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Malte's avatar

Psychology hasn’t had a big new idea because it's still mostly studying humans in isolation, as if minds are closed systems floating in a vacuum. From a heliogenetic and Arne Næss–inspired lens, this is the core failure: the refusal to see the psyche as ecological.

The next “big idea” won’t be another theory of self—it will be a theory of embeddedness. Minds shaped by sunlight, soil, community, and time. We don’t need more models that dissect behavior—we need frameworks that restore connection.

Psychology must evolve from analysis to ecology. Otherwise, it will keep circling the same sterile terrain.

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Becoming Human's avatar

What a fascinating read! And it wasn't short, so getting to the bottom says something (about how compelling it was, and about my attention span these days).

I will poke things and say you are mixing apples, oranges, and aircraft carriers. Chemistry, Physics, and even Biochemistry are discrete sciences that operate at relatively low scale with discrete, relatively predictable units (let's not get into the whole quantum thing). They are paradigms because they yield to relatively mechanistic reduction.

Psychology (or thinking or mind) is not in that category. If it is anything more than an oddly stable phenomenon, it is a complex system (again, let us not quibble that complexity is indefinable). While we suspect that whatever the psyche appears to be, it is a manifestation of activity at more granular scales, there is no decisive proof. As such, it is bearishly difficult to break it down into subsystems.

In this way, psychology is in the family with biology, ecology, sociology, and economics (which you allude to above). These, and related fields like nutrition, are so complex that we can only evaluate them by looking at tendencies and correlations, not underlying mechanisms. Sometimes we find little machines, such as efficient market theory or particular diets. Still, they are almost always gross approximations that fall apart under meaningful scrutiny, leaving us with only broad generalizations like "people tend to die without food."

Some folks will insist that the psyche is an emergent property of materialist principles, but that conclusion is an article of faith, not science. Much of what you list above, like DNA as memory or embodied cognition, makes the "mind as computer" argument a little slippery, and should one keep sliding to panpsychism, all semblance to science goes in the sh*tter.

As such, it is probably more instructive to allow psychology to operate as a form of complex systems analysis and stop expecting it to become math or chemistry. This is not to say stop looking for better answers, but we should stop looking for paradigmatic approaches if that means coherent, self-contained systems for analysis.

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