Appendix: Critiques of Scientific Psychology

Henry Flynt

(c) 1995 Henry A. Flynt, Jr.

CONTENTS

1. Intellectual and social goals of scientific psychology

2. Laboratory psychology

3. Fifties cognitive psychology

4. Piaget's genetic epistemology

5. Second-order cybernetics

6. Quantum physics and consciousness?

7. Cognitive science in the Eighties

Postscript: 1995 thoughts on c.r.

REFERENCES LIST

Chapter 1 of this work introduced an enterprise to supersede psychology. To explain that proposal via a critical contrast with academic psychology occupied the entirety of Chapter 1.

Here I will supplement Chapter 1 by consolidating my critical remarks about schools of scientific psychology prominent in the second half of the twentieth century. I have removed this material to an appendix because to lavish attention on these schools would undercut my long-term credibility. The price of making a careful critique of successively discarded fads is to seem quaint and irrelevant.

I wish to furnish hints to readers who already find the field dubious. There need be no burden on me to prove that every researcher endorses exactly the methodologies I indict, or that these methodologies dominate the historical entirety of the discipline. It is enough to observe that there is no prestigious methodology to counterpose to the methodologies I review (unless one leaves psychology for the equally dubious precincts of phenomenology, theology, etc.).

Broadly speaking, the larger academic world views psychology as a benign and noncontroversial body of research. Physicists individually dismissed psychology as a pseudo-science, but their attitude was regarded as sectarian.

The branch of the discipline which encountered a storm of criticism was IQ testing. IQ testing was singled out from the nondescript mass of psychology and attacked by laypeople, or at least by non-scientists. What was missing was a discussion of the contextual issue of how a doctrine becomes academically accredited as a science in the first place. (Why IQ testing but not graphology?) Meanwhile, research in medical biology and psychiatry continued to be dominated by the principle that all human traits are hereditary.

This narrow episode provided the lesson that the public for intellectual issues is comprised of warring special interests. Opponents of IQ testing had a blind eye for academic accreditation of science, peer review, medical biology, and psychiatry. It seems that nobody is incisive enough to want a methodology which is uniform across many subject-matters.

The remainder of psychology has escaped this sort of intense wariness or scrutiny.

Be that as it may, I must argue that routine scientific psychology is a succession of opportunistic adaptations of the scientific world-view. It passes off injurious and disorienting doctrines as neutral methodologies. What seemed to the intellectual public to be straightforward and harmless in fact imprisons us in a deranged culture. Liberating intellectual avenues are thereby blocked. (See the end of the following section.)

1. Intellectual and social goals of scientific psychology

Perhaps I need to acknowledge why academic psychology has not gravitated toward the enterprise proposed in Chapter 1. Again, in intellectual terms, there is the overwhelming authority of physico-mathematical science. Psychology would in any case seek to imitate physical science, or at least to accommodate it. So psychology seeks to explain the individual's mentation, personality, life-course: in terms of scientifically identifiable "material" factors. Psychology must adopt a "clinical" posture toward the human object, and reduce the object to one of the following:

- neurophysiology and neurochemistry

- individual heredity

- local environmental influences (nurture)

- sociological influences (for social psychology)

The discoveries that ensue will, it is promised, have instrumental efficacy. Psychology promises possibilities of manipulation of human objects--extending to possibilities of control of unwilling objects.

In actuality, psychology's results range across the spectrum from technology which is as genuine as somatic medicine or mechanical engineering to charades whose only impact is ideological. Thus we see the spectrum from neurosurgery, psychopharmacology, and human engineering to aptitude testing and personnel reliability control to educational psychology, industrial psychology, forensic psychiatry and judicially-linked psychology, and psychologists' involvement in "social problems" (juvenile delinquency, drug addiction, teen pregnancy, school drop-outs, teen suicide, etc.).

Psychology's instrumental claims are not necessarily affiliated with any one of the recognized political factions. The import of IQ testing is Right-wing. (So it is said. And yet the "Left" which attacks the testing revered the Soviet Union, which had introduced aptitude testing and elite schools.) On the other hand, humanistic psychology is invoked by educational theory with an intent that is clearly "liberal" ("progressive"). The doctrine that people are determined by their social position lends itself, as an instrumental explanation of the state of society, to a Left-wing construction. Moreover, scholastic aptitude testing may actually succeed in its intended purpose;[1] while mental hospitalization, for example, succeeds only in a custodial sense; and certain of the liberal social remedies which have been proffered by psychology deserve to be called pure charades. With respect to aptitude testing, educational psychology, and judicially-linked psychology (as examples), the psychologist explicitly seeks to ascertain and to manipulate the individual's fate--in accord with some doctrine of the human optimum, and in the interests of some social policy.

To explain psychology as a new repressive instrument invented by an oligarchy would be facile. The success of psychology involves an aspect of impersonal social evolution and of mass consent. In other words, the viability of the entire social order. My principle (I) from Chapter 1[2] could not be the basis of an institutionalized psychology, for if the masses upheld "culture-responsibility," then the existing social order wouldn't work. In order for the system to exist and to deliver the goods, most people have to opt out of c.r.[3] The masses cannot shoulder the burden of c.r. without wrecking the entire system that feeds them. Academic psychology amounts to a lubricant of the system.

So it is that academic psychology would not gravitate to principles A-L from Chapter 1.

I have decided in advance that I want results which break the framework of objectivity. My results will not provide additional technological devices to established industrial-military-political systems. Indeed, given the technological devices already in place, I am in the position of arguing that they don't work in the way the present world-view says they do. (This case is often made from within the present world-view with respect to social science's technological charades. It is another matter altogether to make this case for "hard" technology: in physico-mathematical science, the atomic bomb; in psychology, drugs and neurosurgery.) So I am contesting institutionalized technology in purely intellectual terms, without intending to offer direct replacements.

I aim to conceive the foundation of a new culture. The objective of my work is a perspective in which twentieth-century technology will be analyzed in a very different way, and at the same time will be overmastered by an incomparably different technology. As for the studies in the present work, they are, as I already said, an attempt to move certain subject-areas into my perspective of understanding. I do not claim that they are the shortest route to the "meta-technology" which I envision. And in any case, my ideas presuppose a different mode of life--or at least a resistant enclave--in order to be realized in life. Principles A-L from Chapter 1 are too iconoclastic, too incompatible with common sense, to serve as piquancies in otherwise pedestrian lives.

2. Laboratory psychology

Laboratory psychology seeks to study the personal functioning called perception and cognition via observations from without, as far as possible. It labels first-hand evidence concerning personal functioning as introspection; and it chooses its questions and experiments so as to avoid, or to eliminate, introspective components in observations. Relative to my purposes, this avoidance or exclusion of introspective components in observations is an outright fault of principle. Psychological evidence as such is a sham, because it is strictly second-hand. The psychologist proposes to ascertain how another person consciously manages or copes, by observing exclusively from without how that person accomplishes a given task in a controlled environment.

Psychology's avoidance of introspection is only one aspect of its shaping of the subject-area which it addresses. As a field of specialization specific to the twentieth century, psychology assumes that the question of what is the real world is easy, and has already been solved--once by common sense, a second time by physico-mathematical science. (Psychology does not even probe the incompatibility of these two answers--the issue of whether it is proper to say that tables are "there" to be seen.) So the science of perception and cognition as personal acts can focus on the specialized, residuary task of calibrating how proficiently the individual registers the reality which every sound person knows to be out there. Every sound person agrees that the real world contains tables (or else rotations in fictitious phase-spaces); the only question is how well this or that individual or nervous system registers them. Psychology's experiments have the same structure as experiments to calibrate an alarm system.

An example of how experimental psychology affirms common sense prior to its inquiry appears in T.G.R. Bower, "The Visual World of Infants," Scientific American, December 1966.[4] Bower says,

... if one looks at a triangle with a pencil across it, one can still see that there is a triangle under the pencil ... on seeing a partly covered triangle, one can infer what the hidden parts look like ...

In other words, there is a reality behind the present apparition, and all sound people can divine that reality, because common sense tells us what it is. It may seem unreasonable to contest such a slight, commonplace point, but when this point is accepted, then the entire inquiry is delivered over to the world-view I oppose. The psychologist pre-stipulates that a common-sense world which is an imaginative fiction is proved real by sense-perception; and that is a step I cannot accept (since we must escape just that world to accede to a higher civilization). Showing further how decisive the point is, experiments are devised to prove that humans infer the "correct" hidden parts of a partly covered triangle congenitally--which means that the structure of the world beyond the apparitions, as determined by common sense, is innate to the human nervous system and cannot be escaped.

Elsewhere, Bower says,

... perception seems faithful to the object rather than to its retinal image ...

Once again, there is an object beyond what perception vouchsafes to us. But we lucid people know what the object is, because common sense tells us. So we can judge, from without, how well our perception matches the ("transcendent") object. The generality is that psychologists demand that subjects "see" the common-sense world, even though, literally, that world is nothing like the perceptual apparitions.

Yet again, psychology selects its notions, asks its questions, and contrives its experimental situations so that they will support a physicalist-instrumental world-view. It is very important to understand what this means. Experimental psychology may investigate a realm of functioning seemingly similar to a realm which I study in the course of my research. The psychological investigation may arrive at factual conclusions said to be discovered empirically in the laboratory. But because of the physicalist-instrumentalist bias in the way questions are framed and experiments are designed, it may be that these experimentally established facts are not binding relative to my questions; the psychologists' facts may not even be comparable to what I am doing. A small illustration can be taken from the laboratory investigation of "visual capture"--which sense dominates, when sight and touch provide conflicting impressions?[5] The psychological experiments are highly contrived to encourage the subjects' conformist tendency to deny that their impressions conflict, and to arrive at a reconciled perception at once (and even preconsciously). This rigging of the experiments to encourage epistemological conformism shows both the rigging of the factual results and the preference for the subjects to see the common-sense world.

In order to buttress reductionist explanations and quickly attain a manipulative technology, academic laboratory psychology directly abuses us, with the result of crippling our own faculties. That is, it adopts an anti-empathetic posture toward its object; in a case in which "the object" overlaps with our very possibility of insight, sensitivity, and illumination. This is illustrated in experiments on psychedelic hallucinations reported by R.K.
Siegel.[6] The experimenter's purpose was to make an easy connection between hallucinations and the hard-wiring of the nervous system. He thus singled out hallucinations as features of the psychedelic experience. He posited that hallucinations must fall into a few patterns or types directly reflecting neural hard-wiring. He then gave his subjects psychedelic drugs in an experimental situation which allowed them to respond only by reporting hallucinations in the posited categories (using a Teletype device). The possibility of a whole and illuminating experience was thwarted as if it were a contamination. This refers directly back to what I said about psychology as seeking a manipulative technology (of the nervous system in this case).

Or take the psychology of affect, illustrated by Feelings and Emotions, ed. M.B. Arnold. (Also M.B. Arnold, Emotion and Personality.) Has academic psychology reduced emotion to a cut-and-dried list of emotional simples, substituting that list for human possibility? Has it done so in order to buttress the doctrine that emotions arise directly from certain neurological substrates? (Each of the emotional simples is supposed to have its own neurological site and its own hormone or the like.--?)

3. Fifties cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology became prominent in the Fifties, although its exponents had published in the late Forties. With certain exceptions, it is very much of a piece with the laboratory psychology reviewed in the previous section.

What made cognitive psychology different was that, in the first instance, it posited that perception and cognition are deflected by personal interests. That may have been common sense; but for academic psychology, it was a startling novelty that the subject's detection of reality was not neutral (up to the fineness of the receptors), that it was molded by personal interests. Freud had already posited ego-defenses; and some of the cognitive psychologists had a psychoanalytic background.

To these notions, Leon Festinger added the thesis that the subject experiences inner conflicts of humiliation, and that he or she deflects cognition to moderate the humiliations. An example was knowingly buying a badly made car because it was cheap. ("Cognitive dissonance") Festinger made no claims regarding reality or epistemology in this research.

It was in this connection that cognitive psychology introduced notions such as selective sensitization--which were acceptable contributions in psychology, given what the field is. All the while, a historian might find that cognitive psychology originated in a transfer of psychoanalysis to laboratory psychology.

During the Fifties, cognitive psychology essayed a further departure, and that becomes our topic. There were hints that the knower did not merely inhibit his or her perception of reality, for one or another reason. Rather, there was no reality out there. Each subject, through his or her cognitive style, created a universe.

This departure was later abandoned by the researchers without explanation. Subsequent to the Fifties, the researchers returned to a paradigm which I would not distinguish from the laboratory psychology of the last section.

From a casual perusal of the literature, it is not obvious that the researchers posited the personal creation of universes. Thus, the sources in which this reckless notion surfaced need to be spelled out precisely.

Journal of Personality, vol. 22 (1953) for Riley Gardner, "Cognitive Styles in Categorizing Behavior," pp. 214-233

Assessment of Human Motives, ed. Gardner Lindzey (1958), for

George Kelly, "Man's Construction of His Alternatives"

George S. Klein, "Cognitive Control and Motivation"

Scientific American Reader (New York, 1953), for W.H. Ittelson and F.P. Kilpatrick, "Experiments in Perception," pp. 576-582

Jerome S. Bruner et al., A Study of Thinking (1956), for

Ch. 8: An Overview

Roger Brown, Appendix: Language and Categories, pp. 303-312

Perception: An Approach to Personality, ed. R.R. Blake and G.V. Ramsey (1951), for

George S. Klein, "The Personal World Through Perception"

Perception and Personality, ed. Jerome S. Bruner and David Krech (1950), for

George S. Klein and Herbert Schlesinger, "Where Is the Perceiver in Perceptual Theory?"

Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology (1961), for Jerome S. Bruner and Henri Tajfel, "Cognitive Risk and Environmental Change"

Surveying these references, Riley Gardner's paper, p. 232, said:

people differ in preferred modes of reality-testing, ways of "knowing" the external world, and in their modes of affective response to persons and things

Kelly's paper broadly suggested that in the course of history, magical thinking was superseded by objective thinking (science, experimentation); and that the latter should now be superseded by personal construction.

The paper by Ittelson and Kilpatrick may be considered surprising because of its appearance in Scientific American at the beginning of the Fifties. On p. 581, using "see" to mean perceive or know in the broadest sense, the authors said

What we see is ... our own personal construction designed to give us the best possible bet for carrying out our purposes in action.

George S. Klein was a prominent figure in the cognitive school, and his views need more expansive consideration. In "Cognitive Control and Motivation," he explicitly rebuked psychologists who said that perception is indefinitely malleable. All the while, he anchored his submissions in doctrinaire neurophysiology. From that side, there was not the slightest question of different people living in different realities, or of there not being a reality. On the other hand, he said (ibid., p. 103)

Today's "conventional," workable reality is tomorrow's barrier to explaining different aspects of the same things.

There was, then, this hint that reality is a disposable hindrance. It was Klein who introduced the terminology of cognitive style and perceptual style--which emboldened the relativist recklessness.

Cognitive psychology's leading figure, Jerome Bruner, never really suggested that individual differences in perception were anything but impairments. In A Study of Thinking, there were only the faintest hints that the world might be created by the individual (in the portions noted). The body of the book was concerned with strategies of concept-attainment, on the model of game theory and computer programs. Nevertheless, Bruner was daring enough to suggest that the path of scientific knowing is not unique, that scientific discovery is creation.

The experimental psychology which I reviewed wholesale in the previous section has external reality fixed. For it, perception is a matter of how well the individual detects the world. (I call this the calibration paradigm.) What the above authors were hinting to one or another degree was that subjects create universes, through their idiosyncratic cognitive styles.

The epistemological premise for this reckless speculation was the complete circularity among attitude, the Freudian unconscious, and perception--combined with a Whorfian thesis of the conventionality and cultural relativity of all categories. At the same time, the different world-creations were not just cultural, as they had been for Whorf; they were personal. "The personal is cosmogenic."

Some exponents espoused a Freudian mechanism for the individual mutilation of perception, depending crucially on unconscious mental life. But if reality is something people just make up, why is psychoanalysis--which blames every human condition, good and bad, on the Oedipus complex--exempt from this relativism?

It is the relativist strand in the cognitive psychology of the Fifties that leads me to consider it separately from laboratory psychology and genetic epistemology. The key question, of course, was whether the individual differences in "knowing" were impairments relative to one real world--or idiosyncratic world-creations.

By 1960, a folklore had arisen in the universities which had really prominent figures such as Bruner and Klein saying the reckless things I have outlined. Ironically, perhaps, what is interesting for us is the reckless speculation itself, whether it really had the claimed backing or not. I want to give a careful response to a speculation which was marginal and careless.

The following would be taken as premises:

i) Each human individual has a different perceptual mode.

ii) Perception, cognition, and personality are interdependent.

These provide for different personal life-tones. Do they provide for personally created worlds?

In the Fifties, it became a cliché to use "experience" to mean the world as apprehended by a particular person. The topic was the psychological microcosm--and the assumption was that this microcosm has a structure which varies among individuals, and is imposed by the self with total autonomy.

The folklore found that everybody made his or her universe by cutting "undifferentiated experience"; as if "experience" were the universal baseline, the only raw input to reality. This notion made all people philosophical empiricists: whether they wished to be or not. A claim to be anything but an empiricist would be mere denial.[7]

Cognitive psychologists might speak of idiosyncratic cognitive impairments with a phraseology of "cutting experience up to create a reality." All the same, the derived reality was not believed consequential for anyone but the individual. (The lunatic, one may as well say.) The cited authors had omitted to prove that they were perfectly unimpaired and saw reality as it itself was. They would have needed a metatheory authorizing them to talk about the different impairments and delusions from outside or from above--or from a ground of incontestable fact. They treated both psychoanalysis and neurophysiology as such metatheories, without saying what entitled them to do so.

Referring to cognitive style and perceptual style, I must say that the instances of these conditions do not deserve to be called "cognition." What is offered is not a cognitive style but a judgment style: a spectrum of styles of impairment.

Let us consider some of the cognitive styles which the psychologists discovered. I use the terminology of one or more of the references--or else substitute more succinct terms.

Passivity

Compulsiveness

Similarity (pigeon-holing) -- associated with desire for control

Continuity (sequencing)

As regards perceiving styles, we have Klein's

Leveler (fetishism of the category)

Sharpener (attuned to anomaly, to idiosyncracies)

This duality later became Bruner's

Broad categorizer

Narrow categorizer

The scientists' methodology cannot cope--it does not even propose to cope--with the level of incredulity their phraseology implies they have reached.

If one proposes to make an issue of differences in psychological microcosms, and of "subjective and mystical" factors in natural science, then the question of the level of incredulity becomes all-important. It is possible to conceive e.g. the law of gravitation as dependent on perceptual disposition, subjectivity, mysticism. One can start down that road. But that is an extreme, end-of-the-world venture. You lose the right to expect that even a table or a chair will stay buttoned down. There can be none of this smug "All we gentlemen agree that the earth is round."

a) There are, indeed, major personal variations in "experience" which are concealed for social purposes. Psychiatry finds that hallucinatory apparitions of deceased relatives occur to half of all humans. Our culture pointedly omits to parade this as experiential evidence about the world--treating it as something best kept secret.

b) There are individual differences in the psychological microcosm; and there are "subjective and mystical" factors in scientific research.

c) If our culture were candid about the idiosyncratic contours of experience, then the reliability which makes natural science possible would dissipate.

d) But, realistically, the will to technification in the present culture--or from the other side, our submission to pragmatic imperatives--is so great that there is no risk that electronics engineering will cease because the engineers will be lost in personal hallucinations and fail to find the electronics laboratory.

I do not rule out the suggestion that physical science, for example, is a delusion. The point is that such a suggestion places a towering responsibility on its exponent, and challenges the exponent to be methodologically uniform. Suppose a psychologist, whose subject-matter is idiosyncracy, claims that the law of gravitation is a personally deployed delusion. The claim would be automatically suspect, because idiosyncratic aberrations are trivial relative to the law of gravitation. The claim could be respected only if the psychologist was prepared to overmatch physicists in their arena. The cognitive psychologists who spoke recklessly in the Fifties never even got this far in their thinking.

Passing from psychology to psycholinguistics, should the individual's utterances be seized as a diagnostic tool, as data for a psycho-analysis of the speaker? Does every (English) idiolect create a world? Do each speaker's utterances uniquely permute the categories

- abstraction

- the agent/object relation

abstract vs. concrete

static vs. active

juxtaposition vs. action

inanimate vs. human

Do individuals' natural-language utterances--even just the syntax--evince such cognitive styles as

cognitive passivity

compulsiveness

These latter conditions are impairments. There is no justification for suggesting that such individual postures create universes.

4. Piaget's genetic epistemology

The Swiss psychologist Piaget established a school of research in early cognitive development, or genetic epistemology. The gist of Piaget's views may be obtained by correlating his critique of suprascientific knowledge and philosophical psychology in Insights and Illusions of Philosophy with his experimental results in e.g. The Construction of Reality in the Child. With the latter work may be included other specialized works as I will explain momentarily.

Piaget has adopted, as his own world-view, the science consensus, weighted toward what I call formalist scientism. (Cf. Piaget, Logic and Psychology.) Piaget assumes, as beyond comment, that science has already given us a complete picture of reality, which happens to be thoroughly mechanistic-formalistic: a picture which transcends our subjective lives. (Piaget no more verifies this picture than if it fell from the sky.) The only task of scientific psychology in investigating epistemology, then, is to test the ability of an individual's subjectivity to apprise itself of this picture. That is, the task of Piaget is to calibrate human subjectivity relative to a prior, complete, mechanistic-formal picture of reality.

There is only one serious ambiguity, and that concerns whether the appropriate reality-template is technical science, or the common sense of the age of science. (In The Psychology of the Child, the child is calibrated against common sense; in Epistemology and Psychology of Functions, The Child's Conception of Movement and Speed, Logic and Psychology, and The Child's Conception of Space, the reality-template is technical formal science.) This is an ambiguity Piaget cannot resolve.

The true picture of reality, of external objectivity, falls from the sky and does not require our subjectivity or any insight from us. That means that our acceptance of the scientific picture as normative--or even our assumption that we understand the scientific picture--is an act of blind faith--or a blind commitment to gibberish. So Piaget wants the psychologist to acquire the norms of external objectivity through blind faith; and then to patronize all of us by asking whether our subjectivity can match up to those prior norms.

Genetic epistemology espouses the calibration model without reservation. Cognitive psychology, as we saw in the last section, proposed to go beyond the calibration model. And yet, by default, the cognitive psychologists espoused the same objective external reality as Piaget--and the "individual universes" are mutilated reflections of that reality. To the extent that cognitive psychology suggested that the universe is individually constructed up from experience, the suggestion, of course, remained incongruous with the overriding scientism.

The difference between the schools, then, has to be that in the Fifties, the cognitive psychologists took mutilated cognition seriously. (And accepted it as equal to unimpaired cognition?)

Let me elaborate on my characterization of Piaget. Traditional epistemology was not concerned with what is true, but with how we know that which we already accept as truth. Piaget assents to that mission for epistemology. The result is that the issue of the child's cognitive growth is muddled. The Achilles heel of Piagetian psychology is the "truth" that the child is required to learn.

Piaget measures the child against an absolute marked out by the following precepts. Common sense and physico-mathematical science say exactly the same thing. Common sense is a perfectly consistent theory. Mainstream mathematical logic is the consummation of these truths or knowledges.

Piaget fails to acknowledge the difference between the common-sense and the physico-mathematical "realities." He can't admit that the two are antagonistic--and that common sense is multiply inconsistent. He accepts the self-depersonalization required by positivism as benign, as a coherent conceptualization.

Piaget does not shoulder the burden of vindicating the reality against which the child will be measured. Piaget's conception of reality is entirely that of the science consensus, weighted toward what I call formalist scientism. ("Mathematical logic discovers the laws of thinking"; etc.). Formalist scientism tells us which "cognitive behavior" is worthy and welcome. Reality is nothing more nor less than the early twentieth century codification of formalist scientism (e.g. "classical logic").

Piaget's problem is how the child manages to apprise him or herself of the reality which Piaget espouses. (The reality which I just delineated above--the one of which Piaget is utterly uncritical.) Piaget supposedly investigates the problem with empirical methods.

There is a whole other dimension to genetic epistemology's method. The researchers purport to study the mind of the infant from outside, without the light of introspection which is available when observer and subject stand in the same shoes. Piaget's empirical method forbids introspection in psychology.

Piaget tests the child, and finds that the child is maturing if he or she gives the same answers that the consensus gives. The child is developed, mature, worthy: to the extent that he or she can replicate the tenets of the consensus. Moreover, the consensus--here, formalist scientism--is the only sphere of knowing or living that matters very much. That makes it the sphere on which the child needs to be tested. Piaget is measuring the child by e.g. "classical logic," a doctrine disputed by various schools of adult thought. Piaget selects those moments of child behavior which tend toward, or corroborate, the science consensus.

5. Second-order cybernetics

Second-order cybernetics (hereafter 2oc) was a school of scientific explanation of "living consciousness." It evidently crystallized at the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois in the Sixties, and was widened by the work of Varela and others on autopoiesis in the Seventies. Prominent figures were

Gotthard Günther

Heinz Von Foerster

Gordon Pask

Milan Zeleny

Humberto Maturana

Fancisco Varela

Ranulph Glanville

Annetta Pedretti

The REFERENCES LIST is limited to the minimum to support this commentary.

In part, 2oc is in the tradition of positivist cultural relativism. 2oc purports to look down on all human belief-systems as comparative superstitions; and then, in a rather hit-and-miss way, to provide affirmative knowledge about the operation of these primitive superstitions. It purports to be a General Absolute Theory of primitive superstitions (as it were). But it fails to say: which primitive superstitions are we? What is the theory of the operation of the primitive superstition called 2oc?

A scientific doctrine makes no sense unless there is a way the doctrine's author can see that it makes sense. The problem of self-conscious cogency or insighted cogency is addressed traditionally by immanent logic-epistemology. Insighted cogency was the great issue for Descartes and the early Hume.

2oc lacks an account of how the author sees that what he or she says is cogent. Note Glanville's flippant consideration of "solipsism" in "What is memory," p. 28.

[solipsism would be] inconvenient because [it would] lead to uncertainty (which I have been trying to minimize) (2)[8] and remove the purpose of Conferences by creating a lack of things to discuss.

Glanville relies on professional participation to supply the meaning structure of his life, and to decide ultimate philosophical issues.

2oc patronizes everybody else's theories as superstitions, while tacitly borrowing from standard science, while making dogmatic statements with no authority except that the authors have academic appointments.

Glanville has a paper entitled "The logic of description--Or, why physics won't work."[9] Once we are familiar with the content of Glanville's work, his implied promise to disable physics can only be a joke. The effect of such misbehavior is to poison the well.

2oc's claim of being above physics is a pose which is abandoned when they aren't being pop scientists. A case in point is Goguen and Varela, "Systems and Distinctions," fn. 27. The authors cite classical mathematical logic as an authority to show that their notions satisfy formalist scientism's non-contradiction criterion. Actually, 2oc relies absolutely on modern physico-mathematical science, even as it pretends to patronize and disdain it.

Over and over, twentieth-century "science" proposes to engage in meta-cognition: to take a vantage point above all belief-systems and to account for the systems as superstitions. Each of these exercises in meta-cognition appears as a project in one of the academic fields of specialization. "I am going to start as an electrical engineer, biologist, laboratory psychologist, and take all of human cognition from the beginning of time as a delusion which my department is uniquely equipped to diagnose. Miraculously, I will not need any new language in which to report my findings. The language which is the very embodiment of the delusion--the language which I share with the ignorant people--will be sufficient."

2oc implicitly extrapolates the twentieth-century notion that positivism affords a vantage point from which one can look down on all belief-systems. In line with this, 2oc carries the scientistic objectification of "psychic" notions further than ever. Its theory of "thinking" or "how we think" may refer to a roach's perceptions of a grain of sugar, or even a rock's "conversation" with the ground on which it rests.

Gotthard Günther's Collected Works affords examples. Günther diagrams the relations among subjectivity, thought, and the outside world with a couple of rectangles and arrows. (215) "... a system of subjectivity is a mechanism--albeit not a classical one--in which two interacting programs of cognition and volition regulate its [the mechanism's] relation to the environment concurrently." (212) "If we transfer the terms information and energy to the theory of a system of subjectivity we may confidently replace them by the terms cognition and volition ..." (223)

Glanville's "What is memory" suggests that every object would know it existed by observing itself. A table observes itself. Self-observation is a temporal alternation of roles along a time axis:

observer/observed/observer/observed ... .

Again Glanville, "What is memory," p. 33.

... a Memory is the computing of an identity, by the synchronization of times of observation between two observed Objects, by a common (external) observer. The observer is the rememberer, while the two Objects are the thing observed and the thing remembered. And automatic recall occurs when the times of observation of the observed Object and the Memory are synchronous.

Whatever claims Glanville makes "to take the observer into account," this is a complete physicalization, a complete reduction to it-it relationships.

2oc showcases an "empirical proof" of internally generated feedback in perception, and interprets the "proved" phenomenon as the human construction of a reality in a logico-epistemological sense.

In the early Eighties, I began to engage in a dialogue with 2oc. Once I had a incipiently collegial relationship with some of the exponents, I could not merely react to published words. The work did not stand on its own merits, because it was really a runaround; it did not furnish new solutions. The only question was whether the exponents had any potential beyond what they had already done. I had to know what their personal goals were--as that had everything to do with where they might go.

There is no point in discussing the intellectual merits of 2oc until we know what institutions they are pledged to and the limits which are imposed thereby on their answers.

Evidently 2oc arises in a broader context of electrical engineering and high-tech medicine, and seeks to conquer "mind" on behalf of engineering (as the last engineering frontier). The sponsors of the research were explicitly the NATO Scientific Affairs Division; the U.S. Air Force; etc.

Aside from mentors in cybernetics and neurology, the intellectual forebears mentioned by 2oc are: Wittgenstein, Gödel, Whorf, de Saussure, Piaget (especially), Shannon/Weaver, Spencer Brown, Thom, Lawvere, and Radnitzky.[10] In short, positivism liberalized by cultural relativism. Thus, the goal is to fully account for "mind," in terms commensurate with electrical engineering and medicine, by warping and contorting a liberalized positivism. Apart from academic positivism, the influences cited by the younger generation were the pop gurus Castenada, Bateson, Pirsig, and Trungpa Rinpoche.

Military sponsorship and salability to industry dictated the form that 2oc's answers had to take. 2oc must twist a liberalized scientism to give an account of "mind" which has immediate payoffs; and which dovetails with present-day mechanistic technology. The justification that would be given by the customers of 2oc for the latter requirement is that our mechanistic technology is the most effective technology (or the only technology). But that's not a full answer. The qualitative metamorphoses of technology have been prepared by the long-term rise of new imaginative faculties--which came from the rise of new religions as much as from ancient physics or engineering per se.

2oc has not chosen the long-term "imaginative" route to a science of mind--even though such a route might be in order. That is the other control imposed by military patronage of 2oc. Today's mechanistic engineering is a tool which confirms social relationships giving power to certain social élites. The present military élite, in alliance with modern industry, is predicated on an élite instrumentalism of total depersonalization. That calls for 2oc to propound an account of mind such that mind becomes matter, machine, total depersonalization, and commodity. A takeover of the psyche by technology. The 2ocs are not interested in finding instrumental knowledge about "mind" which would militate against the élite instrumentalism of depersonalization; and which would have "applications" only in tandem with changes in the human community. (A takeover of technology by the psyche.)

My contact came away from the 1984 conference wanting to believe that Francisco Varela or Ranulph Glanville is a romantic outsider or a second Jesus Christ. This is as much of a misjudgment as to suppose that a weapons designer for the Roman imperial army could have played the role of the first Jesus Christ. Knowledge, for an imperial weapons-designer, unavoidably has a one-sided character. Evidently the enthusiasts of 2oc don't want to face this.

Not even remotely can 2oc be a disinterested search for the truth of the psyche.

6. Quantum physics and consciousness?

For decades, the canard that "quantum mechanics takes care of consciousness" has dogged intellectual discourse. Notwithstanding that, actual uses of quantum mechanics by psychologists are rare, even in neuroscience. Schrödinger's cat and Wigner's friend and delayed choice have not been assimilated by psychologists; they remain the province of physicists who wish to pontificate on idealism without paying tribute to academic psychology.

Operative quantum mechanics displaces the terms observation and observer into an entirely mechanical realm. "An observation" can mean the collision of one photon and one electron. "The observer" can be any macroscopic machine which automatically produces a coded registration of some characteristic signal. Physicists who do not want their science to drift away on metaphors deny that there is any role for anthropomorphic notions such as consciousness in quantum mechanics.[11] As well, it is said that the observer in quantum mechanics can be a computer.[12]

Occasionally physicists announce explicitly that their method is reductionistic. Bryce DeWitt says that physically, we can be regarded simply as automata [and hence on a par with ordinary measuring apparatuses].[13] Leon Cooper gives a description of a "human mind" which reduces the mind to a quantitative mechanism, and eventuates in the notion of a "reversible simple mind."[14] I don't want to dwell on quotes here, because I am characterizing broad literatures which do not stand or fall on a sentence from one author.

In discussions based on the Copenhagen interpretation of the measurement problem, Wigner evidently was led to define human consciousness--or more precisely, a human observer--physically. When this definition is fully expanded, it becomes: "a human observer is an observation which collapses the indeterminate state (to a unique reality, i.e.) to the way of seeing which is specific to a human observer." This, it seems, is as far as physics can go in analyzing human consciousness.

By and large, the appropriation of the term observer by quantum mechanics is a reductionism, whose import, frankly, is depersonalizing. What is left to explain is the eagerness of the intellectual public, including humanists, to proclaim that this reductionism has healed the breach in the modern world-view between the objective and the subjective. (In connection with a theory which took "an observation" as the collision of one photon and one electron, Heisenberg reportedly claimed that this was the long-awaited unification of subject and object.[15])

Apparently there is some deep need among intellectual publicists to have the authority of physics come to the rescue of the very realm which physics has crowded out. The popularizers give physics credit for a hip subjectivism which is utterly spurious.

[The foregoing, written in the Eighties, was if anything overly respectful of a crop of publications from the early Seventies. Taking a larger view, the cant that quantum mechanics takes care of consciousness discredits physics totally. That is to say: if physics erects reality on subjecthood taken as an inexplicable simple, then the entire science is a hoax. Twentieth-century physics would not have taken this road if it were not hostage to a "carrier" of occult fads, and if the scientific community were not endemically mediocre.

Intellectual fashion operates in a systematic way. When a credible new technique arises in science, mediocre figures attach themselves to it, and claim it as the answer to everything. So it was that psychological claims were made by non-psychologists for catastrophe theory and chaos theory. (Just the names of these latter disciplines is revealing, incidentally. Yes, Virginia, there is a Zeitgeist. Toward century's end, hard science began to reproduce the postmodernist themes of rupture and irrationality.)

Some physicists, at least, understand that the subjectivist codification of quantum mechanics is a deep embarrassment. Entire fashions in end-of-the-century quantum mechanics have attempted to get the conscious observer's vantage-point out of the theory. But what cannot be denied is that the cant is always in the forefront. The implications for physics' reputation are unavoidable.]

7. Cognitive science in the Eighties

By the mid-Seventies, there was a growing school called cognitive science, not to be confused with cognitive psychology. Authors in the REFERENCES LIST include Reynolds, Globus, Eccles, Battista, Edelman, Johnson-Laird, Fodor, Minsky, Erdelyi. Rosenblueth and Wiener are included for perspective. Cognitive science announces as valid a project of explaining consciousness in the perspective of physico-mathematical science. Second-order cybernetics and cognitive science, then, are like flavors of the same endeavor.

The hard conclusions are exemplified by Edelman 95; Johnson-Laird 476-7; Battista 78-9. I would describe the material as electrical engineering, computer science, and algebraic gobbledegook.

The literature in question abounds in box diagrams of the mind. Actually, the twentieth century produced many box diagrams of the mind. We have them also from cognitive psychology (Klein), second-order cybernetics (Günther) and psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan).

Also to be noted are the proposals to buttress cognitive science with experiments. Edelman 85--build a machine on my principles and it will be conscious. Globus 280--construct a corpus callosum between two different living human brains and get a mind meld.

If we ransack the scientific literature, we can go beyond research classified as psychology to find scattered exercises which purport to apply the physico-mathematical method directly to the realm of thoughts.

Bolzano/Dedekind's proof that "my own realm of thoughts is infinite" is an example of a result about the psyche obtained directly from mathematics.

More recent authors consider the implications of a mind-reading machine for logic. Raymond Smullyan in 5000 B.C. informally proposes a neurophysiological mind-reading machine. Gordon Globus spells this out more formally, invoking the premise of a correlation between thoughts and brain-states, which enumerates thoughts.[16]

Assessing the literature, I find that it all aims to explain the roster of thoughts by reducing them to the roster of correlative brain-states. The scientific work says absolutely nothing about what the roster of thoughts is--nothing about where thought lives.

But the irony is more vicious than that. In fact, the scientists are trying to reduce the roster of correlative brain-states to a thought. Why do I say that? Because the scientists want, as their work-product, not a brain-state, but an understood theory.

Historically, the imaginative or conceptual techniques of science long pre-dated the thought-experiment of an instantaneous total scan of the brain. But science cannot proclaim its project to be the reduction of matter to comprehended theory. Let me propose:

No brain state understands cognitive science.

As it turns out, these researchers redefine the problem so that consciousness can be given a purely mechanical explanation. Their crowning principle turns out to be that everything is conscious.

Meanwhile, the problem they originally proposed to solve--to give a physico-mathematical explanation of the "experience of consciousness"--now turns out to be permanently unsolvable.

Let me elaborate. Cognitive science proposes to explain consciousness within the ontology of natural science, i.e. physics: referring especially to the computational approach of Fodor, Minsky, etc. The scientists define the mission in pointedly provocative terms. And yet, the effect of the research is to replace the problem with the problem of analyzing "mind" as an automaton.[17] The problem can then be given a completely "mechanical" solution. At the same time, we learn that the experience of consciousness can never be explained. Having posited the realm of thoughts and the realm of brain-states, all the work is concerned with explaining the realm of thoughts away, with eliminating it in favor of the realm of brain-states. Nothing is said about the qualitatively distinct existence of "the realm of thoughts"; and any phenomenology of it which is provided is trivial.

Consider all cases in which one is invigorated by appreciating (qualitatively) that which one perceives. The computationalist explanation will reduce this to a brain switching matrix. But the invigoration which follows appreciation cannot be obtained by perusing the switching matrix. It may be objected that this last remark misunderstands what the scientific theory accomplishes. The switching matrix is a picture of brain operation, not the brain operation. Analysis by synthesis. If the switching matrix can be used in Electrical Stimulation of the Brain to produce the invigoration, then the conscious appreciation has been explained.

But it has not been explained; and this is not really analysis by synthesis. It is analysis by replacement. Formerly, conscious qualitative appreciation was the meaning of the experience. Now that is eliminated, bypassed, and an invigoration is produced by ESB without the qualitative moment, the appreciation. It is like positing a psychotropic drug's action as the explanation of consciousness.

It is the same lesson all over again. The original, provocative problem has simply been switched for one with a mechanical solution.

Postscript: 1995 thoughts on c.r.

In the foregoing Section 1, I seemed to say that the overwhelming majority are not responsible (and that they society would fall to pieces if they assumed responsibility). In Chapter 1, I seemed to say that everyone is responsible. Perhaps an explanation of the intuitions I was trying to formalize via the notion of c.r. will lessen the confusion.

Principle I, Chapter 1 demands that psychology view people in the perspective of c.r., defined as living culture-responsibly in a heterogeneous arena. All people should be cognizant that they do not live in a uniform culture, and should be actively judgmental of the tenets of cultures impinging on them. They should actively escape from, or remedy and replace, what is unworthy. That is like asking everyone to be "a genius." The result of such a perspective is to find the overwhelming majority of people to be masochistically acquiescent, morally cowardly, intellectually dishonest, derelict and demoralized. In fact, these traits may not be choices; they may be inborn. Notwithstanding, a person's identity is not separable from the cumulation of that person's choices; in that sense, everyone "produces" him- or herself single-handedly.

At the same time, Chapter 1 argued, previous to stating the principles,[18] that different cultures nurture different human faculties. As a result, one cannot see every possibility (for consciousness) from inside a single culture, nor can one reach every possibility by rearranging the pieces of a single culture.

Only when people are viewed in this perspective--it has the effect of shaming them--do the most important features of their psychology become discernable. I was raging against the validation of the average person in psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy: the acceptance of lives of personal pettiness as the total arena. The heroic anguish of cultures and the individual's formal situation of responsibility for this heroic anguish are thereby brushed off as nonexistent. (Freud was more pointedly insulting: he reduced the entirety of culture--nuclear physics and all of it--to males wanting to kill their father and marry their mother.)

My conception was that everybody was formally responsible, but that the overwhelming majority of people expressed their responsibility as demoralization and dereliction. A profound and refractory question was how much of it was inborn. Psychology posits the topics of the hygienic mind, and of the fraction of the individual's potential which gets realized. I argued that a consequential treatment of these topics (not to mention the needed critique of the topics) was not possible except in the perspective of c.r.

Further, I held that a person who assumed responsibility would become bottomlessly radical.[19] My analyses do not distinguish between the average person and the renowned person, between badges of squareness and badges of hipness. The reason why acclaimed heroes are not bottomlessly radical is that they curb themselves in order to be publicly appealing and thereby successful. (That judgment is generous; it implies that they know what honor is and that they consciously forego and disavow it. That contradicts my judgment elsewhere that they don't know better.)

The literary motto of my psychology could be taken from Rilke's novel:

I sit here in my little room. ... I sit here and am nothing. And yet this nothing begins to think and thinks, five flights up, on a gray Paris afternoon, these thoughts: Is it possible, it thinks, that we have not yet seen, known, or said anything real and important? Is it possible that we have had thousands of years to look, meditate, and record, and that we have let these thousands of years slip away like a recess at school ... Is it possible that despite our discoveries and advances, despite our culture, religion, and science, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even this surface, which might still have been something, has been covered with an incredibly tedious material ... Is it possible that all these people know, with perfect accuracy, a past that never existed? Is it possible that all realities are nothing to them; that their life is running down, unconnected with anything, like a clock in a empty room--? ... Yes, it is possible. But if all this is possible, if it has even a semblance of possibility,--then surely, for the sake of everything in the world, something must be done. The first comer, the one who has had these alarming thoughts, must begin to do some of the things that have been neglected; even though he is just anyone, certainly not the most suitable person: since there is no one else.[20]

I hasten to assure the neophyte that these excerpts do not typify the rest of the novel, much less Rilke. Somehow, in the heady days of central Europe at the turn of the century, Rilke depicted a stance which was not his to uphold. Be that as it may, I assert that a psychology which does not have this premise can only confirm stupidity.

I called the person who exercises culture-responsibility proactively an "initiator" (replacing the word "genius"). That explains the initials c.i. Having gotten this far, it is obvious that the scheme is liable to abuse. Authors find it irresistible to sell the label "genius" to layabouts as a badge of hipness. Beyond that, there are difficulties concerning people who were substantial. Why does my terminology make novelty the name of virtue, in effect? Isn't it debatable whether the initiatives of record were beneficial? (Marx will serve as an example.) That was the point at which I observed that the application of the notion of c.r. will turn on individual judgment. Different readers will inject different answers. The locus of judgments is the person-world.

I didn't want to try to escape this relativism. I didn't want to base my psychology on an objective formula meant to forestall every unworthy interpretation. I wanted to conceive c.i. in a way which accepted diverse and relative achievement--even though that meant accepting a degree of mythification and arbitrariness. I returned to this consideration in Chapter 3 [now Chapter 4].[21]

REFERENCES LIST

T.G.R. Bower, "The Visual World of Infants," Scientific American, December 1966, pp. 80ff.

Irvin Rock and Charles Harris, "Vision and Touch," Scientific American, May 1967, p. 99.

Ronald K. Siegel, "Hallucinations," Scientic American, October 1977, pp. 132-140.

M.B. Arnold, Emotion and Personality (1960) BF 531.A8

Feelings and Emotions, ed. M.B. Arnold (1970) BF 531.L65

Journal of Personality, vol. 22 (1953), for Riley Gardner, "Cognitive Styles in Categorizing Behavior," pp. 214-233

Assessment of Human Motives, ed. Gardner Lindzey (1958), for

George Kelly, "Man's Construction of His Alternatives"

George S. Klein, "Cognitive Control and Motivation"

Scientific American Reader (New York, 1953), for W.H. Ittelson and F.P. Kilpatrick, "Experiments in Perception," pp. 576-582

Jerome S. Bruner et al., A Study of Thinking (1956), for

Ch. 8: An Overview

Roger Brown, Appendix: Language and Categories, pp. 303-312

Perception: An Appproach to Personality, ed. R.R. Blake and G.V. Ramsey (1951), for

George S. Klein, "The Personal World Through Perception"

Else Frenkel-Brunswik, "Personality Theory and Perception"

Perception and Personality, ed. Jerome S. Bruner and David Krech (1950), for

George S. Klein and Herbert Schlesinger, "Where Is the Perceiver in Perceptual Theory?"

Else Frenkel-Brunswik, "Intolerance of Ambiguity as an Emotional and Perceptual Personality Variable"

Journal of Psychology (1948), for Else Frenkel-Brunswik, "Dynamic and cognitive categorization of qualitative material II," p. 261

Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957)

George S. Klein, Perception, Motives, and Personality (1970)

Jerome S. Bruner, Beyond the Information Given (1973)

Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 62 (1961), for Jerome S. Bruner and Henri Tajfel, "Cognitive Risk and Environmental Change," pp. 231-41

J. Bruner et al., Contemporary Approaches to Cognition (1957)

Piaget

Insights and Illusions of Philosophy

The Construction of Reality in the Child

Logic and Psychology

The Psychology of the Child

Epistemology and Psychology of Functions

The Child's Conception of Movement and Speed

The Child's Conception of Space

L. Apostel, Genetic Epistemology and Cognitive Science (1982)

Cognition: A Multiple View (1970)

Autopoiesis, ed. Milan Zeleny

Gotthard Günther, Collected Works

Francisco Varela, "Not One, Not Two," The CoEvolution Quarterly, Fall 1976, pp. 62-67

Joseph Goguen and Francisco Varela, "Systems and Distinctions: Duality and Complementarity," International Journal of General Systems, 1979, pp. 31-43.

Ranulph Glanville, "The logic of description--Or, why physics won't work." Paper presented at first I.C.A.G.S.: R.D. & T., Binghamton, 1977.

Ranulph Glanville, "What is memory, that it can remember what it is," in Progress in Cybernetics and Systems Research, Vol. 4, ed. R. Trappl (Washington, 1978).

Ranulph Glanville, "The Nature of Fundamentals, applied to the Fundamentals of Nature," in Applied General Systems Research, ed. George J. Klir (New York, 1978).

Gerard Radnitzky, Contemporary Schools of Metascience (New York, 1970)

Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, ed. B. d'Espagnat (New York, 1971)

The Physicist's Conception of Nature, ed. Jagdish Mehra (1973) QC173.96.S95

The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, ed. B.S. DeWitt and N. Graham (Princeton, 1973)

A. Rosenblueth & N. Wiener, "Purposeful and Non-Purposeful Behavior," Philosophy of Science, vol. 17 (October 1950), esp. p. 326

Roger Reynolds, Mind Models (1975)

Gordon G. Globus, "Mind, Structure, and Contradiction," in Consciousness and the Brain, ed. Gordon Globus et al. (New York, 1976) BF161.C69

G. G. Globus, Franklin, and Savodnik, "Gödel's Theorem and the mind-brain problem I, II" (1975, unpublished)

Hubert Dreyfus, "The Misleading Mediation of the Mental," Philsophical Dimensions of the Neuro-Medical Sciences, ed. S.F. Spicker & H.T. Engelhardt, Jr. (1976)

Gerald M. Edelman and V.B. Mountcastle, The Mindful Brain (1978)

John R. Battista, "The Science of Consciousness," in The Stream of Consciousness, ed. K.S. Pope and J.L. Singer (New York, 1978), p. 55 ff.

Jerry A. Fodor, "The Mind-Body Problem," Scientific American, January 1981

P.N. Johnson-Laird, Mental Models (1983)

Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (1986)

Bernard Bolzano, Paradoxes of the Infinite, SS13

Richard Dedekind, Essays on the Theory of Numbers (1909), p. 64

some box diagrams of consciousness

Sigmund Freud, "New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis," Standard Edition, Volume 22, p. 78

George S. Klein in Perception: An Appproach to Personality, ed. R.R. Blake and G.V. Ramsey (1951), p. 340

John Eccles, The Understanding of the Brain (1973) for the Figure on page 215, the left-right brain split and consciousness

Gotthard Günther, Collected Works, p. 215

Mathew Erdelyi, Psychoanalysis: Freud's Cognitive Psychology (1985), p. 122 ff.

André Green, "Logic of Lacan's objet (a) and Freudian Theory: Convergences and Questions," Interpretiong Lacan, ed. J.H. Smith and W. Kerrigan (1983), esp. page 165 and Schéma R

[1]Although its opponents claim that it doesn't.

[2]typescript, p. 17

[3]Between Chapter 1, and this paragraph, there are problems with the notion of culture-responsibility. I provide some 1995 thoughts on the matter in a Postscript to this Appendix.

[4]There is a REFERENCES LIST of all publications cited at the end.

[5]Irvin Rock and Charles Harris, "Vision and Touch," Scientific American, May 1967.

[6]Ronald K. Siegel, "Hallucinations," Scientic American, October 1977, pp. 132-140. The very subtitle "These false perceptions" shows that Siegel does not concur with my principle (D) from Chapter 1 (typescript, p. 13).

[7]The term "experience" downplays the personhood of the psychological microcosm: the degree to which the subject has a complete career distinguishing him/her from "environment," the degree to which the subject has an articulated ego-ideal, etc.

[8]this gratuitous `(2)' is in Glanville's text

[9]1977, unpublished. See the REFERENCES LIST.

[10]Gerard Radnitzky, Contemporary Schools of Metascience (New York, 1970).

[11]Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, 41-2, 45, 288.

[12]The Physicist's Conception of Nature, 674, 685, 702-3.

[13]The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, 161.

[14]The Physicist's Conception of Nature, 675.

[15]The Physicist's Conception of Nature, 738.

[16]G. G. Globus, Franklin, and Savodnik, "Gödel's Theorem and the mind-brain problem I, II" (1975, unpublished).

[17]The word "automaton" has become a football because Chomsky took a stand on "creativity." It is worth noting that figures as diverse as Rosenbleuth, Wiener, and DeWitt speak of humans as "machines" or "automata" unapologetically. Chomsky evidently finds humans to be algorithms rather than automata. As Wiener had already pointed out in Cybernetics, the new science is just as mechanistic as the old in the respects that matter to the popular mind.

[18]typescript, p. 10

[19]the word means going to the root

[20]R.M. Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (tr. 1983), pp. 22-24.

[21]typescript, p. 8