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.
Slime Mold Time Mold is currently making a case for a "cybernetic" paradigm, a brain of governors trying to minimize their error signals. It doesn't hit on all the branches, but it's been a pretty intriguing read!
This was stimulating and amusing, a great read. Half-expected mind in a vat to be mentioned. Do we need to smash the vat/change water to create a new paradigm? Newton needed astronomy to make his conclusions. Do psychologists have their astronomy and math yet to make the salad?
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.
"Maybe this is one of those sacred mysteries — their commitments disagree with common sense only because if they didn’t have something counterintuitive to say, laypeople wouldn’t feel the need to listen to them at all." Clickbait is alive and well in science, lol.
Are there not sub-disciplines within psychology that have clearly bounded paradigms? I'm thinking of ergonomics. One approach is to take all these sub-disciplines with strong paradigms and call them psychology. The others are interesting after-dinner topics in faint font on the fringes of the psychology word cloud.
Another approach is to see what psychologists do after graduation. Many will go into HR. Some go into advertising, marketing, and media. Some may be clinical psychologists who fix broken people. Some specialize in ergonomics. Fortunately for humanity, very few go into politics. But at their professional conventions they can all speak to each other in the same language. That's a functional boundary.
I really enjoyed your arguments, and I do think it is time for a new paradigm. I am not sure what it will be, since our ability to predict the future is limited by the paradigm in which we are stuck. Personally, I think the psychology + brain is reasonable. Ironically, I just spent my last Cognitive Psychology class trying to convince my students to explain how a bunch of dumb tissue could give rise to all the cognitive stuff we were studying. Letting of homunculi is tough! Great read… thanks!
I think a worthwhile paradigm would be by closing the loop between personality psychology and evolutionary psychology, directly leapfrogging the medical field’s turn towards personalized medicine:
Firstly the creation of a more finegrained clustering of personality traits, as described by Wood From Eden: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/when-will-psychiatry-invent-the-barcode, then statistically associating different genotypes with these derived personality traits. Joined together, you can use something like the model by SlimeMoldTimeMold (mentioned in another comment) to determine the biological mechanics behind personality traits, and then use that to model for how macro psychological and pharmaceutical interventions might affect biological micro-mechanics.
As an AI specialist, I am really hopeful for more human memory studies. They could give us more insight into structuring data for AI models, which could be a great step forward. So, I am cheering for Psychology + Computer Science.
For me philosophy and psychology are two sides of the same coin. It is like what Forrest Gump’s mom says human is as human does. Imagination speculates about a larger world and finding frames that fit and predict are useful but William James was correct in asserting the importance of introspection and mysticism. Philosophy requires unusual levels of intelligence and openness to experience. If you look at the GRE Guide to Scores you will find the IQs (sum of quant and verbal scores) of people who intend to major in the social sciences are low compared to many others. Philosophy is up at the top with math and physics. When psychologists attempt to do philosophy, it almost always looks like a turkey parade. Sorry if this honesty hurts but, really, if nobody points it out…
Maybe go back to Lilly and Leary, combine evolutionary psychology with Neurology, neuro-chemistry, cybernetics and para-psychology, and wrapp it in an embodiment Paradigm.
I enjoyed the essay. I'm not a specialist in the field at all, but from what I have read a fundamental problem is that the strength of the relationship between any two variables is almost always pretty weak, with the independent variable typically being able to explain less than a quarter of the variation in the dependent variable. In other words, the correlation is less than 0.5. And in almost all cases far, far less. I'm thinking of research related to business, such as what influences job satidfaction or customer satisfaction, but I think the same applies more widely - for example, how any of the Big 5 personality traits might explain differences in human behaviour or life outcomes.
The weak relationship is rarely highlighted. Instead, the researchers stress that it's "statistically significant", which may be the case, but is not very helpful. Maybe we just need to accept that there are severe limitations on how much we can understand human psychology and that shifting the paradigm - or creating one - will not change this reality.
Glad to see this post getting shared again here, Ethan! An absolutely necessary inquiry that won't be finished any time soon.
I'll add my own contribution, which is still far under the radar. I'm (still) working on the final editing for my first book about psychotopology, which adds yet another potential facet to emerging paradigm by proposing a field dimension of conscious experience and providing a method for disciplined, first-person observation of affect fields, revealing a virtual material substrate for the fundamental experience of being and an elegant, fractal modular architecture underlying the experience of self-in-the-world. I've been gradually assembling the book on my 'stack and will release in coming weeks. Hoping to become part of the conversation!
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.
Au contraire, working psychologists are interested only in humans in aggregate. Individuals are anecdotes.
Slime Mold Time Mold is currently making a case for a "cybernetic" paradigm, a brain of governors trying to minimize their error signals. It doesn't hit on all the branches, but it's been a pretty intriguing read!
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/tag/the-mind-in-the-wheel/
They even discuss the shock study!
This was stimulating and amusing, a great read. Half-expected mind in a vat to be mentioned. Do we need to smash the vat/change water to create a new paradigm? Newton needed astronomy to make his conclusions. Do psychologists have their astronomy and math yet to make the salad?
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.
"Maybe this is one of those sacred mysteries — their commitments disagree with common sense only because if they didn’t have something counterintuitive to say, laypeople wouldn’t feel the need to listen to them at all." Clickbait is alive and well in science, lol.
Are there not sub-disciplines within psychology that have clearly bounded paradigms? I'm thinking of ergonomics. One approach is to take all these sub-disciplines with strong paradigms and call them psychology. The others are interesting after-dinner topics in faint font on the fringes of the psychology word cloud.
Another approach is to see what psychologists do after graduation. Many will go into HR. Some go into advertising, marketing, and media. Some may be clinical psychologists who fix broken people. Some specialize in ergonomics. Fortunately for humanity, very few go into politics. But at their professional conventions they can all speak to each other in the same language. That's a functional boundary.
I really enjoyed your arguments, and I do think it is time for a new paradigm. I am not sure what it will be, since our ability to predict the future is limited by the paradigm in which we are stuck. Personally, I think the psychology + brain is reasonable. Ironically, I just spent my last Cognitive Psychology class trying to convince my students to explain how a bunch of dumb tissue could give rise to all the cognitive stuff we were studying. Letting of homunculi is tough! Great read… thanks!
I think a worthwhile paradigm would be by closing the loop between personality psychology and evolutionary psychology, directly leapfrogging the medical field’s turn towards personalized medicine:
Firstly the creation of a more finegrained clustering of personality traits, as described by Wood From Eden: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/when-will-psychiatry-invent-the-barcode, then statistically associating different genotypes with these derived personality traits. Joined together, you can use something like the model by SlimeMoldTimeMold (mentioned in another comment) to determine the biological mechanics behind personality traits, and then use that to model for how macro psychological and pharmaceutical interventions might affect biological micro-mechanics.
As an AI specialist, I am really hopeful for more human memory studies. They could give us more insight into structuring data for AI models, which could be a great step forward. So, I am cheering for Psychology + Computer Science.
For me philosophy and psychology are two sides of the same coin. It is like what Forrest Gump’s mom says human is as human does. Imagination speculates about a larger world and finding frames that fit and predict are useful but William James was correct in asserting the importance of introspection and mysticism. Philosophy requires unusual levels of intelligence and openness to experience. If you look at the GRE Guide to Scores you will find the IQs (sum of quant and verbal scores) of people who intend to major in the social sciences are low compared to many others. Philosophy is up at the top with math and physics. When psychologists attempt to do philosophy, it almost always looks like a turkey parade. Sorry if this honesty hurts but, really, if nobody points it out…
Maybe go back to Lilly and Leary, combine evolutionary psychology with Neurology, neuro-chemistry, cybernetics and para-psychology, and wrapp it in an embodiment Paradigm.
I enjoyed the essay. I'm not a specialist in the field at all, but from what I have read a fundamental problem is that the strength of the relationship between any two variables is almost always pretty weak, with the independent variable typically being able to explain less than a quarter of the variation in the dependent variable. In other words, the correlation is less than 0.5. And in almost all cases far, far less. I'm thinking of research related to business, such as what influences job satidfaction or customer satisfaction, but I think the same applies more widely - for example, how any of the Big 5 personality traits might explain differences in human behaviour or life outcomes.
The weak relationship is rarely highlighted. Instead, the researchers stress that it's "statistically significant", which may be the case, but is not very helpful. Maybe we just need to accept that there are severe limitations on how much we can understand human psychology and that shifting the paradigm - or creating one - will not change this reality.
Glad to see this post getting shared again here, Ethan! An absolutely necessary inquiry that won't be finished any time soon.
I'll add my own contribution, which is still far under the radar. I'm (still) working on the final editing for my first book about psychotopology, which adds yet another potential facet to emerging paradigm by proposing a field dimension of conscious experience and providing a method for disciplined, first-person observation of affect fields, revealing a virtual material substrate for the fundamental experience of being and an elegant, fractal modular architecture underlying the experience of self-in-the-world. I've been gradually assembling the book on my 'stack and will release in coming weeks. Hoping to become part of the conversation!
Psychology is pseudoscience.
I think Psychology has a promising new paradigm check out Transference Focused Psychotherapy.