinking processes and ways in which we use the conscious thoughts we express as tools to further those processes. I describe how the body guides the choices we make through visceral inputs to the brain and how affective experience provides the basis for emotional intelligence. In my weekly blog entries to Of Two Minds on this website, neurophilosophyandart.com, I continue the process of reconfiguring psychology.
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