The 3™ Commander (Why we do what we do) Writer: Spyridon Anagnostopoulos Supervisor: Professor David Clarke Degree: BSc PsychologyDISCLAIMER This essay contains my personal thinking and personal pronouns were inevitable. ‘The ideas presented here are original, so no reference or bibliography list will be presented. After 31 years on that planet and 3 years in that university I will give an account to the question why we do what we do. If you are a free thinker or an explorer of the unknown, I am sure that you will love reading the next few pages. If on the other hand you are a sceptic or an extreme materialist who thinks that we were born in order to breath, eat, breed and die, then you probably believe that only what can be counted is important and I would advise you to stop reading now because it would be a waste of your time to read that essay. Spyridon Anagnostopoulos Page 2 of 11 University of Nottingham.The carpet was red and the two men were walking among the noisy tables looking around and observing human behaviour. Nick the Greek was explaining the various games but Einstein’s mind was not listening, he was stuck on a seemingly simple, but at the same time fundamental, question. He was thinking that something really irrational was going on. Why people were keeping lose their money making bets with negative expected value? They could not see it? And if no, why nobody was telling them? The above refers to an anecdote visit of Einstein at Las Vegas casinos guided by the philosopher and biggest gambler of all time Nick the Greek. In this essay I am going to try to explore Einstein’s question and give an answer to it. There is not a single definition of Psychology, but most psychologists would, in general lines, agree that it is the science that tries to explain human behaviour. When it comes down to others animals behaviour is much more easily to be explained. Instincts like the need to survive and the need to breed can explain almost all animal behaviour, But we are much more complicated. Than is also stated by the etymology of the word psychology. It is made from the Greek word wuxt which means soul and the word Aoyia which means study. So psychology means the study of the soul. To get a holistic view of the study of human behaviour we should take it from the start. Some of the first thinkers who dived into the study of human behaviour were the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle some two thousand and four hundred years ago. Despite the fact that Aristotle was Plato's pupil, they came to form opposite theories which can be easily noticed at the famous Renaissance painting by Raffaello. In that painting Plato is pointing to the sky and Aristotle is pointing to the ground. That two different views of human as a spiritual being and as a mechanistic being would later set the base for the two biggest school of thought, positivism aind spiritualism. The first sets its focus on matter denying the existence of everything that our eyes cannot see and the second sees matter as a temporal creation of our spiritual existence. Spyridon Anagnostopoulos Page 3 of 11 University of Nottingham. y 4The intellectual bloom of ancient Greeks and Egyptians was stopped by the Roman imperialism and a few centuries later Christianity came. Western leaders then used that religion as a mean to control people and by burning down books and killing free thinkers, the dark ages did not take long to arrive. During those years science and philosophy was not tolerated by church and those who tried that, were named heretics and faced tortures and even death. After about one thousand years of darkness, Renaissance came. People started unburying ancient scripts and humanity faced its second intellectual bloom. The first sciences to flourish were physic, mechanic, astronomy, philosophy and literature. The next trends were the gathering of large masses at big cities and a large increase in population. The need for more goods combined with the advance of mechanics change radically the production methods and industrial revolution came into existence. People start working in offices and factories and they become in a way, a part of the machine. That brought the need to study and control human behaviour. Based on those needs, psychology became ‘a doctrine of study in the second half of the 19" century. The first psychologists were interested to maximize human efficiency on the production line and influenced by mechanics they followed a structural view of human nature. Man was component of the machine and its structure had to be studied in order to predict and control its behaviour. At the same time the more spiritual orientated William James brought pragmatism into the game and placed human experience in the focus. The outcome was a function orientated psychology that was studying what functions does human behaviour serves. Industrial revolution and urbanism was on wild when thinkers start getting worried with phenomena of violence, mental health issues and general low levels of well being. It was when the physician Sigmund Freud was studying hysteria, @ condition in which parts of the body where getting paralyzed without any obvious Spyridon Anagnostopoulos Page 4 of 11 University of Nottinghamsomatic cause. His research brought him to hypnosis. He found that when those individuals where in deep hypnosis, they could function normally, That was enough to show to him that medicine and positivism was not even close enough to explain human behaviour, He devoted the rest of his life in exploring human nature and he set the bases for the study of human unconscious. He wrote many books which even today consist the most coherent and holistic theory about human behaviour. The middle of the 20 century found western world dominated by behaviourism. Psychoanalysis proved to be very complicated and was not compatible with the deterministic way of thinking that modern science had followed. Like in Newtonian physics, psychologists were trying to find universal laws that would explain human behaviour in a predictable and controllable causative manner. John Watson influenced by empiricism and John Lock’s views, took the methods of animal study and applied them to humans. That was easy for the study of reflexes but more questionable when it comes to more complex behaviours. In his 1913 manifest he described psychology as a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. His view was that human behaviour was moulded by environment based on learning. He made the extreme statement that if he is given a healthy infant, he can brought it up to acquire any type of personality he wants. The idea of finding deterministic universal laws of behaviour attracted many scientists who continued Watson’s work. The outcomes were classical and operant condition which denied introspection and thoughts and viewed humans as a simple black box machine. They believed that the input can define the output in a predicted universal way It was not long before problems arose since Behaviourism started failing In explaining complex human behaviours. One of the biggest walls faced by behaviourists was the inability to explain how language is acquired. Noam Chomsky published a critique explaining why the acquisition of language must be based on innate neural mechanisms and behaviourists never came up with a good enough answer. At the same time computer science revolution started to emerge Spyridon Anagnostopoulos Page 5 of 11 University of Nottinghamand thinkers once again used the current trend in technology to try and explain human behaviour. Cognitive psychology was invented. This time humans were viewed as an information processing machine. Neurons were viewed to form processors and networks like the hardware of a computer. Thoughts became the focus and problematic behaviours were viewed as maladaptive patterns of thinking or as the result of errors in neuron networks. The base of behaviour was not emotions but thoughts. Again it was not long before problem arose, human “irrationality”, like Einstein observed, could not be explained by thoughts. The next attempt for a deterministic explanation of human behaviour that is on its rise until our days was biological psychology. The advances in biology gave us a detailed view of the working of the brain and the way that genes express their selves. This time thinkers tried to couple behaviours with their biological base. The problem with this reductionist point of view is that the brain is a super complicated system with almost all its parts having an interacting relationship. More over by standing just the physiology of the brain is like trying to explain the outcomes of a computer just by analyzing its hardware and forgetting its software. The solution which is widely used today is a version of experimental psychology which couples up physiology of the brain with cognitive processes and explains behaviour as a combination of those two. My critique on the three recent schools of psychology will follow, ending up with my personal view of how human behaviour could be explained better. As for Behaviourism I do not think that there is a lot to say. Maybe learning is basic for animal behaviour, but when it comes to primates and human things change radically. It is easy to explain how a dog matches a ringing bell with the expectation for food and start to produce saliva, but it would never explain how a Japanese kamikaze pilot sacrifices his life for his ideals by crashing his plane on an enemy's battleship. Cognitive psychology can again explain some behaviour but cannot go deep enough to explain the whole of it. For example someone Spyridon Anagnostopoulos Page 6 of 11 University of Nottinghamfacing many big problems in his life might think that drugs can be a temporal solution to make him forget. Thus he might start drinking alcohol or using cocaine in order to feel better. But if cognition was the central process of decision making, he should soon see that drugs just make his problems bigger and quit them for good. Here biology comes into play and says that drug abuse leave its marks on the brain and creates withdrawal symptoms, making difficult to get clean. But even people who go to clinics in order to quit, they have a big relapse rate when they are again on its own. What remains is the biological view. Except the reductionism problem it is easy to support why this view will never work. It glorifies biological procedures as the cause of all behaviour but it misses a very important fact. Depression for example is viewed as the outcome of small serotonin levels in the brain. That makes it very deterministic and easy to cope with. You prescribe some selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and with a few dollars per month you restore the Individual to a functioning state. He is once again able to work, shop and watch television, But the cause which lowered the serotonin levels has not really been tackled and usually it is not even investigated, It is like observing a car taking a left turn and attributing it on the movement of the wheels and not on the will of the driver, who was the one who purposely rotated the steering wheel. Neurophysiology of the brain can at its best serve as an exploration of the biological substrates of human behaviour. It answers to the question how something is made, but you would agree that what we are really interested to know is the why question. After criticising all the main currents of psychological thought I might sound like a nihilist who sees just faults everywhere. But this is not the case, As I stated in the introduction of my essay, I have something to propose. My theory uses new trends in physics and combines them with psychology of the unconscious mind, ancient wisdom and mysticism. In physics, Newtonian determinism has been long ago abandoned as it was proved to tell just a small part of the truth. In quantum mechanics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal states that we cannot measure at the same time the exact position and speed of a particle. There are precision Spyridon Anagnostopoulos Page 7 of 11 University of Nottinghamlimitations on those measurements that do not allow us to predict future events with 100% accuracy. At the same time modern physics showed that the atomic model of Bohr with electrons moving around the core in specified orbits was not really what is happening. Schrédinger described atoms not as point particles but as energy waves and the new atomic model came to be a cloud of probabilities about where electrons were. From particles and their positions we moved to energy waves and probabilities. My theory focuses on a decision centre that is mostly unconscious. Like Freud said the real decision are made in an unconscious level. That is why our behaviour many times looks irrational and uncontrollable. We try to understand behaviour by are logic, like Aristotle did, but history has proven that this method does not take us deep enough. The reason is that the real aims of our behaviour are well hidden of us for various reasons. One reason is to protect us from the mental pain and the confusion that the realization of our deep conflicts would bring. Most of the contemporary psychologist does not like the idea that there is little commander inside our minds who press the buttons that controls our behaviour. But hopefully there are a few scientists who are ahead of their time and have devoted their research in studying that hidden processes. One of those is the Dutch psychologist Meurs Dijksterhuis who have published many papers with fascinating scientific evidence about the importance of unconscious thoughts, After all these explanations I can now interpret the title of that essay, Human behaviour can be explained based on different levels of control according to its complexity. Simple automatic behaviours like avoiding fire can be explained by learning. Once we got too close to a fire and felt an intense pain, that can couple the stimulus of fire with pain and make us learn to avoid getting to close to fires. Those simple learning processes can be said to constitute the first commander. Then, the second commander would be conscious thoughts. If I want to use the bus I know that I will need to have coins with me to pay the fair, so before I left home I check my wallet to see if there are enough coins in there, and if not I will go to the mini market to get some change. It would be really nice if we were able Spyridon Anagnostopoulos Page 8 of 11 University of Nottinghamto explain everything with conscious thoughts, but that is not the case. Who can tell for sure why he starts going to the gym every September and quits a couple of months later, while he is sure that he want to have a fit body? Which woman can say why she starts a weight losing diet every start of the month, just to find herself a few days later sitting on the sofa and eating ice-cream from the bowl? The reason we cannot understand why we do many of our decisions is because they are taken on a totally subconscious level. But is it like saying that we do not have free will or that an alien virus has taken over our brains? Of course not, here we can use the iceberg metaphor. When we see an iceberg in the sea, basically we can see just its tip that stands out of the water, but that could never mean that the bigger ice mass which is under the sea level does not belong to the same iceberg. The two parts are what is added to make the iceberg, like the conscious and the unconscious mind is added to make what we are. The explanation about why the third commander is not accessible to our conscious thought and control can be quite easy. When we are born we are totally vulnerable and unable to survive on our own. That brings the need for strategies to cope with that hostile environment. The thing is that we do not yet have language abilities to code those strategies and also we do not have a mature way of thinking in order to think in an Aristotelian logical way. Thus our early life strategies are coded in an experiential manner based on emotions and actions that would seem totally irrational if they were acted by an adult. For example we soon find out that if we start crying and hit our head against the mattress, someone will come for the rescue and fulfil our needs for food, love or to change our pampers, Those weird strategies many times form the core of our personality and remain disguised in our adult life. Thus an explanation about why many people act self catastrophically by taking drugs, refusing to eat or losing all their money to gamble could simply be a cry for love and attention. A hypothesis that would be denied by definition by the modern experimental psychology that accepts only what can be counted. Spyridon Anagnostopoulos Page 9 of 11 University of NottinghamThe third commander looks already strange enough, but we are only on its surface. The core of our existence is not just made of infant and early childhood strategies. As modern physics postulates everything is made of energy. Matter is just a creation of our senses and if we want to reach the core of our existence we must explore that energy. That would bring us to Chinese medicine which states that our body is full of various kinds of energies and that all illnesses are caused by disruptions of those energy fields. Despite how charlatanic this might look to the westerns school of thought, we have to forget our dogmas for a while and take a look on these matters with an open mind, Even phenomena like telepathy could have a simple scientific explanation. A parallelism can help me explain that hypothesis. We all know that sounds are created by the vibrations that sound waves cause to our ears’ drums. If hypothetically our ears’ drums were connected with someone else’s drums we would hear the same words. In the same way our brain is vibrating according to the thoughts it makes, if we are skilled enough to catch the waves of another person and let our brain tune in, we will essentially catch his thoughts. That is the reason why some times we enter a room full or not of people and we suddenly feel our mood to change, or thought to come to us. It is not cues to the environment as a sceptic would say, but it is the energy of bystanders of even the energy trapped in the scenery. That phenomenon can be clearly felt when someone enters an old abandoned building in which people were tortured or killed in the past. Many people will have already started wondering if I really believe the things that 1 am writing. My answer would be to read the Red Book published at 2010. That book was written by Carl Yung about one hundred years ago, but was not published because he knew that people would at best laugh at him and at worst close him to an asylum. In that book he describes his supernatural and mystical experiences and gives details about how he got the knowledge to form his theories. History has showed that the metaphysics of today is the physics of tomorrow and the parapsychology of today is the psychology of tomorrow. But to Page 10 of 11 University of Nottinghamwalk on that steep road you must abolish dogmatic thinking and open all the doors of your mind. Many more things could be written to explain deeper the nature of the third commander but that would get out of the purposes of that introductory essay. I will close with a small story. Once there was a really successful businessman who had a beautiful wife, a few luxury cars, a yacht, a nice dog and three children, His business was going fine and he was not really anxious about it, but at night when he was lying at bed, after making sex with his wife he could not sleep, He was looking at the ceiling feeling an unexplained gap inside his chest. Soon he visited many famous doctors who prescribed sleeping pills, but nothing, Later he visited psychologists who diagnosed mild depression and tried to control his levels of serotonin, but the feeling of emptiness deep inside him remained and was getting stronger night by night. One night, being unable to sleep; he got up, wore an expensive suit, polished his shoes and walked to his garage. He chose his most expensive car and start driving around. He was driving with no purpose when the idea of falling down a cliff came to his mind. He soon did so and nobody ever understood why. Spyridon Anagnostopoulos Page 11 of 11 University of Nottingham