Can science study the mind?
I only have direct access to my own mental states and I can't think of a way that I can have the same access to anyone else's. I believe science in all its current methodologies has no direct access to private subjective mental states.
An analogy is if I gave a cook eggs, flour and sugar and told them go make me a fruit salad.
However, at the same time I think that our own access to our mental states is not very helpful either.
An analogy is if I gave a cook eggs, flour and sugar and told them go make me a fruit salad.
However, at the same time I think that our own access to our mental states is not very helpful either.
Comments (51)
We have beliefs about other peoples minds but we can't directly compare mental states.
I think reliance on introspection or phenomenology makes it hard to define mental states.
The less visible a phenomenon is the harder it is to describe it seems. For example we can define a horse in a basic way based on very distinct features or family resemblances. At the level of it's cells we need a microscope then at the atomic level we have quantum theory weirdness and math.
:razz:
Quoting creativesoul
Do you agree with this... in principle?
I reflect on my mental states but so far I don't know what they are.
Maybe we can explore the language we use to define them?
Normally. No technical jargon necessary there.
:smile:
Quoting Andrew4Handel
How does one reflect upon something if they do not first know what that something is to be reflecting on it?
Language plays an irrevocable role. Exploring the language is a metacognitive endeavor. Knowing which language is best for talking about something requires first knowing what we're talking about.
What are you talking about when you talk in terms of "mind"? It is a noun... a name... what are you picking out of this world to the exclusion of all else by using it? What is the referent of the name?
How do you know this?
Maybe via BMI-mediated CNS-to-CNS connection with sufficiently high (& fast) bandwidth ...
I was involved in the care of my severely ill brother for many years who ended up paralysed. I have no idea what that was like for hi m. I just had to listen to him and make no assertions about how he felt.
You can't compare your headache with someone else's. Also like the Mary's room scenario she couldn't know what red looked like by just trying to imagine it.
For example I don't remember the word consciousness being used or discussed throughout my whole childhood. Studying philosophy of mind exposed me to new concepts but all of them linguistic or conceptual as opposed to referring directly to transparent mental states.
Discussion about experiences is bound to be anecdotal . Hence the problem.
If you think the scientific method is limited then you have to come up with another explanatory framework.
Have you ever used the avatar name bushidobillyclub?
If you seek of objective answers, it shouldn't be surprising to notice that there is the subjective also. And that it's quite important too.
This gets into something that underlies the question in the OP.
Here you're invoking "mental state concepts". These are equivalent to our thought and belief about mental states.
Hence... if mental states or minds exist in their entirety prior to our awareness of them, then they can be studied... in principle. Practically, we first need to know what we're studying.
So, going back to what you've added here...
There are a multitude of mental state concepts. What are they talking about though? What is being picked out to the exclusion of all else? Not all of them are compatible with one another. So, at least some of them are wrong. In what way can they be wrong? How would we know that?
These are the sorts of questions that arise if and when we do not clearly explicate what it is we're talking about when using the term "mind".
If minds exist in their entirety prior to our naming and descriptive practices... then we can be wrong about them. Hence... my approach here.
:wink:
Not sure about access to; if I am my mental state, that is, if no distinction is at all possible between the state and the representation of it, then to say I have direct access to myself is merely a trivial truth which tells me nothing I didn’t already know.
But I would agree without equivocation, that I have no direct access to any other mind in the same way, for then that mind would have two representations: the one that belongs to it, and mine, which certainly does not.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Correct. To assert our accessibility to what we already are, doesn’t help anything.
Now, if one has reason to think that which has access is not a proper representation of the condition being accessed........that’s a whole different philosophy.
I think we have to first figure out is if particle collisions is the only thing that effects feeling/awareness. We know that particle collision does have some or alot of effect on feeling/awareness, however is it the only thing that has an effect on feeling/awareness?
Until we answer that question, i don't think we can answer the OP.
Do you think a person can come to talk about one's mental states with any precision? How would talking about mental states come about?
There is the external versus internal problem though. One picture, especially in cognitive theory, is that everything is a mental representation and we have no direct access to an external world.
So it is unclear how much of reality has a mental component.
It seems a big part of understanding language is through analogy to ones own experiences.
Earlier you mentioned having direct access to your own mental states...
One's own personal subjective mental states begin long before one acquires the ability to name and describe their own mental ongoings. Accessing one's own mental state is talking about one's own thought and belief. All sorts of creatures aside from humans are fearful, relaxed, hungry, starving, content, and/or disturbed. So, following what you've offered here, are we to say that these animals have direct access to their own mental states?
I would think not. We humans access our own mental states by naming and describing them. We are often naming and describing that which existed in it's entirety prior to our awareness of it. Thus, we are faced with a choice to make:Either those animals have those states even though they do not have direct access to their own mental states, or there is no difference at all between being fearful and having direct access to the mental state of being fearful.
Here's an example of what I have in mind. Until the 80's, it was widely believed that infants operated under "dumb association mechanisms", i.e. they had no conceptual apparatus and whatever discrimination they made was based on an innate similarity space that measured how much similar one perceptual stimulation was to another (in philosophy, this paradigm was famously defended by Quine: cf. Word and Object and The Roots of Reference). Starting in the 80's, however, a group of researchers, especially Elizabeth Spelke and her collaborators, devised new methods to investigate how infants organize their world. The idea was simple enough: you habituate the infant to a certain stimulus, and then present a new stimulus differing from the new one over a controlled dimension. If the infant's reaction was different (especially if the infant displayed surprise, as measured by looking times), then we know that he or she can discriminate the controlled dimension.
This idea is simple enough, but it showed that infants as young as two months already have an implicit physics and the concept of object, so that objects are thought of by the infant as cohesive wholes (i.e. wholes that maintains their parts connected and boundary integrity) that only move together as they touch and which are tracked through a continuous space-time trajectory. Further studies also showed that infants have integrated senses (so they can use information from touch to discriminate by vision an object) and use analog magnitude representations in order to calculate with numbers. Notice that most subjects studied are pre-verbal! So we can acquire a lot of information about their minds without needing to literally observe it.
Incidentally, I think this is congenial to a point John McDowell repeats over and over again. We tend to think of minds as organs, as if they were "located" in some sort of para-space, which we cannot access and hence must somewhat guess its contents. McDowell urges us to drop this talk and instead recognize that to talk about minds is to talk subjects of a mental life, i.e. to talk about people. So in some sense we can in a sense see the person's mental states because they show us (unwittingly, in some cases, such as the infant's) their mental states.
Consider similar questions: Can and to what extent can science study causality? or the existence of space, time and phenomena? or the reliability of epistemology suitably naturalised? can it even be meaningfully asserted that science can study the cosmos?
I think that, in a way, this is begging the question. Can we study the mind by observing people from the outside?
Quoting Nagase
I like this perspective. Minds are people. But is knowing a person the same as studying their behaviour? Is, for example, empathy a way of studying another person?
I think the question begging accusation is a bit backwards. A reasonable a priori answer to this question is "possibly", or, "perhaps; let's find out". The answer, "no, because minds are private" is the dubious one; that is the answer that begs the question (assumes its conclusion).
The question boils down to whether the mind has observable effects from the outside and whether those effects can be used to infer facts about the mind. That minds are private in the way described in the original post does not suffice to entail that it has no observable effects that can be used to infer facts about the mind; all it really entails is that such methods cannot reveal facts about the mind "directly".
Nagase gave an example of studying infant behaviors in terms of the ability to relate stimuli. I can think of several other kinds of examples, some of which we already do; studying the efficacy of pain medications, studying the effects of optical illusions on perception; studying/classifying disorders of mind in terms of the disabilities of particular persons and by contrast to nominal persons without disorders, deriving facts about how capabilities of the mind are organized; studying nominal disabilities, such as cognitive biases, and deriving from such studies facts about how our minds tend to form conclusions and beliefs; and so on. These things fall somewhere on the spectrum of the scientific method from data collecting to forming theories based on the data, but there's no clear barrier to deriving facts about the mind using these types of observations and scientific approaches.
To me it's painfully obvious that we can indeed study the mind, by which I mean we can derive facts related to how the mind works, using indirect means and scientific approaches. What might be a much more interesting conversation than simply denying reality would be to explore what we could study by such methods and what we cannot.
There is a difference. Being the thing implies that there is one thing. Talking about direct access implies two things - the thing being accessed directly and the thing directly accessing the thing ie. a Cartesian Theatre. Quoting Andrew4Handel
Crime scene investigators don't have "direct" access to the crime either. They learn about the crime by finding evidence of the crime. The evidence has a causal relationship with the crime. The evidence is the effect, the crime the cause. If we can still determine truths about the cause, like the time of the crime, the identity of the criminal, etc. from the effect of the cause, then why wouldn't we be able to determine truths about some mind if minds establish causal relationships with the world?
If I learned that you were in pain because of observing you stub your toe and you wincing, why would it be helpful to know how you experience the pain? What new knowledge would you be able to acquire that would be useful?
I did not give that answer though. I just wanted to point out that the exact relationship is worth thinking about.
Quoting InPitzotl
Sure. I wouldn't claim that minds have no observable effects. But the question is whether looking at observable effects allows you to "study" the mind, or whether you need to combine that information with unscientific methods, like empathy, to actually get a sense of the mind.
Quoting InPitzotl
This all sounds reasonable. I would just question whether we are studying "parts of the mind" or rather "manifestations of the mind". The difference being that if you can study parts, you arrive at an accurate and complete understanding of the parts. If you can only study a manifestation, that's not necessarily the case.
People learn about other people though interactions, conversation and analogy to ones own mental states but I am not convinced psychology has found out anything more profound than what we all can through experience.
I think indirect evidence gets more reliable when the evidence base, predictive power and explanatory scope becomes more objective.
Neuroscience studies particularly around brain damage are interesting in that they appear to show that mental faculties are more diverse than we imagined. For instance memory used to be considered one thing by some people. Now we have seen that people can retain one type and lose another. So people have weird pathologies where they can't name faces or in another instance can't name living things or where they can learn something but not recall the learning process etc.
But there are so many different studies and there has been a replication crisis that it is hard to process the data.
I think the main phenomena to be explained is experience/awareness the subject/centre of perception and mental representations (language/beliefs/memory).
(This is just general comments from me thinking aloud)
I realize that; but the OP is inviting the implications of that answer, and Nagase in my estimation is responding to said invitation.
Quoting Echarmion
I'm not sure I follow. What would combining the scientific method with empathy to get a sense of the mind look like and, if someone did something like this, then how are they being unscientific?Quoting Echarmion
I'm having problems here. If someone were to tell me that, by applying the scientific method to physics, one can arrive at a complete understanding of physics, I would think that such a claim itself was unscientific. If it were false with physics that one could come up with a complete understanding of the parts, I don't know how to infer anything from it being false with mind; and if that's the case, then I really don't see the distinction you're pointing out.
For example there is lying and exaggeration. How can we prove that someone is not lying or exaggerating about a mental state? A similar problem comes with trying to accurately describe ones own mental states.
Then there is the issue of reports of the supernatural and false beliefs. People including myself are skeptical about claims people make concerning things like seeing ghosts, hearing gods voice, miracles, psychic abilities and so on. But can we refute them? Skepticism about mental states can be arbitrary.
Well, in any event I was merely pointing out that I had my doubts about the statement.
Quoting InPitzotl
I'd describe empathy as "imagining yourself in somebody else's situation". Imagining situations isn't an application of the scientific method, it's not an observation. So it's unscientific in that sense.
As to how it looks: you might know from observation that someone is in a bad mood today. You use empathy to get a sense of how their mind feels.
Quoting InPitzotl
Yes the claim is unscientific in a strict sense. It would be a metaphysical claim.
Quoting InPitzotl
Well if your understanding is not complete, what else would you apply to physics? If there isn't anything else, then whatever is beyond the scientific method is beyond any understanding whatsoever. I'd say that if we have understood all we can possibly understand, then our understanding is complete.
I think I understand, but this doesn't really seem like it's addressing the same level as the burden carved out in the previous quote. Here's the issue as I read it:
Quoting Echarmion
So here, you're using empathy to get a sense of how someone else feels. I contend that your example is non-scientific; furthermore, I could very well use empathy myself, and come up with a different conclusion. So we can conclude that empathy isn't a "perfect metric". (OTOH, mood is just one example of a mind phenomenon; visual percepts are another and, though they have the same kinds of issue, they're much more crisp... also, this kind of thing isn't unique to mind; even pregnancy tests have false positives and false negatives).
But I don't think you need perfect metrics to do science; to do science, all you require is indicative metrics. If our empathetic judgments are better than chance at judging mental states, that's enough to use them as measuring tools in double blind studies. Even better, after multiple applications of such methods are performed over a period of time, we could perform meta-analysis on studies to gain insight into whether or not empathy in such applications is a metric of at least something. Such use of empathy as a part of scientific investigations I would not consider unscientific.
Quoting Echarmion
Let's use current science as an example; I'll make some fair generalizations about what we know. We know there's dark matter, and we know there is dark energy; but those terms basically mean "here be dragons"; they're fillers for physics we know is happening but cannot quite account for. We know QM works, and we know general relativity works, but we know they clash in certain areas as well. Given these examples, we know our physics is incomplete; there's dark energy but we know we don't know what it is... we have some speculations in theoretical physics but nothing quite demonstrated... and we know we don't know how to mesh QM with GR in the "correct" way, where correct means loosely scientifically demonstrated. There's no guarantee that employing the scientific method would complete our understanding of physics; but the lack of such a guarantee does not prevent us from using the scientific method to find out. So I would be happy if the physics we know appears closed, in the sense that we don't know we have such holes; but I cannot fathom calling this current state of physics complete until we at least patch the holes we know are there.
I think you're thinking about this from a perspective that is too technical. Every person's mind will be different, and so will every person's empathy. Yes you can still arrive at averages that you can use as indicative metrics. But that will filter out those individual differences. The internal perspective can not be recreated that way, it can only be intuited or imagined. Without that perspective, are you studying the mind, or merely behaviour?
Quoting InPitzotl
I think you have misunderstood me. I didn't ever refer to a "current state". I wrote "can be complete". At what time it is or will be complete doesn't matter.
Well, perhaps you and I have had different experiences and, as a result, different expectations. I certainly didn't learn, before reading the relevant studies, that children a few months old had a complex physics and knew about object permanence principles; nor did I infer that we work with two systems of numerical representation, parallel object files and analog magnitude representations, with the latter obeying Weber's law!
We're not just studying behavior, we're studying the content and structure of people's mental architecture. For example, current psychologists think that there are differences between central processes (which are available to consciousness and can use information from many different sources) and specialized modules (such as depth perception, which is largely unconscious and informational encapsulated). This is a structural claim. On the content side, most of them think that we are endowed with innate principles of object permanence and numerical cognition (parallel processing and analog magnitude representation), which have the status of proto-concepts.
Too technical for what exactly?
Quoting Echarmion
I don't doubt that other people are going to be different than me, but this line of argument (by which I mean arguing against science being able to study mind by focusing on how different we are) sounds more like a rationalization than a reasoned argument. Empathy's core is to "put yourself in someone else's shoes"; that can only possibly work if there's some level of similarity between you and the person you're empathizing with. Extrapolate this, and there should be similarities between you and at least a fair number of others. Reasoning a priori about this, maybe it's global, maybe it's diffuse, maybe it comes in clumps. These averages can possibly teach you how human minds work; help you categorize these minds-at-large, how those minds work, how different they are, what the categories are, and so on and so on. By learning how human minds work, it's even possible that you would understand a human mind a lot better; after all, isn't a human human?
I don't believe this dichotomy; it's like asking, if I look at a cup, am I seeing the cup or am I seeing light? In fact, in a sense, it can literally be like asking this... if I look at a man screaming that he is in pain, am I seeing someone who is in pain, or am I seeing light?
The problem here is that the light you see when you look at a cup still conveys information about the cup. We don't directly see cups either (in fact, even the light is several layers of indirection removed from the cone signals). So the fundamental issue that you're raising... that the mind is "hidden" behind a layer and we only "indirectly" see it through observing behaviors, doesn't really do much for me, because the same is true when you look at any object. I think the degrees of separation are a red herring; it matters not how far down the chain the thing you're observing is. What matters is what you can piece together down the causal chain from the information conveyed to you about that thing that is up the causal chain.
When I interact with a child I have no assumptions. I take people as I find them.
I did a degree in psychology myself and one thing I noticed is the naive assumptions. Humans are too complex to be reduced to simple paradigms and laws.
You asked about whether we can scientifically study people's minds, with the specific challenge that we somehow do not have access to the inside of people's heads. I pointed out that we do have access to the inside of people's heads, and have used this access to collect impressive amounts of data about the mind's architecture and content: that we have innate systems that analyze spatio-temporal trajectories for information about objects and goal-directed actions, that we have innate concepts of objects and actions, that we have innate systems for parallel tracking of objects and for analog magnitude representations that inform our cardinality judgments, etc., etc. We have detailed (though, obviously, far from complete!) knowledge about the format and development of these systems and representations.
In answer to this, you claimed, first, that such results are easily derivable from common experience, and, second, that psychology's "shallow or negative assumptions about people" somehow invalidate this mass of data. Well, with regards to the first, I don't know how to reply except with an incredulous stare---if such data were derivable from common experience, then we would expect it to be common knowledge, yet it is not common knowledge, being, in fact, very surprising (in the very representative sample of two, namely me and my wife, we surely found it surprising, and my wife works with children, if that's relevant).With regards to the second objection, leaving to the side the bizarre implication that a discipline approaches people with certain assumptions (as opposed to its practitioners), I don't see how that is remotely relevant here. Either the results are true or not. If they are true, then the assumptions of "psychology" (?) are not relevant; if they are not true, then you should be able to point out where are the relevant mistakes, instead of merely handwaving about supposed assumptions.
Academic Psychology has faced a replication crisis so a lot of its findings are under question.
If people have prejudices and false beliefs about other people than I am sure they will be surprised by psychology findings.
Psychologists have claimed that babies are egocentric and made lots of other negative and limiting assertions about them and are then surprised to find their assertions undermined.
I think assertions about mechanisms in the brain underlying behaviour and attitudes is not falsifiable. It is rather ad hoc. The final datum of psychology appears to be verbal testimony.
Yes, we use folk psychology all the time in interacting with other people (interestingly, this is now studied under the heading of "theory of mind" and may have connections with autism, a finding that is surely noy obvious). But that does not mean that psychology is reducible to folk psychology, in particular, developmental psychology that studies core cognition is not so reducible.
I'm aware of the so-called replication crisis, but I haven't found any study questioning the specific findings that I mentioned (I would actually be surprised if that were the case, since they have been replicated in dozens of studies by different laboratories, but these things are subtle and I may have missed something). If you are aware of studies questioning, e.g., habituation methodology, I would be interested in hearing about it.
As for your point about prejudices, yes, some people some times approach infants with prejudice. So what? How is this related to the conclusions that I mentioned?
Finally, any existence claim is non-falsifiable in principle (short of a contradiction), so I suppose you also consider particle physics (which, e.g., postulate the existence of certain particles to explain a given phenomenon) to be non-scientific?
That the mind includes an element of ontological subjectivity does not preclude us from having an epistemically objective science of it. Money, assets, and wealth distribution, for example, are observer-relative phenomena that fall within the purview of economics. The problem you highlight is not so much a philosophical one as it is a practical one. There is further no reason to believe that having a science of the mind requires some ability to know/experience what someone else is experiencing from the inside, so to speak.
I don't think it possible to know what is happening in a pre verbal infants mind. But by observing their behaviour you can try and assess what they know in a crude way.
I have had my own varied experience with the mental health services in the UK. After decades of having problems I was diagnosed with aspergers two years ago. My experience suggests to me that diagnosis in psychiatry and psychology is poor and I encountered all sorts of prejudice such as being criticised for not making eye contact which it turns out is a symptom of autism.
I would have thought with better theories of mind we would have less mental health problems.
Do you believe that one can use thought to explain one's thoughts? Isn't this necessarily circular?
If the mind can be reduced to chemistry and physics, there is no obstacle in the scientific study of the mind. Of all that is mind, emotions seem more easily explicable with, ergo reducible to, chemistry (serotonin, oxytocin, epinephrine, etc.). What then is left of the mind that needs to be explained scientifically? The rational mind of course but that, as we all know, is replicable by a physical system like a computer. Thus, although these facts may not suffice to show that the mind is a physical procees, it does indicate that a scientific study of the mind is not only underway but also making some headway.