Subjectivity may not freely reign
The path from physics to psychology
6 min read by Dani 16 April 2021
Reminding myself that “subjectivity may not freely reign”. But then feeling like the only objective claim is the subjective nature of reality. Everybody has a viewpoint. Everybody has their own personal experience.
To my 20-year-old mind reality consists of this:
“We live in a material world made of stuff. We call this stuff particles. They are the building blocks of nature. There are 12 distinct flavours of particles. The way events happen in this world is through forces. Forces move particles. There are 4 forces of nature."
Humans are influenced by their environment. Humans are themselves made of particles and their environment is also made of particles. This means that physically there really is no distinction between a person and her environment. And even if you manage to create some artificial border out of convention, that border will be changing all the time as the human exchanges matter with her environment, for example through eating or breathing.
Humans have this attribute called genes which determine a lot about them. Genes have an influence on almost any characteristic of the person being studied. Their physical appearance, their personality, their mental state and so on.
The human’s environment is the other factor that determines her behaviour. The environment changes and so does the human in order to adapt to it. It is a process of cause and effect.
The final equation is “Cause = Genes + Changes in the Environment”. Each cause is associated with a specific effect. We study the causes, then see what effect each cause has and from there we assume that a specific cause will have the same effect each time. We are not sure how much each factor weighs in determining the future of an individual, but we do know that these two factors, genes and environment, explain everything. They give us the complete picture.
From this point on we can speculate as much as we want when considering the question of why humans behave the way they do. The subject of psychology deals with this.
For example, to the questions why this individual is depressed all the time, we can start having a discussion about the person’s genes and the person’s neurochemistry. Those are physical attributes. Then we can examine her relationship to her parents when she was younger; perhaps she was abused as a child and has some psychological trauma. And we can also look at some major emotional events in her life – maybe she was bullied in school and lived in constant fear of what others thought of her.
This is how we build a picture of a human being. From this information we can look at effective ways to help people who are suffering. For example, people who have low levels of serotonin can be given antidepressants to help them balance their neurochemistry. People with childhood trauma can go to a therapist and speak out their problems as a means to share, bond and feel more connected to others. People who have fears can try cognitive behaviour therapy and expose themselves to their fears one bit at a time in order to reduce their anxiety.
These methods work! But not all the time and not for everyone... Unfortunately, psychology is not an exact science. There is nothing universal about it. After all it is a pseudoscience. We do our best to find practical methods that work, but humans are too complex to be encapsulated by science (for now). People in the realm of the pseudoscientific world do not have as their objective to find what is really True. A lot of the time they are looking to prove what they already think.
I cannot blame them. In such a complex field as psychology if one dreads himself to question every statement produced by a theory, it becomes a dead end.
We need historians, we need psychologists, we need philosophers, but we should not take every idea that sounds plausible. We need to sceptically interrogate the ideas themselves, rather ruthlessly, in our pursuit of truth. It is not an easy task, but it is the best antidote I know to delusion.
Let us be practical and use the body of knowledge provided to us by the social sciences and the humanities. But let us not fool ourselves of any certain answers they may provide.