In this blogpost I will crudely describe and motivate what I mean by psychodynamics, and my starting points for beginning to think about it. It will be a dry text, where I really try to explain my thinking rather than inspire the reader. That I will have to do elsewhere: I will assume that if you are reading this you are already interested.
Recall the fundamental starting point of my reasoning: there is no distinction between reality and experience; they are the same. ‘thing’ Seeking to describe the evolution of this ‘thing’, I entertain a notion of ‘time’, by which I mean the same thing any physicist would mean by it. The way physical reality evolves through time is what physicists seek to describe mathematically. The way experiential reality evolves through time is what I will seek to describe mathematically, using exact formulations of the dynamics wherever possible.
Of course, much of physical reality (almost all of it, in fact) is too chaotic and complex to be described in detail by physicists. Only some underlying principles and statistical behavior has been formulated exactly by physics, and it was enough to change the world forever. Similarly, to predict the behavior of the mind is utterly beyond scope of my work here: it is simply too complex and too chaotic. I do, however, sense that I may be on to one of the underlying principles of the evolution of the mind, which I will present here. If this materializes, it will be the humble beginning of an exact theory of the evolution of experience. Let’s call it ‘Exact Psychodynamics’, though ‘Exact Phenomenological Dynamics’ might also be fitting.
Now, to cut to the chase:
When I say that experience is reality, I mean that one unique state of physical reality (SP) corresponds to one unique state of experience (SE). It’s a perfect isomorphism. The things we experience in this state of experience (the phenomenological contents of the SE) are construed as patterns in the SP. After all, as established in cognitive science, meaning is construed by correlations between ‘reality’ and states of a cognitive system. Such correlations are beyond scope, as long as it is understood that an SP somehow encodes the meaning, which makes up the phenomenological contents of the SE. The point here is that while an SP and an SE correspond one-to-one, we don’t experience some detailed description of the SP: instead we experience some detailed description by the SP. So: any accurate perception which we have of physical reality relies on correlations between symbols encoded in the SP and phenomena present in SP itself. To cultivate these correlations is the purpose of science and all reasoning. The study of these correlations is specifically the purpose of cognitive science.
How cognitive systems function is largely beyond the scope here. But I do insist that phenomenology results from patterns which occur in the SP (where the cognitive system exists) as a consequence of some condition in the prior SP. For example, a neuron firing in the brain might trigger a specific response which has some meaning to it. In cognitive science, this response would be called a ‘symbol’, suggesting that it means something. Chain reactions of symbols suggest that one symbol pertains to another, that they imply one another. This is how any degree of correlation between the phenomenology and reality is possible in the first place.
Further, while we often consider, for instance, the brain to be a cognitive system, it does not exist in isolation from the rest of physical reality. No cognitive system does, besides perhaps one which is simulated. My point is that the bounds of the cognitive system are arbitrary, and hence the distinction between external and internal influences is also arbitrary, and for our purposes here, meaningless.
In this treatise I seek to discuss experience and phenomenology without any regard for isomorphism, nor for the definition of a cognitive system; I seek simply to point out some phenomena which I observe in the evolution of experience.