An instrument cannot examine itself

@Aedes,

Aedes wrote:

Freud's conclusions and emphases are what people disagree with. NOT his methods, which again were science at its best.

Furthermore, he made immense contributions not just to psychology and psychiatry but also to philosophy. He was the first to systematically describe how the conscious human is not fundamentally rational. This was something that had already been explored in depth by the likes of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky.

But to provide evidence for it, to show how there are vying, competing forces in our minds that can overwhelm our rational aspect was a truly immense breakthrough, perhaps the greatest of all developments in the entire history of the human self-image. And that was quite simply done through methodical data collection, not with armchair meditation.

To be honest, I'm not too familiar with Freudian philosophy. You've entice me to go read up on it.

1 Reply

@Zetherin,

I'm not aware of any pure philosophical writings of his. It was his clinical writings that had huge philosophical implications. I mean the only other people in all of history whose scientific discoveries had such philosophical importance were Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. That's pretty elite company to keep.

His seminal work (at least of interest to this forum) is Civilization and its Discontents.

I found this cool quote of his, which I find very prescient:

Quote:

Philosophy is not opposed to science, it behaves itself as if it were a science, and to a certain extent it makes use of the same methods; but it parts company with science, in that it clings to the illusion that it can produce a complete and coherent picture of the universe, though in fact that picture must needs fall to pieces with every new advance in our knowledge. Its methodological error lies in the fact that it over-estimates the epistemological value of our logical operations, and to a certain extent admits the validity of other sources of knowledge, such as intuition.

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@Aedes,

Aedes wrote:

Freud's conclusions and emphases are what people disagree with. NOT his methods, which again were science at its best.

... unfortunately, conclusions and emphases are what distinguishes science from mere data collection ... who is remembered as the "scientist": Kepler who concluded the theories, or Brahe who collected the data? ...

Aedes wrote:

Furthermore, he made immense contributions not just to psychology and psychiatry but also to philosophy.

... no disagreement whatsoever Smile

...

1 Reply

@paulhanke,

paulhanke;23692 wrote:

... unfortunately, conclusions and emphases are what distinguishes science from mere data collection...

He wasn't wrong about everything. He invented analytic psychiatry, which despite many advances and changes is still practiced to this day. He was the first to clinically understand the subconscious and unconscious mind. He was the first to appreciate how formative experiences during childhood could profoundly affect psychopathology in adults. As mentioned he was the seminal figure in the destruction of Enlightenment-style rationalism. Whether he meant to or not, he (along with people within philosophy) basically destroyed metaphysics as a legitimate enterprise. And finally, his students (who included Jung) became the academic and clinical leaders in this field. So even if he overemphasized sex, and even if he was a chauvanist, he is still one of THE towering figures in the entire history of science and western thought.

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@Aedes,

Aedes wrote:

He wasn't wrong about everything ...

... when Popper analyzed the work of Freud and Marx and their followers and concluded these two "scientific" schools were actually pseudo-scientific, he wasn't concerned with how much they had right or wrong but whether or not the veracity of their claims was being self-verified ... what he found was that whenever a prediction made by these schools turned out to be incorrect (which was often), the schools would not re-evaluate their theories but rather blame whatever other factors they could blame, because in hindsight the theories had a perfectly good explanation for what had occurred ... Popper never said the explanations were worthless; he merely asserted that these people weren't practicing science ...

1 Reply

@paulhanke,

Despite an entire career in science, I can't say I have much admiration for Popper's contributions. I find Kuhn to be a vastly wiser and more insightful philosopher of science.

1 Reply

@Aedes,

Aedes wrote:

He wasn't wrong about everything. He invented analytic psychiatry, which despite many advances and changes is still practiced to this day. He was the first to clinically understand the subconscious and unconscious mind. He was the first to appreciate how formative experiences during childhood could profoundly affect psychopathology in adults. As mentioned he was the seminal figure in the destruction of Enlightenment-style rationalism. Whether he meant to or not, he (along with people within philosophy) basically destroyed metaphysics as a legitimate enterprise. And finally, his students (who included Jung) became the academic and clinical leaders in this field. So even if he overemphasized sex, and even if he was a chauvanist, he is still one of THE towering figures in the entire history of science and western thought.

Read some references to Lacan, so had to read some Lacan and found that he referenced Freud extensively. Now Freud isn't referenced much at all anymore, and neither is Lacan so apparently they were not vital to the progress of philosophic or psychiatric thought after all, just a railroad siding. Freud's analytic psychiatry also seems to have disappeared. As to metaphysics, it's still there and going strong although nobody says the word because it has been co-opted by the New Agers. One thing, whatever your dysfunction, they have a pill for it even if there is no cure. Feeling a little too subjective? Take this new med--Objectisoma--twice a day after meals and forget it.

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@Aedes,

Aedes wrote:

Despite an entire career in science, I can't say I have much admiration for Popper's contributions. I find Kuhn to be a vastly wiser and more insightful philosopher of science.

... perhaps both are to be admired for the thinking they did and when they did it Smile

... Popper described contemporary-sounding limits of scientific knowledge at a time when logical positivism was wildly popular; Kuhn described the social reality of science at a time when the notion of the objectively detached scientist was wildly popular ...

1 Reply

@paulhanke,

True, though Kuhn seems a bit more prescient to me. The problem with Popper's falsifiability standard is that it can be applied only to data and not to conclusions. Sure, the presence of these fossilized dinosaur bones in this layer of shale is falsifiable. But my contention that they assemble to form a velociraptor, or my contentions about the behavior of said dinosaur, are not.

And that's the thing with Freud. His data WERE falsifiable -- they were patient interviews. But from there he had to draw out themes, commonalities, etc.

To my knowledge Freud never posited the id, ego, and superego as "things". They were a way of categorizing simultaneous and conflicting processes that he observed in people's minds. That's not so hard to falsify. I mean if I want to examine everyone on earth for an id, all I need do is ask them questions about their appetite, sexual urges, and other impulses.

Fairbanks -- Freud isn't referenced much anymore, but then again neither is Darwin among evolutionary biologists. I'm an infectious diseases physician and I can tell you that no one references Koch anymore. It's not that they're irrelevant -- just that new science is many many generations removed from these foundational figures and our literature basis that we NEED to reference is a lot more recent. Even papers from the early 2000s are obsolete in many cases. Not that the science itself is obsolete, but those papers are no longer in a position to directly contribute to the state of the art.

Freudian psychoanalysis has disappeared, but analytic psychiatry in general has not. Jung, who was Freud's student, was a much greater influence on modern practice in the end. But you should read some of Irwin Yalom's writings. He's a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, and he's one of the major authorities on this subject. He wrote a phenomenal book called Existential Psychotherapy, which is amazing to me -- to incorporate that bleakest of philosophies, i.e. that life is inherently meaningless, to something like psychotherapy that is meant to be (if nothing else) ego-supportive.

As for psychiatry and psychotropic medications, this is a common criticism levied against the specialty, but I don't entirely agree that it's a problem. There are MANY diseases for which we are not addressing the underlying problem, but we're treating the important aspect:

For example, in patients with hypertension we are not treating their underlying predisposition -- we're just lowering their blood pressure. But in-so-doing we lower their risk of coronary artery disease, stroke, renal failure, blindness, peripheral vascular disease, etc.

In patients with autoimmune diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis, we are not treating their underlying immune dysfunction, we're treating the inflammation that results from the immune dysfunction. But in doing so we decrease the amount of joint destruction.

And with depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, anxiety, etc, we thankfully have safe drugs that greatly abrogate symptoms. And thus we allow these patients to work, to maintain families, we prevent suicide, we prevent homicide, etc. It's actually miraculous. And psychiatry is a highly nuanced specialty where just making the appropriate diagnoses and choosing the correct treatment modality (drugs and/or therapy and/or substance abuse services etc) is very difficult. I spend half my time doing general inpatient medicine at a big teaching hospital, and we've had a lot of psychiatry patients lately -- a few suicide attempts, some drug overdoses, an eating disorder, some severe delirium or dementia patients -- and I don't think a single one was treated with drugs alone. In the delirium patient we took away medications, and the others were all referred for counselling in addition to drug therapy.

Just one aside note for Fairbanks -- I spent a month as a medical student back in 1999 working in the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium clinic in Juneau (actually the SEARHC clinic, which is part of ANTHC, which is part of the Indian Health Service), where I learned that the southeast Alaska natives have the highest rate of rheumatoid arthritis in the world. They also had exceptionally high rates of depression. Treating them with SSRIs for their depression and various antiinflammatories for their RA made an enormous difference to their lives!

1 Reply

@Aedes,

Aedes wrote:

The problem with Popper's falsifiability standard is that it can be applied only to data and not to conclusions. Sure, the presence of these fossilized dinosaur bones in this layer of shale is falsifiable. But my contention that they assemble to form a velociraptor, or my contentions about the behavior of said dinosaur, are not.

... actually, I think Popper's ideas about falsifiability apply to predictions, not data ... as a shining example, he uses Einstein's outrageous prediction that that the light from deep space bends as it passes the sun toward the earth (a prediction which was tested during a 1922 eclipse and remains unrefuted to this day) ... in this respect, contentions about the behavior of a dinosaur do not count as science, but merely speculation - which is what any respectable paleontologist would call it ... anyhoo, that is not to say that Popper's ideas about falsifiability were without flaw - the folks at Stanford can summarize things better than I can: Karl Popper (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Smile

...

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@Zetherin,

Aedes:

Whose definition is that? I think that's an extremely inaccurate definition.

Words are arbitrary; I have defined consciousness in a certain way, as follows: all experience, as it arises and is remembered, the present and functions thereof, i.e. the future and past (ideas), syn. w/ life

Sure you can (escape consiousness). Here are a few ways...

Certain drugs, the best of which you sadly missed, do not, per this definition, allow an individual to escape consciousness. The experience that constitutes that cons. is simply unusual, unless that individual is a merry prankster.

The world beyond our ideas is NOT empirical -- it just is what it is. Our ideas of the world, whether individual or collective, are actually what is empirical.

And I can simultaneously believe that there is a real world and believe that my ideas of it bear SOME resemblance to it, even if not 100% accurately.

This tired old argument that we can't escape from our own perspective does NOT mutually exclude the notion that other things are real, that the world is real. All it means is that we can't prove it in the absolute. But no one cares about the absolute anyway outside of religion.

(1) I used the term empical world only to differentiate from THE WORLD (see consc.). The empiral world, as I use the term, means the observed and measured world, the world as ordered by a human mind, which is an idea within that mind.

(2) 'The world beyond our ideas' is not a subject for scientific investigation, or any other kind of investigation; it's existance is speculative and irrelevant.

(3) My point was never to prove simply that there is a lack of evidence for an external world; this is nothing new.

You have still not answered the basic argument I made in the preceeding post, which is that scientific/empiric investigation cannot arrive at an understanding of consciousness (experience), though it may come to understand the physical/chemical requirements for consciousness in the nervous system. Hence, back to the original point; science can never produce a unified theory of reality, as the same methods are not applicable to experience and to objects of our imagining within experience (bodies, forces, etc.); while an object can be defined and thus understood in terms of its neighboring objects in the empiric world, there is nothing outside of consciousness with which consc. might be compared and thus it cannot be defined, understood, accurately. NOTE: the 'physical world', as we understand it, does not exist oustide consciousness; it is an idea, a part of consc.; the actual external world is only a subject for pure speculation and cannot be a subject for comparison.

1 Reply

@BrightNoon,

BrightNoon wrote:

Words are arbitrary; I have defined consciousness in a certain way, as follows: all experience, as it arises and is remembered, the present and functions thereof, i.e. the future and past (ideas), syn. w/ life

... where does unconscious behavior fit into this theory of consciousness? (or does it deny the existence of unconsciousness?) ...

BrightNoon wrote:

... scientific/empiric investigation cannot arrive at an understanding of consciousness (experience), though it may come to understand the physical/chemical requirements for consciousness in the nervous system. Hence, back to the original point; science can never produce a unified theory of reality, as the same methods are not applicable to experience and to objects of our imagining within experience (bodies, forces, etc.); while an object can be defined and thus understood in terms of its neighboring objects in the empiric world, there is nothing outside of consciousness with which consc. might be compared and thus it cannot be defined, understood, accurately.

... if a scientist puts a statistically significant number of subjects into identical situations and asks them to describe their experience of it, cannot the descriptions be compared? ... certainly, the subjects' descriptions of experience have been filtered by language, but can't something similar be said to be true of most science? (i.e., every observation is filtered through instruments such as radio telescopes, electron microscopes, the human eye, etc.) ...

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@paulhanke,

where does unconscious behavior fit into this theory of consciousness? (or does it deny the existence of unconsciousness?)

If you mean the freudian concept of the unconscious, I do not deny its existance, just like I do not deny the existance of black holes, electrons, China, etc. In my view, all that which is not experienced, whether remote such as quantam mechanics, or something more ordinary, like repressed childhood memories, is in the same category; until these things are actually experienced, they are ideas only (the ideas are experienced, not the actual 'things'). Electrons influence my existance, I assume, as does the unconscious mind, but I experience neither.

if a scientist puts a statistically significant number of subjects into identical situations and asks them to describe their experience of it, cannot the descriptions be compared? ... certainly, the subjects' descriptions of experience have been filtered by language, but can't something similar be said to be true of most science? (i.e., every observation is filtered through instruments such as radio telescopes, electron microscopes, the human eye, etc.)

A procedure like that is perfectly justifiable in science; as I said before, things like that are being done and will be done until there is an excellent 'scientific understanding od consciousness'. However, that is exactly the problem I'm adressing. What would be the final product of an investiigation like this (for your sake, let's say its subjects include all living humans): a extremely convincing and probably accurate description of consciousness, as experienced by many, various people. As you, the curious reader of Scientific American read about this study, you come across this description of consciousness, which very nearly matches your own experience and, presumably that of almost all human beings. You, in your mind, then form an idea of consciousness; you would have an understanding of the idea of consciousness, not of consciousness itself.

In other words, the content of consciousness, through rigorous investigation, might be generally understood, but not consciousness. Metaphorically speaking, we might be able to see the filler within, but not the shape of the whole thing. This is analgous ot the universe, at conceived by astronomers and mathematicians; we can very thoroughly examine stars, galaxies, particles, waves, etc, but we cannot understand the nature of the 'the universe'; it's shape, extent, etc, cannot be determined.

We keep coming back to the same issue. I will ask you some questions in an attempt to clarify.

Q: Do you understand what I mean when I say that the physical world/emprical world/external world exists only in our minds?

If not, please explain to me how it can be proven to have an independant existance.

If you (1) answered the question in the affirmative or (2) cannot explain per my request, your argument has essentially become, "the nature of our consciousness can be explained in terms of the world, which exists in our consciousness."

Q: Do you see the contradiction inherent in that? It is like saying, "a is everything; b is a subset of a; a can be defined in terms of b."

1 Reply

@paulhanke,

paulhanke wrote:

... where does unconscious behavior fit into this theory of consciousness? (or does it deny the existence of unconsciousness?) ...

...

This might be an interesting direction to take the discussion. It seems most of our behavior is unconscious, maybe so much so that conscious behavior could be ignored as not existing at all.

1 Reply

@BrightNoon,

BrightNoon wrote:

In other words, the content of consciousness, through rigorous investigation, might be generally understood, but not consciousness. Metaphorically speaking, we might be able to see the filler within, but not the shape of the whole thing. This is analgous ot the universe, at conceived by astronomers and mathematicians; we can very thoroughly examine stars, galaxies, particles, waves, etc, but we cannot understand the nature of the 'the universe'; it's shape, extent, etc, cannot be determined.

... I think I finally see what you're asking - "Can we know absolutely everything there is to know about consciousness with absolute certainty?" ... the short answer is that there isn't anything that we know absolutely everything about with absolute certainty ... science is more like "a is everything; b is what we think we know about a; at best, b contains a subset of a, but as a lot of b is off the target b can be expected to change (and not just grow) as we continue to investigate a; and if b ever becomes equivalent to a, we have no means of knowing that and may continue our investigations and stray back to a situation where b only contains a subset of a" ...

BrightNoon wrote:

Q: Do you understand what I mean when I say that the physical world/emprical world/external world exists only in our minds?

If not, please explain to me how it can be proven to have an independant existance.

... I'm still not sure I'm seeing things from your perspective ... I and a friend stand in front of a house ... I see a yellow house with white trim and a wrap-around porch ... I ask my friend what he sees ... he does not say "I see a forest with wildflowers and a stream"; he says "I see a yellow house with white trim and a wrap-around porch" ... this sounds to me like a shared experience of something that exists independently of either of us ...

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@Fairbanks,

Fairbanks wrote:

This might be an interesting direction to take the discussion. It seems most of our behavior is unconscious, maybe so much so that conscious behavior could be ignored as not existing at all.

... interesting point - if the unconscious makes up the bulk of "mind", then probing into "mind" requires the same sort of indirect observation as probing into another person's "mind", no? ...

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@paulhanke,

I think I finally see what you're asking - "Can we know absolutely everything there is to know about consciousness with absolute certainty?" --Paulhanke

No Paulhanke, you do not. I don't think you can, unless I'm much less coherent than I thought; perhaps I speak some strange patois of english that we only seem to have in common...tragic.

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@BrightNoon,

O, one more thing...If you would like to understand what I am trying to say, just to satisfy your curiosity about this strange character you talked with in an online forum, you should drop some acid. Maybe you already have, I don't know. If not, try it and note the awareness you gain of your own subjectivity, of how in introspection you rise from one 'plane' to another, analyasing the previous plane. You proceed with this rapidly and endlessly and will freak out if you don't stop yourself. This proves nothing of course, but I think its the perfect illustration of the problem that I strated this thread to examine: that human consciousness cannot understand human consciousness, because consciousness cannot, by definition, gain a perspective beyond itself from which to analyze itself: ergo, science (product of consciousness, in consc.) cannot present a unified theory of 'the external world' (also in consc.) and consciousness itself (as the experience, not the chem./phys. reactions which we might deduce are 'the cause of consciousness').

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@BrightNoon,

The non-existence of physical reality would turn the statement in on itself and result in existence that was nothing but the consciousness examining itself...which is a circular Cartesian perversion of reality and long since defunct.

The physical world exists. We interact with it. The consciousness observes (and affects?) certain aspects of that interaction, but ultimately imperfectly because consciousness is, itself, necessarily a part of that same physical system (here is where Descartes made his great pineal gland blunder by trying naively to seperate the two) by virtue of the interaction of observation (if nothing else...).

Consciousness, itself, is therefore part of the great QED which science and mathematics seek, and must be resolved for there to be absolute "truth".

As to the question of whether consciousness can observe itself, I don't know (a lot of terms need clearer definitions) and I don't consider the question logically proven for or against as yet. Consciousness is certainly not as clumsy a tool as a microscope. Certain aspects of thought and understanding do appear to hold the quality of consciousness observing itself, depending on the definitions of the words. Perhaps these phenomena can be assigned numerical values in a sufficiently complex empirical system?

Perhaps we can represent every possible human experience numerically? Ah...but that would still be a representation, and not the experience, itself. What is the first tautology? A = A. Yes, I agree.

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@BrightNoon,

BrightNoon wrote:

O, one more thing...If you would like to understand what I am trying to say, just to satisfy your curiosity about this strange character you talked with in an online forum, you should drop some acid.

A profoundly dangerous recommendation, though perhaps not the most dangerous that is thrown around in these parts. Not that I disapprove, but individual results will vary.

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An instrument cannot examine itself

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