Ways we can understand ourselves

Expanding the range of perspectives

I was on a hike last week with a psychology professor friend of mine from graduate school. We were discussing different perspectives you can take on understanding what it means to be human. How can we best know ourselves? What is the best model to understand why people around us behave the way they do? What is the best model we can use to improve our relationships?

One option you could try is the rational model. Let’s rely on nothing but social psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics etc. This is what you read about in pop-science books like Thinking, Fast and Slow. How far does this model penetrate into human experience? Are there enough good empirical studies on how the mind works? There’s potentially a lot on offer. You can understand your mind in terms of associative networks, with working memory, and attention and so on. You can stumble on happiness. For diagnosing your problems, look to the DSM. For treatment, take some drugs. For many questions, you can seemingly find data stretching back hundreds of years. There is plenty of data on relational practices (Attachment theory) and different therapy modalities (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, secular Mindfulness). There are plenty of options to learn how to better yourself and others.

Of course at the margins of that there are a set of therapeutic modalities whose empirical support you might question. What’s the deal with sound baths? Maybe you question the quality of some studies for even the more well supported stuff. How rigorous were they? Were they well-designed and is the theory well-specified? Do we really know what depression is? What is the effect size of SSRIs? Could effects be changing over time as the social environment changes? Even more worrisome, there’s the so-called “replication crisis”. Maybe some of the data aren’t to be trusted. And even granting the data, there are wide swaths of human experience where we simply don’t have lots of data yet, or the right tools. For example, my friend and I were discussing co-dependency patterns in close relationships (a la Bruce Tift) and he pointed out that part of the reason there isn’t great data is that the statistics of dyads are more complicated and causality harder to tease out. So what we can speak about with science is circumscribed by the research methods and data quality we happen to have on hand. Given all of this, is it really tenable to follow Wittgenstein’s famous dictum, “what we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence”? Is it a good idea to stick to only what has strong scientific backing? What would we have left?

You could, of course, extend your horizons further and see whether there are other systems that could work for you that might not be fully empirically backed. If you are fully ensconced in a scientific/materialist worldview, which has, admittedly, given us so much, that can seem downright heretical or dangerous. Maybe you can limit the damage by only looking at things that seem broadly consistent with that perspective. Buddhism is actually well supported by science, some would say¹. IFS is nothing more than memory consolidation!

As my friend and I agreed, however, if you want to find a practical guide to being human, using the current science of the mind is not where you’d look. And if you limit yourself in this way, you are giving up on a lot of potentially useful tools for living. The challenge is how fold in different perspectives, meta-systematically, and retain some standard for what to believe and what not to believe. Unfortunately, there. are no blanket statements or easy answers.

1. Of course the Scientific Buddha is a very limited subset of Buddhism, and in limiting yourself this way you might be foreclosing the possibility of a truly transformative outcome. Also what happens when these worldviews come into conflict?