The Crisis of Psychology and the Nature of Consciousness

This blog was co-authored with Professor John Vervaeke*.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn, the executive producer of the excellent series on life, cosmos, and consciousness called Closer to Truth, recently produced a massive review¹ (140+ pages!) on the “landscape of consciousness” in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.

The review explores the philosophical considerations and surveys the major positions, which include: materialism/physicalism, nonreductive physicalism, idealism, dualism, panpsychism, quantum theories, and others. It is a wonderful article and a very helpful resource, as the Closer to Truth series has been.

Although it is broad and thorough, there is, nonetheless, a fascinating aspect of the review that, from the vantage point of UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge², shows how the entire field is misframing the problem. In the second paragraph of the article, Kuhn clarifies the scope of the review as follows: “This Landscape is not about how consciousness is measured or evolved or even works, but about what consciousness is and what difference it makes. It’s the classic ‘mind-body problem’.”

Let's be clear about what this means: Given the current state of our knowledge, the classic mind-body problem, framed as: “What is consciousness and how does it fit in the universe?” is seen as a fundamentally separate problem from “How does consciousness actually work?”

This separation is not only made from the philosophical side. It is also made by psychological science. It is crucial to know that when psychology first became a science, it was basically framed as the science of consciousness. In the middle of the 19th century, the earliest researchers were interested in “psycho-physical laws” that showed how changes in the exterior world resulted in changes in sensation and perception. Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of psychology who gave the field its official birthdate of 1879, built his approach to the discipline on the method of introspection, the systematic process of observing one’s own subjective experience. This means that, early on, psychologists had joined the “what is consciousness” question with “how does consciousness work.”

However, psychology collapsed as the science of consciousness³. With William James and the functionalists, psychology shifted to the science of mental life and focused on processes of adaptation. With the Freudians, it became concerned with unconscious mental processes and psychopathology. In the early 1900s, the behaviorists defined it as the science of behavior, and focused on stimulus-response relations. Then, in the 1950s with the cognitive revolution, psychology became concerned with mental processes defined in information processing terms.

Theorists in psychology have long noted that consciousness, adaptive processes, unconscious motivations, stimulus-response behaviors, and neuro-information processing are different things in the world. This variety of topics gave rise to psychology’s “crisis" of identity, meaning it could not be defined effectively. That is, it lacked a graspable subject matter, in part because researchers and practitioners could not define what consciousness was in relation to brain, mind, behavior, cognition, self, etc.

What did psychology do when it was faced with its crisis of identity? It denied it and rationalized a new approach. As is spelled out in A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap², it basically said: “We don’t need to worry about what psychology is about, we just need to roll up our sleeves and get on with the business of doing research on phenomena of interest via behavioral science methodology.”

At Gregg’s institution, undergraduate psychology students must take 8 credits of statistics and research methods BEFORE taking any of the primary content areas like personality, abnormal, social or developmental psychology. Why? Because the modern identity of a psychological scientist is to empirically study things.

What this means is that we have completely split the philosophical questions of “What is consciousness?” from the empirical questions that interest psychologists. Indeed, although there are some psychologists in the Kuhn review, most of the proposals about the nature of consciousness come from neuroscientists, physicists, and philosophers.

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Can we imagine a situation where we get asked the question, “What is life?” but only a few of the commentators were biologists, and this was because the biologists were busy studying how life works rather than being concerned with how it fits inside our understanding of the universe? That would be absurd. And yet, that is what has happened. Psychology is defined by empirical application of methods to collect data, and it is now more or less cut off from philosophy of mind and questions about the fundamental nature of consciousness and where and how it fits in the universe.

We believe this is a profound error. To tackle consciousness effectively, we must marry the philosophical/nature question with the psychological/function question.

As we lay out in the Cognitive Science Show Transcendent Naturalism (available on YouTube), our approach to the philosophy of mind is called Extended Naturalism. Extended Naturalism provides a new view on both the natural world as framed by science and human consciousness and their dynamic interrelation. It is called Extended Naturalism because (a) it extends our view of nature beyond the “matter versus mind” divide and (b) it extends our view of human consciousness to provide a metatheoretical perspective that synthesizes key insights from many approaches and shows how consciousness evolves, developments, and functions in the world. Extended Naturalism also expands our understanding of epistemology (i.e., how we know and how we justify that). It explicitly grapples with how we can align the objective science lens with the subjective consciousness perspective and puts them in dynamic relation to each other.

The bottom line is this: The fact that the academy splits the nature of consciousness off from questions of how consciousness works is a consequence of a broken, incomplete knowledge system, something we characterize as the Enlightenment Gap. We need a new approach, one that can clarify the nature of the world we live in, the nature and function of human consciousness, and the dynamic interrelation between the two. That is what Extended Naturalism is about, and we look forward to expanding further on why it provides both a new philosophy of mind and a new and more coherent and comprehensive picture of human consciousness.

John Vervaeke, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. He is the author and presenter of the YouTube series, "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis."