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Before we return to the clinical trials and snake oil discussion, let's take another step up the epistemological ladder to psychology. Now it gets complicated. First, we're confronting a problem directly that's actually been there all along, but unacknowledged. How do we know what we know, or do we really know anything? What is the relationship between the world "out there," and the world inside our skull? Second, we're explicitly entering deeply into Habermas's Second and Third worlds. We can no longer only be concerned with the True, but we must also consider the Good, and the Beautiful, because these are categories that are generated by and only by the human brain.

 

So let's start with the connections downward. The brain is a physical organ. It is a biological entity and it is part of the body. Other metazoans also have them, but ours is the most complicated and the one in which we are most interested. Animal behavior, psychology if you will, is not as far from biology as is human behavior so I won't consider it here. 

 

It is possible, in fact it has been done, to completely map and understand the behavioral functionality of animals with no more than a few hundred neurons, e.g. flatworms, but it is a practical impossibility to understand the behavior of anything with a nervous system as complicated as an arthropod simply by mapping out the biology. Nervous systems have emergent properties which means they must be studied by methods and theories that transcend biology, just as biology has emergent properties that transcend chemistry, and chemistry transcends physics. 

 

Our power to see inside the human brain and get some idea of what's going on there has increased in recent years but it's still at a very gross level. We've identified areas and circuits that have certain functions but that's about as far as we've gotten. That sort of investigation belongs to neurobiology, the in-between of biology and psychology. But to understand what we mean by psychology, how the mind works, we only have two major alternatives. 1) We can observe people's behavior, and we can do experiments to try to learn how particular stimuli are associated with particular behavioral outputs; and 2) we can ask people to tell us what they perceive as happening in their own minds. That's it. We cannot directly observe any other person's consciousness, which makes it a profound mystery.

 

We must also consider the Good and the Beautiful because they are categories of motivation, but also because they are inevitably goals of psychological investigation. What is the Good, why do people pursue it or not, how can we make people do more of it? And how can we give people beauty and make them happy? Note, by the way, that we're trying to do the latter in a very limited way through biomedicine because we're trying to give people bodies that don't hurt them and enable them to pursue happiness, but physicians, in my view, don't spend enough time and effort trying to understand what really matters to people. And it's because we need to consider that more deeply that I put biomedicine and clinical research in the parking lot while I moved on to this level. 

 

More to come.