- Evolutionary psychology:
- There's a limited quantity of resources in the world.
- Organisms are competing for those resources.
- The dominance of an organism in an environment is a function of its capacity to reproduce.
- An organism's capacity to reproduce is in part a function of its capacity to survive.
- An organism's capacity to survive is a function of both its physical and behavioral characteristics.
- The brain is a crucial survival tool controlling an individual's behavior.
- Humans more than any other organism dominate through their mental prowess as much as their physical capabilities.
- Limited attention:
- Humans have a limited attentional capacity.
- Attention may be divided among multiple concerns but with an eventual detriment to performance.
- In order to operate more efficiently, human reasoning operates in terms of associating characteristics to recognized patterns.
- There are several intermediate steps between cause and effect in human behavior, specifically:
- Reality — There's a whole bunch of stuff that's happening. Light being emitted and reflected, air currents, chemical processes, etc.
- Sensing — Sense organs are stimulated according to their receptors. Raw sensory data is pouring in.
- Abstraction — Sounds are composed into words, sights into objects, etc. I see a bottle and a book — objects with expected properties and behaviors — rather than simply colors.
- Perception — Of all the sense abstractions available to perception, only a few are chosen as being important. The hum of the air conditioner and the speaker on my desk are given less attentional focus than the computer monitor.
- Reasoning — The set of perceptions is combined in the mind and used to make decisions which will have an optimal survival benefit.
- Action — Some concrete behavior is performed.
- These levels are neither discrete nor independent nor function statically.
- Abstraction, perception and reasoning provide feedback to each other.
- An abstraction is a fuzzy set defined by a pattern of some salient characteristics. There's a bottle, sandwich box and ball on my desk. The bottle is 100% a bottle. The sandwich box is something like a bottle with a really wide top. The ball is very little like a bottle.
- The reasoned survival benefit may be for the individual, the family, the society, the species, all life, all being.
- Cognitive models:
- The reasoning component of the process has several influences:
- Autonomic responses such as heightened alertness in response to a loud noise.
- Conditioned responses such as a fear of heights.
- Conscious rational processing such as flushing the toilet.
- Identity is another term for the conglomeration of rational models used in rational processing.
- The "subconscious mind" is a metaphor for the non-rational components of the process.
- Responses can be conditioned on complex patterns that are not rationally apparent, particularly if those patterns do not fit with the accepted identity.
- The rational models are defined in terms of abstractions similar to and intersecting the set of abstractions used in perception.
- Objectification of cognition:
- Conditioned and autonomic responses are subject to change to a certain extent.
- This change comes through further conditioning.
- Abstractions are refined through a process of making predictions of an outcome based on a model.
- The process is faster through an assignment of rational abstractions to the non-rational impulses.
- Feedback from a predicted behavior becomes explicit in addressing reconditioning.
- Psychology is the study of how the methods employed by the brain affect the organism and its environment including its society