Feelings plus intelligence equals rationality.
When the doctrine of the unconscious appeared, how the minimum perceptible weight is associated with psychology and what “trains” of mental activity are like, Leonard Mlodinov’s book “(Not) Conscious. How does the unconscious mind control our behavior?”, From which the chapter is published by Indicator. Ru. The book was published by Livebook.
The distinction between the conscious and the unconscious has existed in one way or another since ancient times, and among the most influential thinkers who delved into the psychology of the conscious was the German philosopher of the 18th century Immanuel Kant. In his time, psychology as an independent discipline did not exist: thus, a collective term, handy for philosophers and physiologists in discussions about the nature of mind. Their postulates about human thought processes were not scientific laws, but only philosophical statements. Since thinkers did not need empirical foundations to construct theories, everyone was free to give preference to their own, rather than someone else's completely speculative theory. Kantov's theory boiled down to the following: we compose a picture of the world creatively, and do not document real events, and our ideas are not based on what really exists,but rather that which is created - and limited - by the inclinations of the mind. This belief is surprisingly close to modern ideas, but modern scientists look more broadly at those very inclinations of the mind, especially taking into account the predispositions arising from our needs, aspirations, beliefs and previous experience. Nowadays, it is generally accepted that the image of a mother-in-law is formed not only from her optically observable parameters, but also from what happens in our head about her - for example, from considerations about her bizarre pedagogical habits or thoughts about whether it was worth settle with her next door.aspirations, beliefs and previous experiences. Nowadays, it is generally accepted that the image of a mother-in-law is formed not only from her optically observable parameters, but also from what happens in our head about her - for example, from considerations about her bizarre pedagogical habits or thoughts about whether it was worth settle with her next door.aspirations, beliefs and previous experiences. Nowadays, it is generally accepted that the image of a mother-in-law is formed not only from her optically observable parameters, but also from what happens in our head about her - for example, from considerations about her bizarre pedagogical habits or thoughts about whether it was worth settle with her next door.
Kant believed that empirical psychology cannot become a science, because it is impossible to weigh or in any other way measure what is happening in the human brain. However, in the 19th century, scientists still took a risk. One of the first practicing psychologists was E. G. Weber - in 1834 he set up a simple experiment with tactility: he alternately placed small fixed weights on the subject's body and asked him to evaluate which load was heavier - the first or the second? Weber noticed an interesting pattern: the smallest difference in the weight of the weights that the subject could determine was proportional to the size of the weights themselves. For example, if you could barely sense that a six-gram weight is heavier than a five-gram weight, the minimum detectable difference would be one gram. But if we take the initial weights ten times heavier, the minimum detectable difference,it turns out that it also increases tenfold - that is, in this case it will be ten grams. There is nothing supernaturally amazing in this result, but it gave impetus to the development of psychology: experimentally, one can study the mathematical and scientific laws of mental activity.
In 1879, another German psychologist, Wilhelm Wundt, approached the Royal Saxon Ministry of Education for financial support to establish the world's first psychological laboratory. The request was rejected, but he opened the laboratory anyway - in a small classroom, where he had already worked since 1875. That same year, a Harvard professor and physician named William James, professor of comparative anatomy and physiology, began teaching a new course called The Relationship Between Physiology and Psychology. He also founded a private laboratory in two basement rooms in Lawrence Hall. In 1891, she received the official status of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory. In recognition of Wundt's pioneering efforts, Berlin newspapers dubbed him "the psychological Pope of the Old World"and James as the "Psychological Pope of the New World." The experimental work of these and other Weber-inspired scientists put psychology on a scientific track. The emerging discipline was called the "new psychology", and for some time it was at the height of scientific fashion.
Each pioneer of the new psychology had their own ideas about the functions and significance of the unconscious. The views of the British psychologist and physiologist William Carpenter were the most prescient. In his 1874 work Principles of Mental Physiology, he wrote that “two different trains of mental activity move simultaneously: one consciously, the other unconsciously,” and the more carefully we study the mechanisms of the mind, the clearer it becomes that “not only automatic, but also unconscious actions actively invade mental processes. This conclusion turned out to be a genuine insight from which we proceed to this day.
After the publication of Carpenter's book, a genuine fermentation of minds began among European intellectuals, but the next breakthrough in understanding the brain - in the same "two-train" context - was made overseas by the American philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Pierce, who investigated the ability of the human mind to recognize indistinguishable differences in weight and brightness. A friend of William James at Harvard, Pierce proposed a philosophical doctrine of pragmatism, though James developed and celebrated it. The name of the doctrine arose from the idea that philosophical concepts and theories should be applied as tools of comprehension, and not as the highest truth, and their reliability should be judged by their practical consequences for everyday life.
Pierce was a child prodigy. At eleven he wrote a history of chemistry. At twelve he already had his own laboratory. At thirteen, he began studying formal logic - from the textbook of his older brother. He knew how to write with both hands and amused himself by inventing card tricks. Growing up, he regularly used prescription opium to relieve painful neuralgic ailment. However, Peirce has credited twelve thousand pages of published work on a wide range of topics, from physics to sociology. The fact he established that the unconscious mind possesses knowledge beyond the reach of the conscious mind - this discovery grew out of the very incident in which Pierce was able to guess who exactly stole the gold watch from him - proved to be the forerunner of many psychological experiments. The process of finding an answerbased on seemingly pure chance - the correct answer about which we cannot have conscious knowledge - is now called the "forced (or forced) choice method," and it is a standard tool for studying the unconscious. Although Freud has become a cultural icon for the popularization of the unconscious, scientific methodology and thought about the unconscious mind are rooted in the work of the pioneers Wundt, Carpenter, Peirce, Jastrow and William James. Pierce, Jastrow and William James. Pierce, Jastrow and William James.
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