Introduction
Psychology is the study of the human mind. The mental and behavioral patterns of an individual comprise a person’s psychology.
The idea of a mind is a euphemism for mentation: mental processing, which includes thoughts and emotions. The term mind is too convenient not to be used, but it is a misdirection.
Your mind tells you that the world comprises objects in motion. This object orientation obscures that the world is motion involving the appearance of objects which are more accurately portrayed as quantized processes in constant transition. Energy, not matter per se, defines experience.
Social psychology studies the internal dynamics behind interpersonal interactions. Whereas social psychology is on mental states associated with sociality, sociology studies group behaviors and societal dynamics.
Sociology bifurcates into 2 focal areas: macrosociology and microsociology. Macrosociology studies societies. Microsociology is about how people behave when together: the artifacts of interacting social psychologies.
As an academic discipline psychology lacks a widely accepted paradigm. Since antiquity, history is littered with various schools of thought about what makes us tick. The discordance continues to this day – awfully peculiar, considering that all the evidence lies within.
There are 2 basic camps of psychology: philosophical and physiological. The philosophic approach employs introspection to plumb inner depths, taking into account observations and life experiences to discern how the mind works.
In contrast, the empirical view eschews such rumination as woolly. Empiricism supposedly relies solely upon observation, which is woolly indeed. While empiricists ostensibly limit themselves to observing behaviors, philosophy – the study and elaboration of concepts – must be applied to make any sense of what has been observed. The mind is a symbolic processor. Theories are inductive hypotheticals. Trying to understand the mind without reference to abstractions is like trying to apprehend electronics while studiously ignoring the flow of electrons.
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When a philosopher says something that is true, then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial, then it is false. ~ German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss
Historically, psychology theories have been framed by perspectives on the natures of perception, mentation, and existence itself: psychology as natural philosophy.
The extensive failures of psychological theories, as with other endeavors at understanding, owe to overlooking fallacies in assumptions. In accepting untrue premises about the nature of the mind, its contemplators have promulgated facile nonsense. Such is the rich and sorry history of psychology.
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One overarching fact overshadows psychology and sociology: people readily succumb to their biology. Many motivations and behaviors amply demonstrate that humans are just another animal whose cunning is by no means exceptional.
The greatest ruse ever perpetrated is that people are rational, in the sense of being reasoning machines. (Rational and reason semantically dance as partners. Ultimately, the terms come down to agreeable cognition which may pass as good sense or sound judgment. There is intrinsic subjectivity in the definition, albeit sometimes abetted by social consensus, which is subjectivity amplified. The motivation behind almost all reasoning is desire, not the cool indifference that typifies how people think of “rationality.” Further, seemingly unsound judgment that plays out to profit is commonly called “genius” – so much for the metric of rationality.) Human desires and behaviors are dominated by biological urges. The inclinations of our minds follow our evolutionary descent. And yet… there is something more at work within: an innate desire and capacity to mentally escape the confines of the biological shell in which we all are encased – that there is an elevated perspective and consciousness to which one may ascend.
