Why Psychology Can't Make Up Its Mind.

 

Modern western psychology and Buddhism appear to be cut from different cloth despite the contemporary interest in finding similarities in them. Why is it that in spite of the effort to find convergence they appear more to be as Kipling said, "… never the 'twain shall meet?" Recently there appears to be more and more interest in the scientific study of internal phenomena such as mind and consciousness as new scientific journals and research enterprises are being established.

In particular, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama has through expressing his own interest in the scientific examination of consciousness drawn attention to the endeavor. In his book, The Universe in a Single Atom (Tenzin, 2005, p. 120) he writes, "There is,…, a growing recognition that the study of consciousness is becoming a most exciting area of scientific investigation." He has shown interest in the problem for years going back to 1987 when a group of scientists traveled to Dharamsala, India to meet and share ideas regarding the nature of consciousness. That conference was eventually published as a book, Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind (Hayward & Varela, 1992).

So with all the attention to drawing "gentle bridges" between the fruits of Buddhism and science, why does there still appear to be so much distance between them? Is there something wrong with Buddhism? Are the doctrines and lessons of a good life given to us by the Buddha somehow incomplete or insufficient? Or is it that somehow science, the modern dogma of Western civilization, is defective or imperfect?

I am both a Buddhist and a psychologist. My knowledge of Buddhism is partial; however, I suspect the problem does not lie there. One might argue that my knowledge of psychology is similarly half-done. However, I think, sadly, that modern psychology is at fault. "What is wrong with psychology?" you say? What is wrong is that psychology simply can't make up its mind.

Some think that the history of modern scientific psychology dates back to Sigmund Freud. That wouldn't be a bad start to suggest, but a more reasonable beginning is probably when in 1879, Wundt founded the first laboratory for psychological research at the University of Leipzig. He also may have formed the first journal for psychological research (The Journal of Mental Science) in 1881. At that period of history metaphysical speculation regarding the behavior of physical events had largely been eliminated or at least put on hold while physicists went about the job of describing and theorizing about what they saw in the physical world. Wundt and others, first in Germany, then later in America sought to capitalize on the underlying principles of the physical sciences and utilize the same confidence in their laboratories. Wundt was at first a physiologist and intended to eliminate metaphysical speculation in psychology. His job as he saw it was to look for experimental ways to attack mental processes. He was a reductionist qua reductionist in the sense that he sought to search for the elements of consciousness as if they were atomic particles. And his methodology was introspection.

In the history of the development of psychology as a science there are of course many turns and twists that wind their way into the emergence of the state we are in today. However, for our purposes, William James is a likely place to pick up the story. If Wundt and his ilk pursued the structure of consciousness out of a metaphysical envy of the physical sciences, James sought to study or catalogue its function. Remember that Darwin had brought the function of evolution out of the darkness. James and the functionalists that he spawned sought to approach a scientific psychology slightly differently. He sought to pose the questions as "What do people do and why do they do it?" Though James was not much of an experimentalist, the Structuralists of Wundt and Titchener at Cornel University had plenty of work to do, he was no simple foil to the Structuralism of the day. He was an avid critic of Wundt and Titchener, though he was a pragmatist as well.

James was impressed by the need to characterize consciousness, that is, it's personal and dynamic qualities. He coined the phrase, "stream of consciousness." He noted that consciousness chooses its objects and is selective. Second, James felt the need to define the purpose of consciousness. He reasoned that it was related to survival of the species (1890/1952, p. 94): "A priori analysis of both brain-action and conscious action shows us that if the latter were efficacious it would, by its selective emphasis, make amends for the indeterminateness of the former; whilst the study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness show it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself." Third, James spent a great deal of effort both as a psychologist and as a philosopher examining the mind/body problem. Unlike Titchener, he could not conceive of a mind consciousness apart from the body. It is not clear, however, just where in the body the mind existed.

What happened next in psychology about a century ago was that behaviorism occurred. As is the case with many developments in psychology of the time, behaviorism grew largely as a result as a reaction against rather than an adjunct or support to ideas in psychology. Such was the birth of the behaviorism of John Watson. In his establishment of behaviorism of the time Watson took his first shot across the bow of introspectionism (Watson, 1913, p. 158):

Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist's total scheme of investigation…. The time seems to have come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness; when it need no longer delude itself into thinking that it is making mental states the object of observation.

There is nothing ambiguous about this statement. And for some this seemed to be the unexamined doctrine of behaviorist for the 20th century.

Not to make a long story shorter than it needs to be, but this sums up the story of modern psychology. This is what has happened with a few interesting twists and turns. There were a few variations on the themes presented above, but in essence modern psychology has not developed much from these germinal metaphysical beginning described above. There are, however, a few persistent and inconvenient developments, most of which are misinterpreted, misunderstood, or simply denied.

This leads me to the next phase of this discussion. What happened in psychology when psychology adopted behaviorism in the early part of the 20th century? The most important theorist in behavioral psychology during this time was B.F. Skinner. As behaviorism grew its tentacles into modern psychology there developed at least two types of behaviorism, one called "methodological behaviorism" and the other called "radical behaviorism." From his vantage point, Skinner observed first about methodological behaviorism (1974, p. 16):

Methodological behaviorism might be thought of as a psychological version of logical positivism or operationism, but they are concerned with different issues. Logical positivism or operationism holds that since no two observers can agree on what happens in the world of the mind, then from the point of view of physical science mental events are "unobservables"; there can be no truth by agreement, and we must abandon the examination of mental events and turn instead to how they are studied. We cannot measure sensations and perceptions as such, but we can measure a person's capacity to discriminate among stimuli, and the concept of sensation or perception can then be reduced to the operation of discrimination.

With regard to radical behaviorism, Skinner wrote (1974, p. 18):

Mentalism kept attention away from the external antecedent events which might have explained behavior, by seeming to supply an alternative explanation. Methodological behaviorism did just the reverse: by dealing exclusively with external antecedent events it turned attention away from self-observation and self-knowledge. Radical behaviorism restores some kind of balance. It does not insist upon truth by agreement and can therefore consider events taking place in the private world within the skin. It does not call these events unobservable, and it does not dismiss them as subjective. It simply questions the nature of the object observed and the reliability of the observations.

In the opening pages of that book, Skinner noted that (p. 3) "Behaviorism is not the science of human behavior; it is the philosophy of that science." As a philosopher Skinner was an apt proponent of the behavioral position. However, he was not the only one. At times others had complementary or contrasting views of behaviorism, though he nonetheless expressed a coherent and useful view of behaviorism. He goes on to point out twenty commonly held misconceptions about behaviorism, none of which appear to have been righted since he published his book. I will enumerate the first few erroneous notions (p. 4):

1.    [Behaviorism] ignores consciousness, feelings, and the states of mind.
2.    It neglects innate endowment and argues that all behavior is acquired during the lifetime of the individual.
3.    It formulates behavior simply as a set of responses to stimuli, thus representing a person as an automaton, robot, puppet, or machine.
4.    It does not attempt to account for cognitive processes.
5.    It has no place for intention or purpose.
6.    It cannot explain creative achievements--in art, for example, or in music, literature, science, or mathematics.
7.    It assigns no role to a self or sense of self.
8.    It is necessarily superficial and cannot deal with the depths of the mind or personality.

Many psychologists, philosophers and others have noted that "Behaviorism is dead." As early as 1964, Sigmund Koch observed (Wann, p. 162), "I would be happy to say what we have been hearing could be characterized as the death rattle of behaviorism, but this would be a rather more dignified statement than I should like to sponsor, because death is at least, a dignified process."

"Alright," my patient ready may ask, "how does this help bridge the gap between Buddhist psychology and modern western psychology?" Buddhist conceptions of mind are not without their controversies. Theodore Stcherbatsky refers to three central conceptions or metaphysics relating to mind (Stcherbatsky, 2008), Pluralism, Monism, and Idealism. For my purposes, I will refer to the Madhyamaka tradition advocated by Nagarjuna and his followers.

 

 

References

 

The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika. (1995). (J. L. Garfield, Trans.) New York: Oxford University Press.

Hayward, J. W., & Varela, F. J. (Eds.). (1992). Gentle Brides: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind. Boston: Shambala.

James, W. A. (1890/1952). The Principles of Psychology. Chicago: Encyclopeadia Britannica, Inc.

Skinner, B.F. (1974). About Behaviorism. New York: Vintage Books.

Stcherbatsky, T. (2008). Buddhist Logic (Vol. 1). Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.

Tenzin, G. (2005). The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality. New York: Morgan Road Books.

Wann, T. (Ed.). (1964). Behaviorism and Phenomenology. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20, 158-177.