Psychology Emerges from the Shadow of the Soul

Because for literally centuries and centuries, humans have always perceived themselves as
special in some way distinct from everything else in the world around us. The idea there, the
concept is that, sure, we live in this world where everything around us is perceived as physical,
as material.

But we are something else. We have a spiritual element to us that makes us distinct. Now, this
distinction is really relevant in the scientific context for the following reason.

Things that are physical and material, we assume that the interactions and the behaviors of
those things show must follow what we call natural laws. And in fact, science is the pursuit of
those natural laws.

The idea that through careful observation and systematic manipulation, we can figure out what
those laws are. Things like gravity, and various other laws.

And so, we studied Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc. in which all of those are studies of the
physical world around us. But, of course, if we do not perceive ourselves as physical beings,
and perceive ourselves as spiritual beings, then what we're implying there is that our behavior
does not follow such constrained natural laws. And if it doesn't, well then, it doesn't make sense
to study it scientifically.

So really, psychology would never be born unless we started to think of ourselves in different
ways and that process really began with Rene Descartes and here's a story of Rene Descartes
that I really like.

The idea is that he was walking through a park in France, and as a typical French park, it had
statues and it had flowers. Up ahead he saw a statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt, a beautiful
statue. So, he started to approach to get a better look at her, but as he came closer out from
behind the bushes came Neptune, barring a trident and blocking his path.

A statue of Neptune, I should say, and that's what was, you know, really so impressive, the
statue moved as if with intention. Now, how did it move? Well, this was the time when hydraulics
was just being understood and used.

And so, literally, Rene Descartes had stepped on a pressure plate which forced some sort of
liquid through a tube and ultimately that force was used to move the statue on some relatively
frictionless set of, you know, rails or something like that.
That's how the motion actually happened. But in Rene's mind, it was a really profound
experience for the following reason. He knew that statue was inanimate, he knew it was made
of physical material, and yet it behaved as though it was alive.

That is, it was animated and had intentions. It looked like the statue was trying to block his path.
So, Rene suddenly started looking at other things, like animals and humans, and asking
whether maybe their behavior was analogous (comparable) to that statue.

Maybe they really were physical beings as well and maybe their behavior did reflect something
like hydro, hydraulics, some physical process that made them look animate. Ultimately, Rene
concluded that once the case for animals, he felt they were fully machine-like, fully mechanical.

But humans, he thought, were a little different. Humans, he thought, had a dual nature. And we
now call this notion, Cartesian Dualism. So, he thought, yes, humans are partly machines. And
sometimes, their behavior is reflecting that mechanistic side of them, but he thought humans
also had a soul. And that soul could, at times, control the body. Much like a marionette
controller, you know, a puppeteer. The puppet is moving, the puppet is acting, but it's actually
the puppeteer who's moving the strings and causing the action.

So, Rene thought we do possess a soul and that soul can intervene and take control of this
machine, or it can kind of sit back and let the machine do its own thing. So, this dual nature,
Cartesian Dualism.

As philosophers considered this idea, some of them went a little bit more radical. And I'll ask you
to kind of look at the dates now.

Rene Descartes, he's around 1600s.

John Locke started to push the idea that maybe even the mind, the human mind, maybe it was
even mechanical, physical and therefore, maybe it was subject to natural laws that could be
studied scientifically.

Now, this notion was given a name by James Mill, you know, into the 1800s now. James Mill
called this idea materialism, the idea that we are material beings. So, material beings in a
material world. And therefore if we are completely material, if there is no soul whatsoever, then
everything, all human behavior, reflects material interactions that should be governed by natural
laws that could be studied, okay?

So, that cognitive shift really opens the door for psychological investigation. Philosophy is all
well and good, but Philosophy is about ideas. How do you know which ideas are right?

Well, Philosophy itself had an answer to that question. And the answer was something they
called Empiricism.
Empiricism is the notion of conducting experiments that demonstrate clearly what
is and what isn't true. And when it comes to this notion of humans as potentially being
materialistic beings I want to highlight two sorts of experimentation.

So, first let's start with Luigi Galvani. Luigi Galvani, a very interesting guy, did a lot of research
on frog legs or he eventually, at least, did. It was kind of happenstantial, he happened to have, I
don't know why, he happened to have dismembered frogs on a table where static seemed to
cause a leg to move. And he was intrigued by this, and he ultimately created a scientific
experiment.

These things that you're seeing are depictions of frog legs and, you know, what Luigi would
stress when he did his demonstration is, there is no soul in these frog legs. Maybe, depending
on your belief system, you might believe that once upon a time, a soul did inhabit this frog's
body. But if that soul was there, it ain't there now.

At some point, when this frog became dismembered, the soul left the body. And clearly, what we
have left here is just biological matter, material matter. But what Luigi shows is if you apply a
current, so imagine, this is a frog leg, if you apply an electrical current to the muscle, you will
see that frog leg retract. And if you let that current go, it will kick it. So, by applying or not an
electrical current, you can literally make that leg dance. You can make it look animate, you can
make it move, as though it were full of life. Nothing too profound there, but that gives you the
idea and Luigi would go around showing this demonstration. It was very powerful. It showed
people in a very clear way that the body at least seems to be a mechanical kind of device, not a
hydraulic, more electric in what we will now call electrochemical but clearly there was a machine
like nature to it.

Okay, fine. It's a frog. Rene Descartes said frogs were immaterial. Why should we be
impressed? Why should we accept that what's true for the frog is true for the human? And that's
where I want to highlight the work of Paul Broca. Paul Broca and, and notice now, we are into
the 1800s. Paul Broca was a medical doctor and he would visit many different institutions and
one thing he noticed was that he came across these patients, in different places that seemed to
have a very similar and interesting symptomatology. So, specifically, they would follow
instructions well. If you said something to one of these patients like, hey, can you go get that
glass of water on the table over there and bring it to me, they would do exactly that. They clearly
understood language. But when they tried to speak to you, they couldn't form comprehensible
sentences. Their language was all jumbled. They could perceive speech but they couldn't
produce it.

Paul found this really fascinating and he did what had to be a kind of an odd thing for the time.
He asked these patients for their permission for the following. When you die, I would like to cut
your skull open and remove and examine your brain. Kind of a crazy idea, but a number of
patients agreed to this. When they died, he removed their brain and looked at it, and a tumor
patient, everyone of them had damage in this area.

This is what we now call Broca's area (left) In fact, since Broca's work, another patient group
was discovered as a sort of opposite patient group who had problems understanding language
but could produce it perfectly fine. When you look at their brains, they all have damage over
here, in the area we now call Wernicke's area (right).

Now, these results are critical because they seem to show that the brain itself is kind of put
together like a machine. Distinct parts of the brain seem to have distinct functions, a notion that
we call localism in the brain. Local parts of the brain do very specific things.

That is true of machines. You know, the steering wheel does a very specific thing in a car. The
acceleration pedal does a very specific thing. So, the brain kind of looks like that. And it looks
like that even with respect to something like language, which we consider a very high level
ability, a human ability, shall we say and even then, it looks mechanistic. So, the results of Broca
really seem to go along with this, this philosophical move towards a materialistic view of
humans. By the way, this was also the time I had Frankenstein over here. Because I think it's
kind of interesting to know, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, that book, was written at about this
time. This was a time when doctors, physicians, scientists, started to think of the human
body and the human mind as a machine, something like Frankenstein, that you could maybe
even put together with spare parts. And think of Luigi Galvani now. If you have a bolt of
electricity, that might animate this machine and bring it to life. And maybe that's all there is to a
machine. Now, Frankenstein wasn't, you know, a real success as a human. But he does
embody, quite honestly, that concept, that the human condition may be a purely physical, purely
material condition.
And if that's true, then we can assume that human behavior must reflect natural laws and that
puts it squarely into the realm of science. It suddenly becomes human behavior, suddenly
becomes something we can study scientifically. That's what we'll turn to next.

Summary:

- Rene Descartes (1600s) - Cartesian Dualism. The idea that we do possess a soul and
that soul can intervene and take control of this machine as a dual nature.

- John Locke (late 1600s) - pushed the idea that maybe human minds were mechanical
and physical and thus maybe it could be subject to natural laws that can be studied
scientifically.

- James Mill (1800s) - named John Locke’s notion Materialism

- Luigi Galvani (1800s) - Experimented on frog legs. It showed people in a very clear way
that the body at least seems to be a mechanical kind of device.

- Paul Broca (1800s) - Distinct parts of the brain seem to have distinct functions, a notion
that we call Localism in the brain.