Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry
the-tls.co.uk
the-tls.co.uk
I don't know if this is true for a good chunk of mental illnesses, tbh. How does one use a purely biological model and treatment for PTSD, BPD, ASPD, etc?
Side-unrelated note, I wish paywalled sites would at least have the decency to produce an abstract. It's always a sad day when ideas are hidden behind a gatekeeper.
I can say with confidence that the abstraction of chemistry in physiology is not watertight (is that a pun...?) and we still barely understand physiological chemistry in any kind of way that any self-respecting scientist could describe as rigorous.
The hubris of some people in their fields...
Humans have excellent pattern matching, reasoning, and lots of research into the subject. I do believe there is value in doing it.
That said, I’m highly skeptical of a lot of talk therapy, beyond the simple gains of saying things out loud to a 3rd party and challenging your mind and assumptions.
“psychiatry rightly saw mental illness as rooted in biology, more specifically in the brain.”
This statement is far from the big picture, imho.
We've identified that the bulk of neurons rests below the brain, that hormones are being produced elsewhere (e.g. around the heart, or the intestine) that have a dramatic effect on conditions like depression (or lack thereof). See The Second Brain[1] by Michael D. Gershon for a primer on your intestine.
I personally think reducing mental life to the brain is just as shortsighted as reducing a computer to its CPU: sure, you can do CS with such abstractions, but not deal with real-life implementation. It's paper-theory, not applied practice. And purely abstract models have a way of not wanting to fit reality as well as we'd wish...
Ideas that we are what we eat (quite literally so), or that physical exercise helps mental strength, tend to show that even for processes seemingly 'happening' locally in the brain, the whole neural system and by extension the whole body plays a part (if only as "infrastructure", but possibly more so in an "edge / core" fashion — aren't we but a big IS after all like any living system, however esoteric to us the physical processes).
Anyway, not a neuroscientist, maybe just a cheeky dev who likes to challenge ideas, but the whole fantasized body/mind dichotomy is only furthered when we say "oh it's all physical but it's only the brain that affects mental/mind processes". You've just moved the magic black-box from "otherworldly" to "physically located in the brain" — that's better, but not quite there yet.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/636974.The_Second_Brain
It was a big departure from the way the mind was conceived till then.
You might as well try to build an alternative theory of mechanics based on an assertion that all objects have a conscious and subconscious mass, and that gravity actually act on the subconcious mass and only moves the whole because the two are interconnected.
There are clever ways to get around those issues and tie theories about behavior to observed action in the real world, and there are a number of psychological theories that come up with a plausible sounding evolutionary history to certain thoughts and behavior that seem correct, but a lack of good measurement instruments seems to be a very big problem preventing more concrete answers to a lot of different questions about the mind. When talking about things other than motor or perceptual related studies of the mind (bionics related stuff), the most common measurement tool seems to be self reported surveys, and although I think there are tricks you can do when wording questions and statistically analyzing results to try to account for patients trying to answer in ways they feel like they should that aren’t necessarily accurate/make sure people don’t misinterpret questions, that whole way of investigating claims seems to be very very shaky.
It’s a common complaint about the field, and I’m sure a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists are sick of hearing it, but I haven’t felt like I’ve ever gotten an adequate response about why it’s not a valid complaint.
Call it what you will, but there are parts of our minds, whose functioning can be observed but which we don't have access to.
It's so trivial to find examples, and it's really fun: describe to me in detail how it feels to hit a baseball, to perceive the colour red. Tell me about the exact moment that you learned the word "squirrel".
It's trivially true that, while we can observe some of the workings of our mind, we cannot observe all of it.
That part that we can't observe can easily be mapped onto his ideas of the unconscious mind.
There are other reviews like https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/mind-fi... (discussed previously at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435815)
The analogous thinking is that software bugs, in particular data storage errors[1], are best understood as hardware malfunctions, and that precise interventions at the hardware level can solve them. It's not exactly wrong--for any given software issue, you might be able to devise hardware changes that correct it. But. I feel like I don't need to continue to make my point.
[1] In reality the lines blur between software and data, so the analogy might be better more solid between trained ML models and hardware, where trained ML models are both software and data in a way that can't be meaningfully distinguished. So we're talking about correcting a trained ML model via a precise hardware edit.
It's not wrong per se, not even insane in some cases. But the dismissive tone in the abstract of taking the trained model of the human mind on its own terms, versus as a purely biological object boggles my mind with how wrong-headed it is.
Your post sounds suspiciously new age to me. I’m aware that our bodies feed into our minds, and that things like hormonal levels, nutrition, gut flora and fauna, etc all have a fairly profound impact on things like mood, but that’s different that saying the mind is not the brain. Social isolation and long periods of darkness also have profound impact on the mind. That doesn’t mean that the night sky or society somehow “is” our mind, or that our minds are somehow housed outside as well as in our brains.
There’s a tendency to belittle things that we understand mechanically, which is why I believe people tend to believe the mind is somehow “beyond” the brain. But we can still have deep respect for the sovereign, spiritual like divinity associated with consciousness while recognizing that it’s all happening within the confined, physical space that constitutes a person’s brain, and that there’s a physical basis for it.
it's pretty much that. the mind is the entire body. although it's mostly the brain it is NOT entirely the brain.
> That doesn’t mean that the night sky or society somehow “is” our mind,
but our mind is formed by what we learn from society (culture) with our brains (the software gets installed hahah)
> while recognizing that it’s all happening within the confined, physical space that constitutes a person’s brain
maybe all the language and the words form within the physical bound of the brain, sure, but the mind more than just what we do with our brains.
In the end, thinking this way has led me to take better care of myself, not just my "brain" (i.e. eating better and exercising the rest of the body a little more)
Tying all of our experiential world to a single organ in the body doesn’t really do justice to the magnitude/scope of that experience, sure. But I think it’s wrong to call that experience “Mind”.
Obviously I don’t want to interfere with your self care, and think it’s very important to have a holistic view of self and your relationship to those around you when trying to be healthy, I just don’t think “Mind” is the right word to use for what you’re talking about.
I don’t really like the philosophical direction of the concept, though. It mostly seems about acknowledging that we are fundamentally coupled to our environment, and that our minds are not really designed to function in isolation as a brain in a vat.
That’s all true, but I think it dilutes both the definition of “self” and of “mind”. While we are not designed to function in isolation, the boundaries placed by the more traditional conception of both the self and the mind make them more useful, imo. If we consider the “self” to extend into our environment whenever there’s a dependency, at what point does “self” just become synonymous with everything? It’s going in a direction that makes the concept meaningless. And I don’t think it gives us any insight.
For example, it is incorrect to think of object instances as living in isolation during the runtime of a computer. They are a part of a more holistic state, and interact with are influenced by other parts of that state constantly.
But if you try to think of a program in terms of one giant state blob, reasoning becomes basically impossible. We need to break things down into differentiated modules in order to understand them. Keeping the concepts of “self” and “mind” as tools with which we can differentiate between something like “experiences per meatbag” and “thing doing the experiencing“, respectively, seems important, and the “embodied cognition” idea seems to be trying to get rid of those tools without replacing them.
edit: I see this was downvoted. Interesting.
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