An Architecture of the Mind

A Psychological Foundation for the Science of Everyday Life

Brendan Markey-Towler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351002288
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

An Architecture of the Mind proposes a mathematically logical and rigorous theory of lived experience, and a comprehensive and coherent theory of psychology. It is also remarkably simple. Building on the core proposition that the mind is a network structure, it proposes a theory of the psychological process as operating within and upon that structure, and a theory of behaviour as determined by that process.

The theory presents a view of the mind which reveals a new perspective on the process of reasoning in thinking and how it may coexist with processes more akin to simple rule-following and computation. It allows us to understand the role and influence of social influences in the psychological process by revealing their role in and influence on mental networks. It reveals the place of motivations in the psyche as complexes in mental networks from whence aesthetics, preference and value judgements arise and demonstrates their necessity for behaviour. This book is especially useful for the perspective it offers on behavioural change. It reveals the conditions under which traditional economic theories of incentives will be appropriate, and the conditions under which they will not be.

This book draws on psychology, social science, cultural science, neuroscience and economics to offer an interdisciplinary contribution which resists the tendency for disciplines to become over-specialised and fragmented. It will be of interest to any interested in the functioning of the human mind and the government of human behaviour.

1
A fundamental question

What is the mind, how does it function?

There are two questions of philosophy and of science together that are arguably the greatest of all. The first is: what are the fundamental substances of physical reality, and the laws governing them and their interaction? The second question is: what is the mind, and how does it interact with the world? The first inquires about our external reality, and we have been remarkably successful in moving toward answering it. For the second, we look into our internal reality, and the present work aims to contribute toward its answering.

This book proposes a theory of the mind which is developed from the proposition that the mind is a network structure within which and upon which the psychological process operates. It utilises the mathematics of graph theory, or more colloquially, the mathematics of networks (Newman, 2003; Chartrand, 1985) to propose the existence of a structure which underlies the otherwise unfathomably complex and individuated phenomena of mental processes. Therefore this work proposes an “architecture” guiding the mental processes of perception, analysis and decision which evolves over time. This architecture reconciles many theories of psychology, indeed, perhaps all of those that currently exist. It also explains and predicts a number of psychological and behavioural phenomena observed by psychologists, neuroscientists, sociologists and economists.

First, we will consider some important philosophical questions concerning the nature of the mind. After taking a stance on these we shall introduce the concept of the mind as a network structure within which and upon which the psychological process operates. We will then use this concept as an architecture within which the psychology of behaviour exists and develop a theory of the process of perception, analysis, decision and the evolution of the mind over time. Naturally, not only a theory of behaviour, a theory of decision, but also a theory of indecision, of inaction, emerges from this.

The rest of this work will be occupied by efforts to elaborate how this theory explains various phenomena of psychology and behaviour within the context of a single, coherent theory, while reconciling many theories of the same by so doing. First we will consider how the psychological process may be interpreted as a process of reasoning or a process of rule-following, and by this duality arrive at the concept of dual-process psychology. In this chapter of interpretation we will also consider the place of the hypotheses of motivational theory as the basis of decision-making in both psychoanalytic and cognitive theories of psychology. We will also consider the manner in which social influences enter the psychological process. This in hand, we will turn to consider how various factors affect behaviour. First taking “quasi-fixed” environments, we discover the conditions under which traditional economic theories will be valid to be arbitrated by the existence of a state of substitutability. Then, in the final substantive chapter, we will consider the factors affecting behaviour in a more “wholesale” sense in which environments are free to vary and the whole psychological process affects behaviour in concert. This chapter will propose that there are a few core features of the architecture of mind reconciling the vast array of “heuristics and biases” identified in recent years and revealing them to be in fact the result of fundamental aspects of the human psyche long known to psychology, but hitherto somewhat disconnected.

This will form the core of our psychological foundation for the Science of Everyday Life. The conclusion of this work is not an end; it is a beginning in a long project to come to a new, useful Science of ourselves, our place in the world and our interaction with it. Proofs of theorems within this theory are relegated to the appendix as they are a matter of rigour primarily of interest to those of a technical persuasion, and detract from the development of the theory.

2
Philosophical considerations

The nature of the mind

To begin, we must take a stance on certain philosophical questions, ancient ones in point of fact. What is the mind and in what relation does it stand to the body and the world?

The first systematic treatment of these questions in Western philosophical tradition is given by Descartes (1637 & 1641). In an effort to purge his mind of any notions which might succumb to the sceptical, he found himself arriving at a fundamental truth which he found to be unshakable, related in a famous passage of his Discourses:

But… I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, cogito ergo sum, was so certain of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the skeptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.

Discourse IV

We often translate cogito ergo sum as “I think therefore I am”. But this is probably not quite faithful to Descartes’ meaning. He probably would have said in the modern day something more like “I have cognition, I am aware, therefore I am”. He had some faculty which allowed him to have the experience of existence, which allowed him to be aware of his existence. This was the mind.

He was also of the utterly unshakable belief that the external world existed, but independently of himself, for he perceived it yet was not consciously aware of creating it. To Descartes’ thinking then there were two worlds; a “mental” world of ideas and contemplation where the mind was free to associate and generate ideas, and a physical world determined by the deterministic laws of nature. This is the “dualist” philosophy of mind, held to by many great minds of science and philosophy including (albeit with variations) David Chalmers (Chalmers, 1995, 1996), Sir John Eccles and Sir Karl Popper (Popper and Eccles, 1977) and Sir Roger Penrose (Penrose, 1989).

The present work, however, holds to a monist perspective on reality (that there is one unitary reality) and so Descartes’ philosophy must succumb to the critique of Gilbert Ryle. In the Concept of Mind (1949) he famously (and a little unfairly) dismissed dualism as a philosophy of the “ghost in the machine”. It was founded, to his mind, on a category mistake concerning the concept of “existence”. Existence is a monist concept: there is only one unitary existence (Ryle, 1949, p.24). One reality, not two, for mind and world are clearly deeply connected and interact, even in Descartes’ estimation.

Ryle did hold, however, that we have a mind. We do have a consciousness of our existence in the world and experience of it. He even rendered Descartes’ description of this into a plainer English: the mind is that faculty by which we may “know what we are about” (Ryle, 1949, p.154). Thomas Nagel developed this notion in a famous paper (1974) titled “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” Our mind is that in which exists “intentional states” (think intensio rather than “intent”), our awareness of our existence within and experience of the world.

But defining the mind we must not exclude the possibility of the subconscious or even the unconscious first explored (in Western tradition) by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. We know that we have such experiences as exist in the subconscious/unconscious mind for we feel their impact consciously whenever we have some feeling or emotion for which we cannot identify the cause (Freud, 1917, 1930, 1963; Jung, 1933, 1935, 1964). So we must allow that the mind and consciousness are not necessarily equivalent.

The mind is that element of our being which experiences our place in and relation to the world. We are conscious when we are aware of our place in and relation to the world.

The mind, then, is that in which our lived experience of our existence in the world occurs. By world we are not enforcing a dualist ontology so that the world is only external to ourselves – we are part of the world, the world is internal to us as well as external. It is a part of our being – mind, brain and body united as one whole in a monist world (Bennett and Hacker, 2003; Bennett et al., 2007). We are conscious, and are aware of our existence, though not necessarily of its totality.

A new question arises at this point: in what relation does the mind stand to our world?

The extreme solution to this question was proposed by Ryle’s student Daniel Dennett (1991, 1996), who equates mind and brain. The mind is in this view totally reducible to the brain. It is thus known as the “strong Artificial Intelligence” view, for a machine which replicated the brain would be held to have an artificial intelligence indistinguishable from the intelligence of a human being.

A potential problem with such a view is that it would appear to deny the existence of consciousness as we experience it. If the mind is the brain and consciousness is real there must be some point in the brain where conscious experience is played out as on a screen in a theatre – a “Cartesian theatre” if you will. Given what we know about brains we know this to be absurd, so consciousness as we know it cannot be real.

Searle (1997), drawing on his assessment of the flurry of works published around the time, proposed a weaker form of this hypothesis. It seems absurd to deny the reality of consciousness as we experience it – it is the very awareness of such thoughts! Yet it appears that the brain is necessary and sufficient for the mind. If the brain does not function, we die and appear to cease being aware of our existence and place within the world. If the brain functions, we are alive. So the mind must in some sense be emergent from the brain.

Now if the mind is emergent from the brain, we might expect it to function in a similar fashion to the brain. The brain seems to have sufficient regularity for it to be capable of being modelled mathematically (Kandel et al., 2013, Appendices E,F). So we might expect the mind to be similarly amenable to being modelled mathematically. Indeed, we might be able to replicate the function of the mind in the working of a computer and thus create an Artificial Intelligence. Certainly, Turing (1950), von Neumann (1958), Newell et al. (1958, 1962), Simon (1969, 1991) and Samuel (1953, 1959) seem to have some success in that regard. Searle’s philosophy thus justifies the basis for this work – we hold the mind under this philosophy to be an entity with regularity sufficient for us to theorise and represent mathematically.

Searle’s philosophy, however, is one of “weak Artificial Intelligence”. A machine constructed to replicate the function of a human mind is not necessarily the same as a human being in the particular of consciousness. Unless the machine is aware of its place in and relation to the world it is not equivalent with a human being. Searle puts it neatly when he makes a distinction between the “syntax” of mental processes and the “semantics” endowed them by consciousness. A machine may faithfully enough replicate the “syntax” of observing van Gogh’s Starry Night, indeed one might argue that a camera does this. But not until it is aware of that experience and can feel the ecstatic beauty and chaotic glory of the cosmos swirling above us can we say that machine equals mind (cf. Jefferson, 1949, p.1110).

There is some consonance between the “weak Artificial Intelligence” philosophy and what we might (riskily) call “m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Glossary of mathematical symbols
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A fundamental question: what is the mind, how does it function?
• 2 Philosophical considerations: the nature of the mind
• 3 The psychology of behaviour: operating within and upon the architecture of mind
• 4 Reasons, rules, society and motivation in the psychological process
• 5 Substitutability and behavioural change in quasi-fixed environments
• 6 Properties of the psyche and their influence on behaviour: explanations and predictions
• 7 Conclusion
• 8 Appendix: proofs of theorems
• Index