The human mind is one of the most powerful organs of the universe. The one hundred billion neurons that make about one hundred trillion connections number the amount of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, a microcosm, or synecdoche of our macrocosmic world.
The mind is a temple, a vessel, a place of representation and intention in the environment. Philosophy of mind attempts to use that vessel to understand itself, at its best, a self-reflective exercise involving the right place of oneself, other and environment.
As early as philosophy, the mind was a subject of analysis. Plato declared in the Phaedo that knowledge was not the acquisition of new understanding, but the awareness of already present understanding. The mind or soul of man inherently contains knowledge of reality, and knowledge is the anamnesis, or remembrance of this knowledge. Philosophy, then, was merely to making the soul aware of the already present truths it held. In this sense, education is a leading into pre-existing harmony between the nature of the soul and the nature of the world, where one is less creating knowledge and establishing ideas and more becoming aware of what is already correct. Plato, then, was not an epistemological constructivist.
The soul or mind was understood to be a deeper topic in Christian worldview. Eternally present in a contest of life and death, the soul required salvation from its separation from perfection, that is, God. The unity between man and God was accomplished by the death and resurrection of Christ–the old man, as dead to sin as body in a morgue, now the new man, alive to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit led us to greater peace and compassion, utterly changing the ancient world from a place of cutthroat competition to charity. The homeless and sick, rejected by Roman society, began to be seen as the vehicles of Christ Himself, just as He proclaimed, “For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat” (Matthew 25:35).
In its more rational bent, philosophy dealt with humans as rational animals. In its spiritual dimension, we achieve fullness of life by the release from the prison of imperfection and negative habits.
From late Rome to early modernity, the soul was seen as the garden and dwelling place of God. It was with John Locke that the mind and its categories were first systematically related to reality, describing objects and whether their qualities are present intrinsic to the object or a product of perception.
This is quite the endeavor, given that it requires the confidence that one is able to discern that something is only in the mind, rather than in the mindworld. The objectifying of reality began systematically in this time, with Francis Bacon describing the New Organon of science, intended to yield God’s systematic design of the cosmos to man, restoring his place of authority in the garden, not recognizing that restoration was achieved by the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Other philosophers contributed their own work to the place of the mind in reality. Immanuel Kant’s work described an absolute separation between the physical, observable, phenomenal world, and the existent but illusive, structuring and present noumenal world. This is folk psychology. That there is a mysterious reality behind the observable one is accepted by most people on the earth.
Charles Darwin, not merely biologist, but later in life, evolutionary psychologist, proposed that the principles of natural and sexual selection would fundamentally impact human psychology, such that those who had more offspring would spread their genetic tendencies in their population.
Around this time, Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener began the first subjection of the psyche to objective metrics such as reaction time to gauge mental faculties like sensory perception and memory.
Then, Sigmund Freud began a materialist exploration of the unconscious of man, rooting much of his drives in sex, power and domination. Alfred Adler did much of the same, discussing the role of comparison and jealousy in the psyche.
Carl Jung, beginning as a student to Sigmund Freud, soon extended beyond the materialist assumptions of his elder. His psychology emphasized the interaction with unconscious contents to retrieve the substance sought for by the conscious mind.
William James explored the mind in his Principles of Psychology, describing mental faculties and including a place for spiritual discovery in an increasingly mechanistic worldview.
Psychologists in the post-World War 2 era focused much on the state of a global society and personal psychology that could descend into two world wars and multi-million person massacres. Erich Fromm, taking much from Sigmund Freud and the sociology of Max Weber, developed a theory of man based on responsibility and love. Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the Holocaust, described people as essentially searching for meaning. Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Gordon Allport and Rollo May had their specific programs for good living.
And then, computers.
The advancements in logic and mathematics accomplished by John Von Neumann and Alan Turing in the lead up to World War 2 were utilized extensively after VE-Day, leading to the metaphor of mental faculties as symbolic, cognitive processes and the brain as hardware.
The cognitive revolution as it is called opened up new dimensions to psychological research. George Miller described seven, plus or minus two, as the number for objects available to the human mind for immediate recall.
The soul as symbolic processing has had mostly the effect of turning man into a machine. Model-able, calculable and predictable.
I consider the best Doctor of the Soul to be Christ Himself. Come engage in the daily war of Heaven and Hell. Jesus already won.
God bless.
Veracity as Virtue 