A New Way to Solve the Mind–Body Problem Has Been Proposed
Is psychology a “soft” science?1
The core reason can be summarized as follows: Physicists, chemists, and biologists have a general agreement about what their science is about.
Physics is about the behavior of energy and matter across scales ranging from the quantum to the universe as a whole; chemistry is about the structure of matter and the behavior of atoms and molecules; and biology is the science of life and the behavior of organisms.
In contrast, psychology is the science of—what? Animals? Humans? Behaviors? Feelings? Thoughts? Cognition? The mind? There is no general agreement among psychologists on this question, or what terms like behavior, cognition, and mental processes mean.
Psychologists can’t even agree on the core identity of the field. For example, there are deep disputes about whether psychology is primarily a natural science, a social science, or a health service profession. There is now there is a growing movement to consider psychology officially part of the humanities.
A “Soft Science”
Psychology is, thus, a soft science because it lacks a core of agreement about both its identity and what it is about. I call this failure to be clear about what psychology means the “problem of psychology,” and it is a problem that should be well-known.
My book, A New Synthesis, breaks down the problem by focusing on the primary constructs that define the subject matter of psychology, which are behavior, and mental processes. What is the B4M3 problem*? The “B” refers to behavior and the “M” refers to mental processes.
There are at least four different referents for behavior. They are the movements of physical objects (B1), the movements of living organisms (B2), the activities of animals (B3) and the behaviors within the brain (B4).
There are three fundamentally different meanings for mental processes. One is neurocognitive activity, which refers to the information instantiated within and processed by the nervous system that regulates overt animal behavior. This is M1. The second, M2, is the subjective conscious experience of being in the world from the first person-animal perspective (the redness of red or the sweet taste of a strawberry). M3 refers to the self-conscious justificatory reflective capacities of human persons, such as me writing this post.
This latter meaning is what René Descartes had in mind when he split mind from the material world with one of the most famous self-conscious justifications of all time, “I think, therefore I am.”
The Enlightenment Gap
Descartes is considered by some the first modern philosopher. More than any other thinker, he crystallized the now (in)famous “mind–body problem.”
This problem is a gap in our knowledge that emerged in the Enlightenment, and it refers to the problem of how we can coherently connect physical behavior to Mind3. It was never resolved. The difficulty it poses is why psychology has always remained a soft science.
The B4M3 problem highlights the issues that need to be sorted out. We can interpret “B4” as pointing out that, before we consider mental processes, we need to differentiate physical behaviors (B1) from living behaviors (B2) from animal behaviors (B3) from brain (B4) behaviors.
With these categories in hand, we can then bridge into neurocognitive processes (Mind1) to subjective feeling states (Mind2) to self-conscious reflection (Mind3).
This gives us the basic vocabulary to sort out both the different meanings of behavior and the different meanings of mental processes. It anchors that understanding to in a new unified theory of knowledge, which enables us to tie these domains together in a coherent way.
We can finally resolve the Cartesian conundrum of how to understand the relationship between physical behaviors (B1) to Mind3 behaviors such as writing this post. We can now solve the mind–body problem, the problem of psychology, and perhaps usher in a new enlightenment.