Jochen, As an indirect answer to your question: One reason why physics, chemistry, and biology seem to be largely complete and self-contained fields is through the progressive banishment of the magical explanations for their phenomenon. There are many traditions in psychology which have, to a greater or lesser extent, been successful in banishing magical explanations, however the currently dominant approach - cognitive psychology - is all about magic. The entire basis of Chomsky's critique of Skinner, for example, was an unflinching faith that magic was needed to account for verbal behavior, and hence that any approach not based in magic must be wrong.
One reason that psychology is stuck with this burden, I suspect, is that the "hard sciences" have pretended that dualism is not a problem for them due to their heavy reliance on instruments, and they have convinced others to join them in this myth by trying to foist all the problems of dualism onto psychology. There seems to me little hope that the borders between psychology and other sciences (e.g. neuroscience) will be solved until these more fundamental issues are dealt with. (For example, there is much magic invoked in <www.extremetech.com/extreme/123485-mit-discovers-the-location-of-memories-individual-neurons>.) Oddly, quite similar problems stand between genetic and organismal biology. People have become so infatuated with DNA, that several magical properties are attributed to it (e.g., that it 'stores a plan' for the organism, or 'codes' for a specific, macroscopic, body trait). Eric On Sun, May 13, 2012 12:20 PM, "Jochen Fromm" <j...@cas-group.net> wrote: > > The classical sciences like physics, chemistry, biology and psychology >are similar, they seem to be largely completed and self-contained >fields. The major phenomena and subfields are well known, and the >available research methods are applied to all common phenomena. >The unsolved problems seem to lie between and beyond the disciplines, >when things start to get very complex, for example between psychology >and neuroscience, or between biology and molecular genetics. > >We can not really say how genes generate a living organism >or how neurons interact to produce a mind in detail. And >there is still a large gap between mental processes, abstract >thoughts or subjective feelings on the one hand, >and concrete brain circuits, neural correlates or >molecular processes on the other hand. > >Do you think it is possible to bridge the gap between psychology >and neuroscience using some kind of sociological/ecological >approach by an "society or ecology of mind", as proposed by >Marvin Minsky and Gregory Bateson, respectively? >Eric has written about "ecologcial psychology" in his blog >"Fixing Psychology" a couple of times (without mentioning Bateson >or FRIAM, though). What do you think, is this a promising approach? > >-J. > >============================================================ >FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > > >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
