Zinrainder

or: How to Change the Oil Without Replacing the Entire Engine

…although it is responsive to the client, it is almost never the response the client expects…

-Marsha Linehan

Modern science has validated that thoughts and emotions (“the mind” if you will) show up as features of the brain and associated sensorineural tissues, which constitute a biophysical organ system in a carbon based life form subject to the laws of physics.  It is still unknown whether minds might be realizable in wire and circuit brains.  This possibility cannot be ruled out, a priori.  The status of a wire and circuit brain that reproduces the phenomenology of the organic brain is an empirical question for natural science with its interminable experimentation and hypothesis testing.

Modern science has also validated that the behaviors of sensorineural organ systems obey Newton’s laws of physics.  Specifically we know that sensorineural systems often exhibit energetically cheap,  habitual and highly generalized phenomenologies, and that change requires non-habitual, context specific and energetically expensive countervailing efforts.[1]  This is the principle of inertia applied to behavior—a natural science model of a biophysical sensorineural organ system.  The inertial model clarifies several historically vexing issues.  The model predicts that systems, including sensorineural systems, will continue on their way through spacetime in a manner consistent with their behavior at the moment they were observed unless and until perturbed by an external influence. 

What then do we mean when we say we are thinking or feeling?  We mean that at some point in its history subject to inertia, the sensorineural system produces events we call thoughts and feelings.  And these are real events, as real as any typewriter or neutron star.   One could say that the “mind” appears as part of the history of the “body” if one prefers dualistic terms (I don’t).   Substance dualism was clearly articulated by Rene Descartes (1596-1650) who asserted that all human experiences are dubitable and contingent save one: the very act of thinking.  Human subjective experience for Descartes was underdetermined by the facts of life just because the fact of awareness expressed in language was the one experience he thought was not relative to any other facts, and about which we could not be mistaken or deceived.  Clearly he was dead wrong about this—it is logically quite conceivable that one could be deceived about anything (including existence) without knowing that one is being deceived.  Deceptive processes are, after all, quite difficult to detect. 

That objection notwithstanding, the idea that human experience is not adequately explained by the observable facts of life (“the environment”) shows up all over the place in the western intellectual tradition.  It is so common it got a nickname—“poverty of the stimulus.”  Psychological models which embrace the poverty of the stimulus assumption include:  psychoanalysis, universal generative grammar (Chomsky), cognitive therapy (Aaron Beck) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).   In the ACT community poverty of the stimulus has at times been described as a “truism,” by one of the central authors  of the therapy.[2]  That is, in the ACT world poverty of the stimulus is at times as logically necessary and self-evident as “bachelors are unmarried” or “dogs are animals.”  It is quite readily apparent that poverty of the stimulus, especially as it shows up in the ACT conceptualization of suicide, is neither logically self evident nor empirically validated.[3] 

Many authors who accept poverty of the stimulus turn to putative internal causes to explain human behavior.  For example Aaron Beck and colleagues claim “the schemas activated in a specific situation directly determine how the person responds.”[4]  In the ACT world the assumption is that “humans have the capability to give functions to any stimuli in the environment, functions that they don’t have in and of themselves…we call it thinking when it is done internally.” [5]  Mentalism here involves (as it did for Descartes and others) the supposition that internally sourced thoughts and feelings are causally necessary, a priori, because of an inadequate and underdetermined context.  But the alternative, that thoughts and feelings are contextual effects of adequately determined biophysical environments, makes just as much logical and pragmatic sense.  Moreover, mentalistic emphasis on thoughts as the locus of change is neither necessary nor sufficient.[6][7][8]  Rules don’t work.[9]   Linear models are not applicable to behavioral networks.[10]  Fortunately, an alternative is available:  A model in which language memorializes contextualized bias, in which thoughts and feelings exist as supervenient features of a recursive (non-linear) biophysical network—contingent upon the natural laws of physics.  In DBT this is called “reciprocal determinism.”[11]

In this model, thoughts and feelings are not epiphenomena, they are direct and tangible, subject to the laws of physics and learning that all other real phenomena are subject to.  The reason we tend to perceive the “intangible” mind as separate from the “concrete” body, is just because of the spatiotemporal separation between the forces that shape the system’s history, and the appearance of thoughts and feelings, “later on down the line.”  Drinking brought on by a sad song might not show up for hours; depression might start in childhood and show up decades later in the lost job or the psychiatric encounter.  We don’t readily recall the historical connections.  The present moment is often overwhelmed by unhelpful thoughts and afflictive emotions.  Analysis requires effort.  No wonder we think thoughts and feelings have a life of their own—the relevance of the subvenient network and the laws of physics are lost in the fog of yesteryear.  And systemic phase transitions are often notorious for how difficult they are to predict. [12]  Consider the Millenium Bridge in London which had to be closed immediately because of an unanticipated design flaw.  But connections can be restored—in DBT we use functional chain analysis, a protocol which restores the mind’s connection to the body as contextualized behavior.  The mind is not assumed to be underdetermined by the contingencies of life.  There is no poverty of the stimulus.  Instead, the mind’s eye is validated through accurate description of the biophysical system in which it shows up.   

Another vexing concern has been the question of how to skillfully influence behavioral networks.  How do we affect the future history of inertial systems?  Newton’s laws tell us that to change a system we must put energy into the system—a “force” is required.  Behaviorally, energetic change often shows up as executive function.  Executive function is a context specific, energy expensive, non-habitual process that predicts a change in the system’s inertial history.  It can show up as rethinking what has been thought, as in cognitive therapy.  It can show up as noticing the provenance and the pursuit of thinking so as to cultivate insight and wise action, as in mindfulness based practices.  Or it can show up as behaving in a way that defies any articulation, as in irreverence based techniques.  Imagine the first person to witness a sunrise, what words would they have had for their experience?  The irreverent therapist seeks to BE (not only say) something that the client cannot yet describe.  Something that leaves the client speechless enough to seek more, but not so surprised they wanna puke.  Irreverence is the untouchable snow that all traverse, the unspoken tune, the un-cancelable heart beating, shocked at its own existence that it dared to say, through mist and fog, here.  I am. 

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[1] Kahneman, D. Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan, 2011.

[2] Steven Hayes, personal communication. 

[3] In the ACT model suicide is seen as underdetermined by the environment and therefore necessarily “verbal” just because following suicide, behavior cannot be shaped by consequences.  But they forget that an operant behavior can be adequately shaped by antecedent learning trials without ever being directly consequenced.  If someone hits the first homerun of their life and just mysteriously vanishes, in that very instant the homerun is indeed unconsequenced, yet still has been shaped by the environment.  Internally derived verbal relations are in no way logically necessary or self evident.

[4] Beck, Aaron T, A. John Rush, Brian F. Shaw and Gary Emery.  Cognitive Therapy of Depression. Guilford Press, 1979.

[5] Ramnero, J., & Törneke, N.  The ABCs of human behavior: Behavioral principles for the practicing clinician. New Harbinger Publications, 2008.

[6] Marks, I., Lovell, K., Noshirvani, H., Livanou, M., & Thrasher, S. (1998). Treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder by exposure and/or cognitive restructuring. Archives of General Psychiatry, 55, 317-325.

[7] Foa, E. B., Hembree, E. A., Feeny, N. C. et al. (2005). Randomized trial of prolonged exposure for posttraumatic stress disorder with and without cognitive restructuring: Outcome at academic and community clinics. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 73, 953-964.

[8] Dimidjian, S., Hollon, S. D., Dobson, K. S., Schmaling, K. B., Kohlenberg, R. J., Addis, M. E., … & Jacobson, N. S. (2006). Randomized trial of behavioral activation, cognitive therapy, and antidepressant medication in the acute treatment of adults with major depression. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 74(4), 658.

[9] Alper, M., Durose, M. R., & Markman, J. (2018). 2018 update on prisoner recidivism: A 9-year follow-up period (2005-2014). Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

[10] Barabási, A. L. Linked: The new science of networks. Basic Books, 2014.

[11] Linehan, M. M.Cognitive-behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. Guilford Publications, 1993.

[12] “A phase state (or simply, a phase) is a state of a macroscopic system that is qualitatively different in its characteristics from other states of the same system.  A thermodynamic system can exist in a number of different phases where macroscopic behavior can differ dramatically.  A phase transition is a qualitative change in the state of the a system under a continuous infinitesimal change in external parameters.  In simpler terms, we may also say that the phase transition is a transition from one phase of a system to another, such as water to ice.  Phase transitions change the integral structures of thermodynamic systems and cannot be described solely in terms of their parts due to the broken-symmetry and ergodicity.”  -from Li, B. L. (2002). A theoretical framework of ecological phase transitions for characterizing tree-grass dynamics. Acta biotheoretica, 50, 141-154.