Tag Archives: psychology

12/17-12/27/2021

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The Universe moves through you. Don’t take it out on your career…. Armed with western psychology, you might cease to live in an interesting way!

There’s nothing exciting about “neutral”. Be a gummy lord, but ask: Where was the ground beneath us? Try love in a liberal democracy: date a 25-year-old delight 😯 Be a calm taco–forge a good relation with woman.

Feel the winter chill on your bones? That’s the result of my past, hedonistic ways! At least, I don’t take my own madness seriously…

No one wants to be overrun by other religions. Latent willpower can save you; I took the story into my own hands. No emo-ness to report, there!

What if you conform to her judgments of the situation of us? God–I really sucked from the tit of existentialism: huh? Not to prove I’m not a pig, or anything…

While purely at ease, you won’t be too sensitive from the breakup. You might become a meme-y guy, in which case you could join a party with Christians. I should have stayed a nerd! He is entitled to feel emo (as we all might be).

A Ph.D. in Chanda Studies may well exist by the time I’m through. No playing the suppression game: any Freudian one is a testy concept. Through my innovative powers, I now discard that cognition! “Bonding over individualism” might seem possible to someone who is thrown off by fiction…I won’t be an Orichalcos daddy.

I would never try to criticize her darkness. Am I obsessed with being active? Why: activity is integral to my being!

I awakened her vulnerability. “Freaking simps of culture!” She yelled. I control the flow of my cognition…yet, I passed them the sex bug.

Can you see me having fun with the oppressor’s language? Leave your grieving heart behind! Shoot over statistics while others are going blind, psychologically. Let them be riddled with subjectivity; be careful not to disappear into your grief.

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What is a psychological person?

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Maybe more aptly: who are they?

The psychological person is so necessarily by their being embedded in society among other, conscious agents.

As both conscious and societal, the psychological person has the following attributes:

  • They have a mind.
  • They engage in behaviors.
  • They have a distinct personality.
  • They respond to situations.
  • They experience.
  • They sense and perceive.
  • They think, feel, and motivate.
  • They pay attention.
  • They recall and foresee.
  • They learn.

What might this mean for the person who may not have a personality or general life situation? What if they don’t think, feel, or motivate? Surely, they must experience as a conscious being. Further, personhood has been granted according to societal status over the centuries. Societal, conscious personage is a keenly biosocial label. (If someone ceases to be alive medically, they are no longer technically a “person”.)

The psychological person is biosocial! Another way to say this is that people are biopsychosocial. Some may be more or less psychological than others in certain respects…

Subjectifying the other

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How do we do it? By taming the following:

  • Male gaze
  • Outgroup demonization
  • Fundamental attribution error (FAE) – reactively judging oneself–including one’s efforts–as superior, and others’ as inferior

Outgroup demonization is turned inside-out into (“outto”?) ingroup angelification.

The ideal opposite of FAE is FAC, i.e. fundamental attribution correction. Through FAC, we fundamentally attribute correctly, viewing oneself and others as innately, humanly equal and democratic!

Existential-humanistic psychology

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Existential-humanistic (E-H) psychology is the study of human existence.

Psychology in general is the science of mental processes (mind) and behavior.

Thus, E-H psychology enlarged is the science of mind and behavior within human existence.

But what is human existence with no mind? Mind is a necessary feature; for without it, we’d have no room to consider human existence to begin with.

Behavior may be said to pervade all levels of reality. In physics, we speak of the behavior of particles. Social science considers the situational behavior of persons as human beings.

Mind and behavior are thus part-and-parcel of human existence. Our science of the former two topics must serve to bolster our understanding–and, ultimately, experience–of the latter.

As minded human persons who behave situationally, how do we experience our existence?

Are psychological diagnoses meaningless?

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Part of the issue is the power psychiatry wields as a profession, relative to psychology.

“Evidence-based” usually translates to privileging biochemistry over psychology (the latter of which is “soft”, and therefore “less empirical”).

People have equated the brain with mind more and more, over time. Pushing that further, if neural dynamics determine psychological states (such as moods) outright–but, not vice versa–it becomes logical to target biological factors to uproot behavioral problems.

It is telling that psychological diagnoses are outlined in a manual published by the American Psychiatric (not Psychological) Association. Much of modern psychology grew out of psychiatry–see Freud and Jung, but also other theorists around their time like Karen Horney, who was an M.D.–so part of this is attributable to psychology’s heritage.

As the field develops its identity more, perhaps we’ll see psychologists push for greater control over the field’s diagnosis-establishing processes.

Is your mind physical?

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That it is is a necessary assumption for those who accept that minds exist, but equate it with either the central nervous system or its encapsulating body.

Much of the issue around physicalism vs. the question of minds’ existences may have less to do with the nature of reality than with what we mean by certain words. If anything and everything is physical, then “physical” is a unifying rather than polarizing or distinguishing concept; there is no contrast class to it (that is: nothing non-physical exists). 

The project for physicalist cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind–those who, in short, believe that everything (including the mind) is physical–is, perhaps, simply to extend the language of physics to also accommodate “mind”. (And physicalism could well have to change, itself, in order to be able to do so!)

It may be convenient for a field like cognitive neuroscience especially to have a common framework for its studies of neural and cognitive (mental) systems, which have traditionally–a la Descartes and his successors–been regarded as more ontologically separate than they are, these days. Still, people’s mileages vary with respect to whether physicalism is the right unifying ideology for reality even aside from this possibility.

[The discussion from which this post arose took place on INTJforum, at: https://intjforum.com/topic/175287-if-physicalism-how-is-it-that-we-can-trust-our-cognitive-abilities/ ]

A general tool for increasing critical reflexivity and awareness

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Critical-phenomenological method

“…How are people to become aware of their more destructive acts to begin with [e.g., of environmental disregard]—the fact that they, themselves, might be committing them regularly?

“The [phenomenological-critical] method can be performed mentally or verbally. Where individual privacy is of concern, the former would be preferred, and where other people can help one become aware of something less subjectively-accessible the latter would be. The step-by-step logical form I have chosen may dovetail neatly with efforts in schools to teach algorithmic thinking (e.g., through the instruction of computer programming), and it would likely prove most prudent to encourage such a habit of critical awareness from a younger age. However, the general method may just as well be practiced by any capable adult in any other realm or mode of existence.

“Naturally, people who think less linearly may find the method disagreeable, though it has been deliberately kept simple for early and general use. The method’s efficacy will also covary with individual differences in temperament, personality factors, attention-distributive tendencies, motivation, and health conditions, and would require appropriate adaptation for non-English speakers” (Sood, 2016).