The Confusion or Lies of Mainstream Psychology

'A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it' - Siddhartha Mukherrjee

Such a Big Problem

That scientists are often wrong is not a problem - inasmuch as they are Human beings - dynamical systems first, Human beings second, and scientists third. It would be nice if ontology and epistemology were subjects covered on way to becoming a scientist, but alas, we live in the dark ages of Human reasoning - where the scientist reasons without considering the conditions from which he reasons: indeed, has this state of affairs not been mediated by crappy philosophisizing? If it was up to me, every book that offers nothing but obfuscating garbage would be burned - Friedrich Nietzsche would be a nice place to start..

I mention the philosopher only to point out how fundamental bad philosophy is to the construction of a negative and destructive science: science entails a Goethian approach - but alas, many scientists are caught up in the ubermensch weltanschauung - not apparently learning from the example of Nietzsche that brash and undisciplined reasoning leads to corruption of self, body and society.

If you haven't read Thus Spoke zarathustra, or Twilightlight of the Idols, or the Antichrist, hold you tongue and leave this thread - you aren't equipped to understand what is being spoken of. For those who have read this, or understand why books like this present a problem to scientific progress, ask yourself: how can a discipline fundamentally based upon correlation - i.e. the "meeting up between inquiring subject and objective process - when reason is the enemy of your thinking - that is, correlated and coherent thinking, symbolized by Nietszsche (and the ancient Greeks) by the god Apollo? Reason is not used properly - it is not used at all, it seems, when something so trite and patently unreasonable - as spoken by the debonairly dressed Mukherjee, passes as common sense?

What is an Attitude, but Reason and Affect?

First, to disentangle the corrosive reasoning of Mukherjees assertion, lets start with the simple question: what is an attitude? Mukherjee, like the pretentious elites he probably spends much time with (judging by his artist wife) mind and body appear to be two separate processes. The reason for this, as other philosophers have spent their careers trying to undo - earlier on, Spinoza, Whitehead, Begson, later on, Varela, Maturana, Noe, Kelso, Johnson, Lakoff, Laszlo, etc - is largely due to the epistemological program established by Rene Descartes, who spoke of the mind as "res cogita" and the body as "res extensa".

Suffice to say, Descartes was critically wrong - Spinoza being closer to the truth than Desrtes was, it would take much of the latter half of 20th century philosophy to point out how utterly, utterly wrong the virtualism of Descartes reasoning was. And yet - how much does such a view afford - given that it permits one to traffic in the world of occultism and mysticism, as if mind and the emergent functions it gives rise to was fundamentally flowing up from a dynamical system - embodying within its flows meaning and metabolism, all together a singular process.

Meaning and Metabolism: Two sides of the Same Coin

Herein lies the fallacy of Mukerjees assertion: by saying attitudes cant effect cancer is akin to saying metabolism has nothing to do with cancer - but then were brought to a fantastical and blatantly unscientific proposition: that gene aren't subject to metabolic dynamics.

This is the view being teared apart by the new science of systems biology - which ineluctably shows, and will never again unshow, that genes - nucleic acids - arise as functional constrains upon the flow of energy through a large dissipative system. Genes, than, are large macro-molecules dynamically tethered to the activities of lower-level metabolic activities - such as co-factors (from food) and small metabolites which interact with such co-factors. Mukerjees view is thus complete Bull$hit, total incoherent pseudoscience, because it denies any relationship between metabolism and cancer, or genes and the foods we eat and the environments we live within i.e. the nutritional sources which provide precursors to the reproduction of our bodies biodynamic structure and function.

Mukherjee, perhaps without even knowing it, is trafficking in a pseudo science called "geneticism"- which proposes that "genes"control our health, without even properly defining what genes are within the corpus of processes we call the physical world. Not to worry, however: real scientists such as Harold Morowitz, Stuart Kauffman, Brian Goodwin and others at the Santa Fe institute have made very important contributions to Human understanding by linking the dynamical activities in the non-living world to the way and manner cells self-organize, and their views support the view that genes are not "permanent"realities, but macromolecules subject to the dynamism of the organisms "flowing".

Herein lies the power of belief. What is a "positive view", but the institution within your own physiology of a set of neurological higher order constraints (cortical functions) that constrain the flow of emotion such that the person looks upon the world and reality in such a way as to maintain a consistent state of robust feeling with the world? Mukerherkees nonsense - just like the nonsense of anyone else who parrots these views - is that a positive feeling state isn't metabolically robust i.e. more resilient, and therefore immunologically effective in dealing with incoherence within the body?

Yes - pandering incoherence will promote incoherence - in mind just as in body - and don't be fooled by the gains that can be made by the pharmaceutical industry, to which one of the 20th centuries greatest minds, Linus Pauling, described as "sickness industry". The very man who discovered how metabolism operates and works believed that dissonant evolutionary living conditions i.e. our present society, affected how thebody self-organized, and therefore led to what we call "disease", or what a systems scientists would regard as a "mismatch" between two systems (environment vs. expectations of the biodynamical structure).

To finish this post, I leave you with the words of an important, though not very well known systems scientists, the late Mae Wan Ho:

"What is it that constitutes a whole or an individual? It is a domain of coherent, autonomous activity. The coherence or organisms entails a quantum superposition of coherent activities over all space-time domains, each correlated with one another and with the whole, and yet independent of the whole. In other words, the quantum coherent state, being factorisable, maximizes both global cohesion and local freedom. Its that which underlies the sensitivity of living systems to weak signals, and their ability to intercommunicate and respond with great rapidity. Within the coherence volumes and coherence times of energy storage, there is no space-like or time-like separation, and that is why organic space-time can be non-local.

The organism is, in the ideal, a quantum superposition of coherent activities over all space-times, this pure coherent state being an attractor, or end state towards which the system tends to return on being perturbed" - Mae-Wan-Ho, The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organism, pg. 286, World Scientific, 2008

Yepp, im in trouble

a reply to: Astrocyte

LOL - such fancy words - LOL

or perhaps better put:

The Windmills of Your Mind

Round,
Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever-spinning reel

Like a snowball down a mountain
Or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that's turning
Running rings around the moon

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space

Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind
Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of its own

Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half-forgotten dream

Like the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes of its face

And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Keys that jingle in your pocket
Words that jangle in your head
Why did summer go so quickly?
Was it something that you said?

Lovers walk along a shore
And leave their footprints in the sand
Is the sound of distant drumming
Just the fingers of your hand?

Pictures hanging in a hallway
And the fragment of a song
Half-remembered names and faces
But to whom do they belong?

When you knew that it was over
You were suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning
To the color of his hair?

Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever-spinning reel

As the images unwind
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind


Songwriters: Alan Bergman / Marilyn Bergman / Michel Legrand

Near mathematical perfection - but still just a model.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Maybe you should consider the nature words and language in your understanding of people and psychology. Words are representations of reality. Words are not the reality they represent. We claim our words give us understanding of human psychology. But the reality is human beings are much more complicated than the words we use to represent them.

There are rogue waves of converging energy causing exceptions to the laws of physics on every level. The human mind is swimming in a pool of energy with lots of waves. I'm not sure words will ever accurately or completely represent all that is going on in the mind.

You are taking Materialism to seriously.

I mean seriously.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Think about reality like Play-Doh.

You can make all kinds of different shapes that will do different things.

And that's materialism: "the shapes do different things so lets take them apart, measure their dimensions, and see which pieces cause which behavior."

What you need to understand, what should be at the very core of your understanding by now, is that it's not the shapes that cause the shapes to do different things - it's the will measured into the shapes, into the "Play-Doh", that causes the shapes and their behavior - it's the forces / will / Spirit.

A metabolite acts as it does, not because of its shape, but because of the will measured into it.

The shape is only meant to lead you to the measurement [of will]. i.e. It is a faithful measurement of will that causes the placebo effect. It is known!

And that's why you run into irreducible complexity or emergence: it's because the thing was imaged as a whole, not because chaos, retro-causality, or emergence is real (they're not.)

Other than that, I think you're getting there.

And nice thread if you wrote all that from memory.