1

Galileo’s Lament
And the COLLAPSE of
the Social Sciences

A. j. Marr
 2

Part 1 the Collapse of Social science

Introduction
Chapter 1 Hierarchies
-Stocks and Swans
-Paradigm Shifts
-Galileo’s Lament

Chapter 2 Science unexplained

-Collectible Genius
-Warehouses of opinion
-the unheard-of social sciences
-Confirmation Bias
-Paradigm Shiftiness
-Bob’s Ark

Chapter 3 Making Explanations

-Prime Movers
-on the level
-getting real
-cannonball run
-from physics to psychophysics

Part 2 Ab-Normal Science

Chapter 4 paradigms lost

-science, as expected
-ab-Normal social science
-Too Narrow predictability
-Too general predictability
-Minimal explanation
-Minimal depth
-surplus logic
-surplus facts
-Neglected observations
-Irrelevant observations
-false processes
-false observations
 3

Chapter 5 The Ill-Disciplines of Psychology

-Reality Testing
-Popular psychology
-evolutionary psychology
-social psychology
-behavioral economics
-philosophy
-humanistic psychology
-behaviorism
-theology
-cognitive science
-affective neuroscience
-Cognitive linguistics

Part 3 Foundations of motivation

Chapter 6 Incentive Motivation, with effect

-The Cassandras of Science
-Pushed, Pulled, and Glued
-A Unified Reinforcement Principle
-Skinnerian and Popperian creatures
-Intrinsic and extrinsic motivators

Chapter 7 Incentive Motivation, with affect

-Once more, with feeling
-Fear not, A Matter of stress
-Pleasure
-Habit
-The Tycho Brahe of Psychology
-Emotion
-An Affective Circumplex
-A Behavioral circumplex
-Let consilience be your guide
 4

Part 4 Brave New Social worlds

Chapter 8 Motivation, Tried and True

-The usual prospects
-Effective self-control
-the ten percent solution
-affective self-control

Chapter 9 The Meanings of Life

-Turning on a dime
-Salience networks
-Napoleon’s Big Day
-Shaping Shakespeare
-broken networks
-The soul of a Conservative

Chapter 10 Social science disciplined

-Shadows in a Cave

Postscript
-When worlds collide: when behaviorism and humanism
become one
 5

Books by this author, free for all.

Psychology
The Book of Rest: The Odd Psychology of Doing ‘Nothing’ The psychology of
rest from the perspective of the neuroscience of learning and affect. An
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A Mouse’s Tale … a practical explanation and handbook of motivation from

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Galileo’s Lament, and The Collapse of the Social Sciences (NEW!) A critique of
the Social Sciences from the deconstructing rules of science, and from the
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Collapse-of-the-Social-Sciences

One Track Minds: The Psychology of the Internet The psychology of the
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B2: The Old Art and New Science of the Business Network Social and business
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IT Bytes! Giving IT the Disrespect it Deserves Rude and ironic essays on

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Psychological Acts Essays on the psychology of the stranger places in the lives
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Satires
Dr Mezmer’s Dictionary of Bad Psychology Bad psychology dictionary for a
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Platonia Star Trek meets Gulliver’s Travels, along with parallel universes,
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 8

Introduction
” Social scientists by and large spurn the idea of the hierarchical ordering of
knowledge that unites and drives the natural sciences. Split into independent
cadres, they stress precision in their words within their specialty but seldom
speak the same technical language from one specialty to the next.” E.O. Wilson.i

"…..science has been increasingly the task of specialists. Today there are few
scholars who can call themselves mathematicians or physicists or biologists
without restriction. A man may be a topologist or an acoustician or a
coleopterist. He will be full of the jargon of his field, and will know all its
literature and all its ramifications, but, more frequently than not, he will regard
the next subject as something belonging to his colleague three doors down the
corridor, and will consider any interest in it on his own part as an
unwarrantable breach of privacy." Norbert Weiner ii

“Psychological theory today is a patchwork, much like the mosaic of

principalities that eventually became Italy and Germany circa 1870. A major
goal for all theorists must be to integrate what exists rather than to neglect or
denigrate the rest of psychology. Connecting theories conceptually exposes our
mutual blind spots and can lead to new and bold insights.” Gert Gigerenzeriii .

This book is about understanding how we understand motivation, or in

the large, the importance of explanation as a unifying principle in the
social sciences, and indeed, for all the sciences. The physical and
biological sciences have progressed due to explanations of the core
processes of existence, and with this has been the explosion in
technological advances which make the world more comfortable, livable,
and secure. On the other hand, the social sciences, which should be
dependent upon the kernel of understanding derived from an elemental
explanation of motivation, has not been so blessed, and still have no
adequate and uniform notion as to how motivation is grounded to actual
neural processes, and what is worse, do not seem to care. In short, social
 9

scientists have no clue as to how motivation works. How this is

disastrous for the social sciences and the human prospect and its simple
remedy is the core and purpose of this book, as motivation is integral
not as an explanation of how we think, act, feel, perceive, and remember,
but why we do. But for the reader to understand the importance of this
and give a figment of credibility to the author’s argument, let us provide
a brief lesson from the history of science.
It’s the year 1723, and medical science is exceedingly popular and well
established in academia and in the public mind. Everyone had their
preferred ideas of the nature and causes of disease and of nostrums and
curative tales to tell, from old doctors to old wives. The number of
diseases multiplied to meet the measure of their cures, but people died
of plagues, bad hygiene, and diseases with unmitigated frequency all the
same. Yet from the vantage of scientific hindsight this edifice of
diagnosis, treatment, and cure was derelict, as it was uninformed as to
how diseases actually worked. For that, it had to wait over a hundred
years. The foundations of the germ theory of disease were laid by the
French physician and biologist Louis Pasteur in the late 19 th century
from his studies of chicken, cattle, and other mammals, and the language
of disease and its metaphoric representation soon formed the
hierarchical guardrails that bounded the nature of what one could claim
about the causes and treatment of disease, and eliminated from popular
discourse evil spirits and infectious fogs. It also provided a common
metaphoric language that allowed individuals of every perspective and
intellect to communicate with each other. Thus the language of disease,
its prevention and cure informed geneticists, physicians and
epidemiologists as well as the public at large, from intellectuals to
children.
Now let’s move to the year 2023, and the social sciences are likewise
exceedingly popular and well established in academia and in the public
mind. Although the psychology of language, sensation, perception,
locomotion, emotion, thinking and memory progressed along their own
individual paths, all are interwoven with the separate subject matter of
 10

what incents people to learn, speak, feel, remember, and act in the first
place, or the psychology of motivation. Everyone, regardless of
education, intellect, or wit, has their own opinion as to how motivation
works, and extends it to their personal behavior, family, politics, religion,
and invariably the social sciences. A common and sustaining thread in
the social sciences perceived through academic and non-academics alike
are presumptions as to how motivation occurs as a mental process, and
these usually are derived not from the metaphors of contemporary
neuroscience, but rather from the metaphors of the physics of everyday
life, as behavior is pulled (reflexes), pushed (drives), and glued (reward)
into place, all embellished with a panoply of inferred motivational
causes from need states to self-actualization that are limited only by the
bounds of language. As in the case of medicine a century earlier, reliable
inferences from behavior can do when there are no good explanations to
be had, as is the case of our personal, family, and occupational lives. So
the simple fact that incentives motivate and demotivate are enough to
sustain civilizations and economies, but not perfectly. Thus, as medicine
before Pasteur had to reconcile its certainties with inevitable plagues and
endemic diseases, so too does modern social science have to reconcile its
own diverse certainties with poverty, injustice, and war, all the while in
wont of a better explanation.
Pasteur’s discoveries were possible due to the better resolving
instruments that were available to him, namely the microscope and
modern laboratory instruments. These allowed him to perform the
experiments that laid the foundation of modern microbiology and the
metaphors of disease and wellbeing that sustain us to this day. Similarly,
it was only until the 20th and early 21st centuries that equally powerful
instrumentalities could be employed to determine how motivation
occurs. The subjects again were common laboratory animals, from
Pavlov’s dogs to Skinner’s pigeons to Berridge’s mice. And once again,
the social sciences should be at the cusp of a transformation to a new set
of basic metaphors describing how motivation works.
Or maybe not.
 11

How disease occurs in animals has transferred without loss to their

human cousins. On the other hand, how motivational processes occur in
animals has not made a similar migration. This, as will be argued in this
book, is a matter of timing, ignorance, and simple individual and
institutional prejudice. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
motivation in animals was perceived to be analogous to human
behavior, and habits, rewards, drives and a myriad other inferred
processes were assumed to have their equivalent in other mammals.
Since then, and due again to the increasing resolving power of
observational tools, incentive motivation has been reduced to
rudimentary and observable processes that discard the many metaphoric
processes of incentive and replace them with a unified, simple, and very
testable unified theory of reward. This new unified theory of incentive
motivation, or what is called a ‘discrepancy’ theory of reward unites all
the various threads of motivation from habit to drive to reward under
one simple metaphorical language that is mapped to observed
neurologic behavior, and has falsifiable predictions that can refine it or
even overthrow it through test. It will be argued that this language in
turn, like Pasteur’s germ theory, will provide the hierarchical language
and generality of procedure and understanding that can reign in the
many unfounded non-empirical perspectives in the social sciences.
Presently, unlike the physical and biological sciences, the social sciences
have no hierarchical structure because they have no uniform
explanation of how motivation maps to actual neurological processes
that can inform and constrain their hypotheses. This lack of a hierarchical
structure means psychologists are condemned to talk past rather than to
each other, and to develop and foster their own data languages within
the confines of schools of thought and the journalistic boundaries that
keep subject matters in the social sciences wholly apart. This
unfortunately means an unenlightened populace condemned to
ignorance and left to the mercies of ad hoc conceptions of motivation that
divide the world into ideological camps that often impede and
 12

sometimes destroy the construction of amicable, just, and progressive

societies.
Collapse means the rapid deterioration of a structure from a higher
order, but this can also apply to the collapse of a point of view that is
corrupt or fallacious to begin with. Thus if your temple to the Gods
collapses like the cardboard props in a Potemkin village, there was never
any great edifice that truly collapsed, only the illusion of one. And so we
will argue that the social sciences have collapsed from heights they have
aspired to but never reached, and in spite of successes as sporadic as that
of a medieval surgeon, have failed, but can if they follow scientific
discipline achieve their aims if they but open their eyes and survey with
greater accuracy the foundations of the human mind.
This book is divided into four parts. First is an explanation of
‘explanation’, or how we can and should talk about and practice science.
Secondly, is an argument that the social sciences in many instances don’t
proceed according to the maxims of science, and compromise their
disciplines and their predictive and explanatory power to achieve
personal goals that augment their status, authority, job security, and
income. Third, is where we get to our ‘germ’ theory, the rudimentary
neural processes that compromise how incentive motivation works,
which encompasses the elementary cognitive and affective processes
that underscore everything we do, think, and feel. Fourth, we will
demonstrate that a sound understanding of the neuroscience of
motivation can pare the inaccuracies and prejudices of social science, and
makes its predictions more precise and its procedures more effective,
and also conform to the personal and social values that civil society holds
dear.
 13

Part 1

The Collapse of the

Social Sciences
 14

Chapter 1
Hierarchies
Stocks and Swans
In 1737, the Scottish philosopher David Hume pondered the color of
swans. All swans in the Scottish countryside were white, and by
historical legacy, were always white. However to posit that all swans
everywhere must be white is arguing from correlation, not causation, as
the genetic origins of swan coloration were unknown, the world was not
surveyed to view swans in every habitat (black swans live in Australia,
for instance), and how whiteness evolved was not on the intellectual
table. Causation, or a proper explanation of whiteness, derived from
observation, hypothesis, and test, was feasible if one had the
observational tools, patience, and time, but was not practicable.
Correlation was easier and at least reliable, so one could go about one’s
life in confidence that every swan viewed in a pond or in the sky would
be white.
Explanation is hard, and we literally are ‘wired’ to perceive and use
correlations both consciously and unconsciously (e.g., habit), as the
multitude of correlations in life demand speed in action rather than the
patience of understanding and deliberation. Hume concurred, as he
noted that the problem of inductioniv was not that correlations were
useless, but rather that they could not suffice as explanations. So what is
an explanation?
An explanation is a multi-metaphorical perspective on a phenomenon. It
can be emergent (red, green, sweet, sour), analytic (wavelength of light,
taste receptors), macro (universe, humans), micro (atoms, DNA), and all
equally describable with metaphorical representations of differing
accuracy and predictive power that fits the intelligence and purposes of
the audience, from a child to a university researcher. Explanations are
 15

also hierarchical, with higher metaphors constrained by lower ones.

Thus given a knowledge of the small (Newtonian laws) to the large (a
baseball in motion), one can never say that a ball moves because it has a
mind of its own. Because of this hierarchical discipline a particle
physicist can explain quantum mechanics through a mathematical
language cryptic to all but his peers, yet not compromise his explanation
by couching it in metaphorical terms through a popular text that any
layman could understand.
Now let us follow our tale of swans with the swan song of an era. In the
19th century, horses and buggies were on a roll, figuratively and literally.
An investment in horse and buggy companies would pay off because it
had always paid off, and the correlation between this investment and
time proved the rule, a trend one could claim began with the invention
of the wheel and the domestication of the horse. Now let’s say you are
an investor in 1899, and are heavily invested in horse and buggy stocks.
An investment in such a category would have paid handsomely any year
of the century, and safe to say, the correlation would also prove the rule,
except, as in the immediate years to follow, it did not. Trend lines
notwithstanding, in a few years you would be broke.
Not let us say that you as an investor had a time machine and traveled
back to 1910. Would you follow trend lines, or follow the value of the
motorized technologies to come? As a ‘value’ investor, you can explain
why an investment in car companies would be valuable, as you
understand from your knowledge of technology its many purposes and
realized capabilities. You would invest in Ford and GM, travel back to
the future, and in the present day, count your millions.
As an investor rooted in the 21st century and without the benefit of a time
machine, trend lines again have the same siren’s call. An investment in
the stock market over the past fifty years would have an annualized
return adjusted for inflation of 7%, enough to make one rich with even a
modest investment, if of course you wish to wait fifty years. For any
individual stock, would an analyst follow the trends, just sit back, and
ride the roller coaster of incline and decline, or would he study what
 16

underlies its value, the performance of the firm’s management, products,

market share, technology investment, and its economic environment
(depression or prosperity)? We may not have time, inclination or wit to
do this ourselves, but we can place this confidence in others. So, because
a Warren Buffett can explain the value of specific stocks better than we
can, we place our trust and our investments in him. On the other hand,
you can go full induction, and using a technical analysis where you
reason the value of the market from historical trends, with sharpening
mathematical acuity of the longest and most reliable trend lines. Useful
perhaps in ferreting out the horse and buggy trends that last from
century to century.
This is the enduring conundrum faced by the common investor. Should
one follow the correlations or the explanations? The answer is both. For
almost all the 19th century and centuries before, an investor could do no
wrong in investing in horses and buggies. However, if he followed
explanations of the emerging technologies of his time, he could diversify
his portfolio by investing in new automotive companies. For modern day
investors, a correlation is useful because it can underscore hidden events
that the most current explanation has yet to account for, and an
explanation can make sure that correlation (let’s say in a Ponzi scheme
or cryptocurrency) may be fool’s gold. Explanations for what makes a
company valuable temper the correlations that if left unchallenged can
have us make poor investments. We can still make the wrong choice, but
be far less likely to follow the lottery or an astrological star. Investors
typically follow a mean in their considerations, as trend lines and
explanation both correct and inform each other. However, if analysis
skews too far in its methodological preferences, then disaster is the usual
outcome. Correlational designs seek out reliable statistical trends,
whereas explanatory designs seek to see how things actually work. We
need to explain the world, yet also be aware of inconsistencies in our data
that point to unconsidered variables behind the trends of existence.
Logically, the happy interplay between correlational and explanatory
designs should auger well for the smooth advancement of science, as
 17

theories change in lockstep with ever increasing knowledge, and with

now useless non-empirical assumptions being cheerily abandoned.
However, advances in science often occur otherwise, and with fits and
jolts where entire world views can collapse in a fortnight. Why this
happens is not because of what we see, but what we assume exists in the
shadows and refuse to let go.

Paradigm Shifts
“The proponents of competing paradigms are always at least slightly at cross-
purposes. Neither side will grant the non-empirical assumptions (i.e. data
not verified by the senses or by experiment) that the other needs in order to make
its case….They are bound partly to talk through each other. Though each may
hope to convert the other to seeing his way of seeing his science and its problems,
neither may hope to prove his case. The competition between paradigms is not
the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs…”v Thomas Kuhn

It may be argued that most of the long-standing controversies in the

history of science could have been resolved by a five-year-old child if
fitted with the proper spectacles, or to be more concise, just adding a a
few hundred feet to her perspective. When all the facts have been made
plain, science should be easy. Just deduce the algorithm that fits the data,
plug the data in, and chug it along until it spouts out predictable
outcomes. If it doesn’t work, then change your algorithm to fit the facts,
all the while adhering to the principles of parsimony, practicality, and
generality. Newton, Darwin, Einstein and many other great scientists did
this, yet because they were limited in the facts at hand, and had to make
do with what they empirically saw and what they theoretically inferred.
Working with what you have rather than what you could have is called
working within a paradigm, or a limited data set which is supplemented
by a collectively agreed set of inferred facts. The best example of this is
the paradigmatic structure of the solar system before the telescope.
Astronomers worked mathematically with the data they had and the
ironclad inferences or non-empirical assumptions they made about the
 18

universe, namely that the earth was at its center and the whole cosmos
revolved around it.
In his widely influential book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’
the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn observed that scientists work
within the confines of limited data sets and a set of mutually agreed
inferred processes. This he called ‘normal science’, where problems or
puzzles arising from the paradigm are worked out without challenging
core inferred processes. Only with a succession of difficulties that could
not be handled by a paradigm would there be a paradigm ‘shift’, and like
the sudden movement of tectonic plates, would disrupt science as
equally, only to settle down within a new paradigm and a process of
normal science to scientific revolution that would build in time the same
tensions. How fast this would happen would be a matter of significant
philosophical debate. The philosopher Carl Popper for example believed
that just a few predictions from a theory that are falsified would call into
question the validity of a theory, whereas Kuhn had doubts about
whether this was at all possible.vi Probably the best solution to this issue
comes from perhaps the grandest paradigm in history, and the
surprising cause of its resolution that we will argue serves well for all
scientific revolutions yet to come.

Galileo’s Lament
“Count what is countable, measure what is measurable, and what is not
measurable, make measurable.” Galileo Galilei

In 1610, the earth and the starry firmament was long established as a
settled place. Seeing was believing, and even though the stars, planets,
and the sun let themselves be known by merely how they traced their
way across the sky, mankind knew its place at the center of creation, and
knew as well the celestial script of God. The cosmos was a divine
clockwork built upon revolving and transparent spheres of crystal, from
where was affixed the planets, sun, and the stars.
 19

Except for the fact that the clock didn’t work.

Like the white rabbit’s wayward timepiece from Alice’s Wonderland, the
planets would move backwards and forwards, lurch ahead, and stall in
their courses. Hard to keep time in the cosmos, unless God had a wicked
sense of humor. To resolve this confusion the Greek astronomer
Claudius Ptolemy in AD 142 came up with a not so elegant solution. It
could all work, he reckoned, if the planets and sun did loop the loops in
their courses. These ‘epicycles’, like the looping rotors in an engine,
could be described mathematically, predicted the motions of the
planetary bodies and sun, and most importantly, save the appearances,
and confirmed what was revealed to the naked eye, and more
importantly, that mankind was the apple’s eye of God.
Except of course, for the fact that Ptolemy’s clockwork didn’t quite work
either. It was generally inaccurate, and his calculations were made to fit
that data, which were also, most likely, fraudulent. The problem was that
Ptolemy’s model was inaccurate, hyper-complex, and unusable. But it
did save the appearances, and that was all that mattered in an epoch of
ignorance, or so it seemed.
The appearances, or man’s privileged place in the universe, was
vouchsafed as a matter of celestial geography. That observations didn’t
quite fit the model troubled the Polish astronomer Nicolai Copernicus,
whose heliocentric model of the cosmos also saved the appearances, if
one didn’t mind the earth being moved to the cosmic suburbs. He
postulated that the computational cobwebs of the Ptolemaic model could
be cleared up if the sun was in the center of the solar system, with the
planets rotating it in perfect circles, with individual epicycles for the
planets put in to round out the equations, and the stars remaining fixed,
knowing their place as it were, and to suit the clerics retaining the crystal
spheres was just fine.
To clear up the difficulties with both of these models, relying on
centuries old observations would not do. New observations were
required, and this time there would be no doubt as to their precision and
 20

validity. The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was up to the task, and
granted title to a barren and windswept island off Denmark, Tycho set
up his observatory, where he became master, lord and tyrant of his
empire rooted in the stars. Tycho’s observatory was set to collect
precisely accurate data of the changing positions of the planets and stars.
There were no telescopes at the time, so Brahe used a sextant device
pointed out of a small aperture in the observatory, a way of securing
adequate measure to the fallible human eye. Brahe’s data did not fit the
Ptolemaic or Copernican models, so he came up with own, at once
simple, elegant, precise, and wrong.

Tycho’s Astronomical Sextant (Some Squinting Required)

When Brahe unexpectedly died, as rumor held due to a burst bladder

from not excusing himself during a beer bender, his assistant Johannes
Kepler inherited his position and his research. Kepler had the data, but
Galileo had the telescope. One possessed correlations, whilst the other
the observations, and both engaged in a spirited correspondence as both
happily discovered that their discoveries were in agreement. As it turned
 21

out, observations converged with correlations, which converged again

with predictions, and the clockwork of the solar system and indeed, of
the universe, changed.vii So Kepler was right, and Galileo had the
observations to prove it, observations that were easily replicable to
anyone who had a telescope and the inclination to incline it to the stars.
But Galileo was not out of the woods yet.

Ptolemaic Model

Copernican Model
 22

Tycho’s Model

As no one believed him and had every incentive not to, with explanation
to be damned, both figuratively and literally. Because a usable or
generalizable model of the solar system was not required, and besides,
no one had the wits to use it even if it existed, as Ptolemy’s contraption
was forbidding enough to even the most learned astronomers. Only the
semblance of reality was a necessity, like free will or the ghost in the
machine, a reality that was insured because it would always be
comfortably obscure. God leapfrogged the universe in importance, and
was the real power behind the veil, unknowable and perhaps with a
tendency to be reproachful to mankind if he peered into heavens vault a
bit too closely, as the apocryphal Tower of Babel demonstrated.

So by 1610, Galileo was alone.

From his letter to Johannes Kepler.

“You are the first and almost the only person who, even after but a cursory
investigation, has, such is your openness of mind and lofty genius, given entire
credit to my statements….”
 23

“I think, my Kepler, we will laugh at the extraordinary stupidity of the

multitude. What do you say to the leading philosophers of the faculty here, to
whom I have offered a thousand times of my own accord to show my studies, but
who with the lazy obstinacy of a serpent who has eaten his fill have never
consented to look at planets, nor moon, nor telescope? Verily, just as serpents
close their ears, so do these men close their eyes to the light of truth.” 8

And to Galileo’s despair, they closed their eyes for a very long time, only
opening them to snatch him from the public eye in 1642 to a solitary
confinement at his home where he awaited not retribution and
vindication, but loneliness and death.9
Galileo’s telescope was a game or should we say paradigm changer, as it
provided the extended vision that with a glance demonstrated the sleight
of hand God used to move worlds. But what would the future hold if it
did not exist? Given the unerring precision of the orbital syntax of the
planets, and a choice of models that all claim to have an excellent
semantics and precisely map to and predict the future course of the stars,
which model would win?
Well, none exactly. Take the Ptolemaic model for example. Any
deviations of planetary motions from the model would be remedied by
just changing or adding a component to the model. Thus by adding or
adjusting an epicycle here and there, the model still works, the
appearances are saved, and mankind is still at the center of the universe.
And even if no added modules were suggested, deviant results in
predictions could be ignored, derided, or simply labeled as false. Now,
Kepler’s model may be found to work unerringly, simply, and require
no alteration. Nonetheless, a beautiful model would not save the beauty
of appearances, and expunge mankind from his privileged position.
Finally, even if Keplerian laws achieved a modicum of generality, and
fitted square within Newtonian laws that would apply in turn to all
earthly and cosmological objects, Kepler’s model would be but a
harmonious voice in a discordant chorus of models that even though off
key, nonetheless sang the praises of God. In other words, the Ptolemaic
 24

model, and the Copernican, Tychan, and Kepler models are not
falsifiable, and no manner or number of inconsistencies, complexities, or
mal predictions can sway a true believer. Thus Kuhn’s prediction would
unfortunately ring true, as non-empirical assumptions can only be
supplanted by empirical facts, not logical proofs.
Thankfully, Galileo’s perspective was quickly validated by the resolving
perspective granted by better devices that could actually see the solar
system in motion. However, achieving better perspectives or
explanations may not be the primary mission of the sciences anymore, to
the detriment in particular of the understanding of that most difficult of
universes, that which is contained in the human mind. And to illustrate
this point, we will tell two tales of the pragmatic and sensible Dutch.

Oh yes, and below is what Kepler came up with from his volumes of
observations, all conforming to what Galileo with his telescope saw. And
truth be told, it was less well accepted than Copernicus’s vision, even to
this day. After all, Copernicus’s model still runs circles around it’s
alternatives, literally that is.10

And the winner is…

 25

Kepler’s Model
 26

Chapter 2
Science Unexplained
Collectible Genius
In the 17th century, the Netherlands passed into uncharted economic
territory as its population, led by a mercantile class and robust industry
and trade, became middle class. It had time on its hands, money to
spend, a dollop of leisure, and a need to express its collective vanity in
new ways that given their limited budgets did not involve erecting
palaces and grand cathedrals. Portraiture was the answer, and
bureaucrats to housewives wanted their own piece of immortality in
selfies sketched in charcoal, oils, and watercolors. And with this demand
came the artists who could fulfill it, and for some, possessing of genius
which vaulted the facsimiles of their simple subjects into great art. Hals,
Rembrandt, Vermeer and others made their mark and continue to do so
by their peculiar and publicly selected genius. The arbiter for genius was
ever refining public taste and judgment, or in other words, the utility of
art. During a time when public and private patronage was discerning,
practical, and ruthless in its preferences, only the best survived, though
millions of paintings were privately entertained, and this by the ever
renewing and winnowing popular acclamation that has served times
test. Shakespeare’s plays, Mozart’s operas, and Michelangelo’s art were
all selected and continue to be rewarded because of their utility for
pleasure and practicality, and the many failed alternatives, like the 50
other playwrights who competed for a place on a stage in Shakespearean
times,11 or the innumerable mediocratic failures in art and science in the
day, are forgotten.
To be forgotten and deemed mediocre is a bit rude and is too harsh a
verdict in these egalitarian times, where all thoughts merit respect and
everyone must have prizes, or at least a certificate of participation, or
 27

better, tenure. So to encourage a re-flourishing of an interest in art in the

20th century, the ever-practical Dutch came upon a sure solution. They
established a bounty for art by subsidizing artist salaries, whose works
were received and approved with little discernment, and stashed away
in a warehouse open to the public at no cost, as if Sam’s Club merged
with the Louvre. The result was predictable. “With the BKR (Beeldende
Kunstenaars Regeling) — an artist subsidy scheme — you can hand over your
artwork to the government and get a salary in return.…In 1969, the BKR
experienced an explosive growth in members. Lured by its benefits, students
flocked to art academies, foreign artists immigrated to the Netherlands, artists
moved to the countryside to ask for membership, and with the help of the BKR,
women felt that they could finally become the breadwinner. Municipalities were
flooded with such a massive amount of artwork that many of them couldn’t find
enough storage space to preserve them. When the BKR was finally abolished, the
Netherlands had half a million more artworks sitting in its warehouses. Of these,
20,000 pieces were declared “museum worthy” and the rest were given the usual
treatment of mediocre art. They became wall decorations, were given to
institutions as gifts, returned to the artists, slowly trickled back into the market,
or were simply cut up and made into relatively attractive notebook covers.” 12
It is estimated that in the 16th century more than five million paintings by
Dutch artists were created to grace the homes and businesses of the
people of the Netherlands. All had their daily use and pleasure, even if
the audience was often but a solitary maid. Each of these paintings
existed because they were individually demanded, and needed to meet
not just the taste of the artist, but of his patron. The contemporary Dutch
authorities erred by thinking that art is for its own sake and for the artists
edification alone. Rather it is a symbiotic relationship between creator
and audience, each edifying and embracing the other in the ascending
waltz of culture. But when the audience is a disinterested self-selected
elite rather than a demanding general and diverse populace, the artist
dances alone, and the standard diverges away from the audience idling
in the shadows, with the elite gathering in small rooms to celebrate art
work no one will view nor take in their arms and hearts.
 28

Warehouses of Opinion
In the centuries before our modern age, the arts and sciences were
cottage industries, and were encouraged by small groups of people from
high wealth and status to low. It was individuals, not research or creative
teams, that drove the progression of culture, and this included of course
the advance of science, but the latter was never easy. Respectability for a
scientific idea was as hard won as any great work of art, literature, or
music. Before the twentieth century, if you had a great idea, you would
write a book about it, and it would be published by your colleagues and
friends. Your audience was small, but its encouragement was all that
mattered, as indeed it is the case for nearly all works of genius and those
aspiring to genius. But authorship was rare, and it was teaching that paid
the bills. Before the world wars, teaching skills came first, and academic
authorship was not a measure for tenure, and indeed would impede it.
Indeed, science practitioners were few, and even at the turn of a new
century, thinking about the cosmos was a cottage industry.
In these rarefied circumstances, in 1908 the distinguished German
physicist Max Planck received an unsolicited paper from an obscure
patent office clerk in Switzerland for inclusion in the physics journal
Annalen der Physik. Although the mathematics was consistent, he felt
its conclusions were plainly wrong, but he published it as a matter of
principle, due in no small matter to his belief that challenges to
established truth made the truth more secure, unless…
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the nascent rise of
journalistic publication in all the sciences served as a platform for debate,
not conformity, and publication served to increase knowledge, not to
secure position. If you wrote a paper to further knowledge on any topic,
it was a labor of love, a desire to bring to attention a new perspective on
the world. As such, your competition in this intellectual space were equal
minded sorts who wrote papers for an audience that was equally
discerning of beauty, whether it was a beautiful sonata or a beautiful
idea.
 29

Then came the world wars. Along with economies and men, science was
also mobilized for research, production, and war, and it was soon
discovered by the scholarly elites that the research prowess and
reputation of a scientist was a new currency for grants, prestige, and it
followed a predictor of the acumen and personal success of individual
researchers who duly took note. Scientific journals thus flowered and
multiplied by more than a thousand-fold, and presently there are over
33000 peer review English language journals distributing over three
million articles per year.13 Naturally, with this avalanche of wisdom, to
make sense of it one would have to first sort it out. Each topic of study
would have its own paradigms to protect, like walled gardens, and
would only accept papers that accepted the non-empirical foundations
of its subject matter, as well as using the same data language,
experimental procedure, and level of analysis. No feelings would be
ruffled by those who would challenge the core inferred truths, and
progress would be made within each little theoretical pond. A fine state
of affairs, unless you happen to be a patent office clerk who loved to
throw rocks into ponds.
Returning to Max Planck and the troublesome paper submitted by an
non-academic amateur, a modern day editor would have rejected the
paper outright as denying the paradigmatic truth of absolute space and
time agreed to by the community and its journalistic standards.1 That

1
This is not as farfetched an idea as one would believe. Indeed, modern physics
is presented with the same untouchable and unfalsifiable models of the
universe as were embraced by the scholastic astronomers in Galileo’s time. In
his 2009 book ‘The Trouble with Physics’, the distinguished physicist Lee Smolin
labeled a large faction of the physics scholarly community with the similar
charge of obscurantism and censorship. This time it wasn’t an unfalsifiable
model of the solar system but an unfalsifiable model of how the universe came
to be. ‘String theory’ posits that the universe and all we see around us is the
emergent property of infinitesimal one-dimensional particles or strings. The
theory is unfalsifiable, and indeed has millions of mathematical solutions, a
super abundance that would put the permutations of Ptolemy’s theory to
shame. Fine enough, except that Smolin noted that the one unchallengeable
and non-empirical aspect of string theory, namely that strings existed, held a
predominate sway in physics journals and academic physics departments, so
 30

Max Planck didn’t reject Albert Einstein’s paper is a tribute to not only
the standards of an individual, but an age.14 But what of this abundance
of research and opinion, could it not have a virtue in itself? Could
progress be made in spite of an institutional resistance to challenge?
It depends of course on what you view as progress. Certainly progress
in one’s career must have some weight, for even philosophers have to
eat. And credentials are a good place to start. Go to the faculty or
personal web page of any academic, and there you will find his or her
‘vitae’, or academic resume. This document will list the academic
credentials and job history along with a chronological list of all of the
journal, book, and other articles written by them or in concert with other
authors. The list will usually be large, sometimes numbering in the
hundreds of articles. The titles will be weighty, significant to their field,
and express their authors intelligence and knowledge of his or her field.
They will also be off limits to the lay audience, hidden behind the
paywall of journal policy and copyright, and often written in a style and
with a focus in content that would be of interest to no one. But the point
is that they were never meant to be read, and it is of little issue that they
in general are not read by other than a journal editor and a few curious
friends. This is because they are used not to advance current knowledge,
but as an intellectual currency that demonstrates from its sheer scholastic
tonnage that their authors are serious and accomplished in their field,
regardless of the near certain zero impact of their work in the world at
large.
The pretense is that a pile of findings accumulated over the years will
through its sheer intellectual weight combust into new knowledge, like
the fusion reaction in an imploding star. Sadly, the opposite has been the
case, with article after article descending into black hole of core journals,

that competing views rejected the reality of cosmic strings were denied a voice
in academic circles, and were ignored or rejected outright. Of course, this was
a milder sort of inquisition, with Smolin and his likeminded colleagues spared
the pillory or the pyre, and were able to publish independently without
churchly proscription.
 31

and no light emitting from the darkness. It’s just, as it seems with
everything these days, a matter of statistics. And with statistics, you can
prove anything, with all you need is a willing ear and a bias to confirm.

Confirmation Bias
In order to prove the hypothesis that kicking stones hurts, you must kick
a lot of stones, and if you get away with such collisions with one less
stubbed toe, there’s somethings afoot, and you must reconsider your
hypothesis.2 Still, a theory worth its salt must be easily subject to test and
have compelling reasons for its continual test, whether it is pragmatic, as
in the usage of Newtonian mechanics to power trains and rocket ships,
or conceptual, as in the frequent and often outlandish tests that Einstein’s
relativity theory has successfully survived. But if you have a hypothesis
that is underwhelming, getting it tested can be as much an exercise in
futility as getting your paper read in the first place, and if so, for your
hypothesis to hold up, you may just as well flip a coin. Indeed in an
article in the Lancet, a peer reviewed medical journal, Richard Horton,
its editor, wrote in a 2015 study: “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps
half, may simply be untrue,” Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny
effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together
with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science
has taken a turn towards darkness.”
“And this crisis is getting worse. A 2020 DARPA survey of 2,500 social-science
papers determined that starting in 2009, 53.4 percent of them had failed to
replicate — that is, their results could not be verified independently by
subsequent research and thus may be wrong. By 2018, that number had risen to

22And kicking stones can confirm other realities than that it hurts, as the 18th
century English critic Samuel Johnson whacked a stone with his foot to refute
Archbishop Berkeley’s philosophy of “immaterialism”, or the view that all that
exists are ideas, there is no material substance. Crying ‘I refute it thusly!’ as he
swung his foot, it is unknown if Johnson felt the effort worthwhile afterwards.
 32

55.8 percent. This means that flipping a coin on any question might be more
reliable than “trusting the science.”
“In a survey of 2,000 research psychologists, more than half openly admitted to
having selectively reported experiments to yield results favorable to their views.
Another 34 percent of scientists admit that they’ve engaged in “questionable
research practices” such as “dropping data points on a gut feeling” and
“changing the design, methodology, and results of a study in response to
pressures from a funding source.
Worryingly, this kind of manipulated research is cited by other scientists at the
same rate as more robust research, and the vast majority of such citations are
positive. This is especially true in fields dominated by the rising wave of
progressive identity politics.
Lowered standards have resulted in the proliferation of entire fields of study that
are so susceptible to confirmation bias that their journals repeatedly publish flat-
out falsehoods and then refuse to issue retractions if the research results are
getting flattering media attention.
To “trust the science,” we need to first fix science and rid important scientific
fields of ideological contamination. Otherwise, the incentive structure that
favors politics over truth will continue to distort our understanding of reality.”15
Unless of course, the science wasn’t written for you anyways, and you
can safely ignore it, as we have an ear to distinguish politics from reality.

The Unheard of Social Sciences

If as an academic no one reads your articles, skips your books, and goes
about their affairs oblivious to you or your peers intellectual output, or
anything their forbears wrote as well. you would justly be concerned. If
you include in this blanket avoidance anything remotely resonant of all
your knowledge, then this is a recipe for intellectual disaster, presaging
the collapse of a discipline from its imagined heights. Like a concert with
no audience, a book with no readers, or an art work with no viewers, the
question remains, if a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make any
sound?
 33

For all the reputed sound and fury of learned opinion, academic papers
in the social sciences make little sound, and hardly an echo, as they were
written to not make a sound at all, but rather a small footnote in a
resume. This is not a matter of opinion, but a simple matter of fact, as
data do not lie. Indeed, of all papers written in the social sciences, only
20 percent have actually been read, and of those no more than ten people
on average read them, with the vast majority going uncited or cited only
once or twice.16 In addition, their readability has significantly declined
through an overuse of technical language and jargon. 17 Hence, the
impacts of most peer-reviewed publications are miniscule even within
the scientific community. Moreover, non-academic practitioners very
rarely read articles published in peer-reviewed journals, nor can they with
paywalls embedded in nearly all of them. So if you do not have access to
the articles behind the pay wall, any argument no matter how well
founded and phrased is meaningless if you are standing on the other side
of the warehouse fence.
Of course, someone can summarize and explain it all, in a monograph,
textbook, or work in popular science that synthesizes findings and
theory. It would if such books were common in the academic curricula
at least. But they are not, as the social sciences have no explanatory
hierarchy and do not derive from first or essential theoretical principles.
Indeed, as the pundit A. Menard put bluntly, “The majority of journal
articles in the social sciences are almost completely atheoretical. Even if all the
statistical, p-hacking, publication bias, etc. issues were fixed, we'd still be left
with a ton of ad-hoc hypotheses based, at best, on folk intuitions. But how can
science advance if there's no theoretical grounding, nothing that can be refuted
or refined? A pile of "facts" does not a progressive scientific field make…. Rather
than building up principles that flow from overarching theoretical frameworks,
psychology textbooks are largely a potpourri of disconnected empirical
findings.”18
So the trend lines are clear, with journal article publications increasing
by over 65% in the 2010’s, and with textbooks disjointed along with a
decline of 54% in scholarly monographs and books that could synthesize
 34

available knowledge. The result: lots of facts, little synthesis, and even
less understanding.19 The problem with journalese quite naturally
extends to the physical and biological sciences as well, but still in these
domains we can mark progress, and there is no shortage of popular
books that can synthesize it all, from the nature of the universe to the
advisability of eating saturated fats. The regression of the social sciences
is due not to an abundance of facts, but to the unavailability of the rules,
born from explanations, that allow us to derive and limit the facts that
can exist and the ones that cannot. In other words, explanations do not
just reaffirm facts, they generate them, and they limit the inferred facts
that we could hypothesize and their implications, or paradigms.

Paradigm Shiftiness
In the last hundred years, the social sciences have witnessed an explosion
of paradigms for motivation, which in addition to their empiric
observations have new non empiric assumptions that go unchallenged.
In addition to the familiar religious, political, and folk psychological
views, there are now a multitude of theories of motivation from the
Freudian to the behavioristic. Thus, the social sciences are plagued not
just by surfeit of ‘facts’, but by an overpopulation of paradigms that bring
a surplus of facts that are inferred, or ‘non-facts’. In other words, the
obscurity or indeterminacy of the root causes of motivation allow for an
abundance of non-empirical assumptions as to how motivation works
that are at odds with each other, and cause psychology opinions to talk
past rather than to each other, as there are no commonly agreed
assumptions as to the basic facts of behavior.
We have seen that by placing a bounty on the quantity of research rather
than its quality, the physical and social sciences end up with literary
warehouses full of articles that almost no one will read and no one will
use. Nonetheless, the research literatures in the physical and biological
sciences, for all their opaqueness, prejudice, and frequent error, do make
an impact, and we can count the technological progress safeguarding our
health and wellbeing for that. However, the social sciences have as much
 35

impact on our present lives as Socrates’ haranguing’s on the Athenian

mob. We can tell this from our political, religious, and social institutions,
which have hardly progressed in acumen since medieval times, and are
influenced still by ancient texts. Thus Aristotle’s physics is forgotten, but
his politics are worth remembrance. The reason for this returns us to
Kuhn’s paradigms, which are as abundant in the social sciences as there
are gods in the pantheons of ancient religions. For in the social sciences,
non-empirical reasons for behavior are cherished for reasons that like
geo-centric reasoning of old, keeps the appearances, and will be
supported even if one must close one’s eyes, like Galileo’s telescope, to
the truth.

Bob’s Ark
In a ‘Far-Side’ cartoon, a unicorn, dragon, centaur, and winged horse
looked askance at the column of animals boarding the nearby Noah’s
Ark, and pitied its poor prospects as they went on board the much better
built Bob’s Ark. Needless to say, like black swans, no one knows for sure
that unicorns don’t exist somewhere, and if they were admitted into the
bestiary of known animals there would be no harm done, or so it seems.
Legendary animals are non-empirical creatures, or beasts whose
existence is merely inferred, in this case from tradition, myth, and an
errant observation now and then. But if we allowed mythical creatures
into the annals of existence, would our lack of prejudice to facts that we
are almost certain do not exist compromise all the other well-established
facts of daily observation, like white swans?
To illustrate, consider this mind experiment. In the year 2050, the
enlightened and progressive minds in higher education across the world
decided to make basic science an elective to those fields metaphorically
‘beneath’ those who practiced their exalted applications. Thus
physicians needed to know nothing about cellular microbiology, rocket
scientists did not need to study Newton’s laws, and computer chip
designers did not need to know anything about quantum mechanics. In
addition, studies of alchemy, witchcraft, and the scientific hypotheses of
 36

the ancients are given there due respect and equivalence. The result
would be a new breed of ignorant experts untethered to commonly
shared foundational principles and with a temptation to accept
uncommonly shared quackery, with disease and plagues ravaging the
land, planes falling out of the sky, cars that would not start, and
computers bricked and an internet collapsed. The world would be
welcomed back to the glory days of 1550, when science knew its place,
and with a newly undisciplined and incommensurable language,
scientists would talk past rather than to each other, rendering this
modern scientific Babel complete.
When more non-empirical events are allowed in any discipline, you
would have still great scientists, engineers, and doctors admittedly, but
also many more frauds and popular delusions, and a prospect for the
human race growing a lot dimmer. The remedy for this is not wiser
minds, but more disciplined ones, guided not by prejudice, but by
explanation. The aforementioned example of course would not and
could not happen because the physical and biological sciences are
rigorously hierarchical, and lower levels of analysis and their
accompanying metaphors that are shared up and down the hierarchy
dictate and constrain what you can and cannot do with the practical
applications of your craft. It constrains in other words the non-empirical
claims you can make, and with so the paradigms you can propose. And
this applies also to metaphors in their most specific and general forms.
So if you talk about virus’s and rocket motors as a biologist or engineer,
you can be sure that the man on the street will also have some semblance
of knowledge of what you are talking about.
Presently there is no hierarchy of knowledge in the social sciences, and
more specifically, the governing principles as to how motivation works.
Like the medieval scholastics who detached the cosmos from the physics
of human affairs due to the need to make literally elevated matters the
province of God, so too has the elevated status of the human mind
merited a detachment from elementary principles of learning and
motivation. Evolution or merely God’s favor functionally detached
 37

human motivation from that of the animals, and with the help of the
metaphorical embellishment of language, made us a breed apart. But are
we? That is the enduring question that can be only be answered by
explanation unfettered by any inferences unjustified by observation. But
explanation is not what we think, and embodies rules that make
explanation not a static but a progressive and ever evolving concept that
is never quite complete and grows stronger with criticism.
 38

Chapter 3
Making Explanations
“Weak science lets slip the dogs of unreason.” J.E.R. Staddon

“The anatomist presents to the eye the most hideous and disagreeable objects,
but his science is useful to the painter in delineating even a Venus or Helen.
While the latter employs the richest colors of his art, and gives his figures the
most graceful and engaging airs, he must still carry his attention to the inward
structure of the human body, the position of the muscles, the fabric of the bones,
and the use and figure of every part or organ. Accuracy is, in every case,
advantageous to beauty, and just reasoning to delicate sentiment. In vain would
we exalt the one by depreciating the other.” David Hume, Concerning Human
Understanding

Explanations are multi-metaphorical perspectives on a phenomenon,

and are rule based and are subject to criticism or test (falsification). We
use explanations to understand and manipulate our worlds and it is
because of explanations that we have an ever-progressing technological
society and can grasp the world from near infinite expanses to the near
infinitely small.
The rules for explanations are quite simple, and derive from a basic
linguistic representation of how we describe our world. We begin with
an elementary process, or a physical transformation in time, like a swan
flying across the sky or an apple falling from a tree. Each transformative
event is mapped to subjects, objects, and predicates, or in other words,
its reality or semantics is mapped to a set of symbols or a syntax. In
addition, the detail of what we observe can change depending upon our
perspective, whether the observation is from miles away or when closely
rendered through a telescope or microscope. The regularities we see in
 39

these transformations, such as the fall of an apple, can be generalized to

apply to other similar events like a shooting star, and be modified and
even rejected through test. Thus we come to four elements of an
explanation:

Elementary Process (action in time like the fall of an apple or the orbit
of a star)

Elementary Question (syntax, or data language, denoted alphabetically

or numerically)

Elementary Observation (semantics, or observed physical events

mapped by data language. E.g. (‘apples’ and ‘stars’ denote actual
observable objects.)

Augmented Observation (refined semantics, or reductionism, with

components of physical events mapped to a new data language)

Prediction and Test (falsifiability) Observations that factor, or transform

from one entity to another and their testable and novel predictions.

Explanations vary to meet the criteria of parsimony (only use observed

variables necessary for required precision of prediction), generality
(applicable across wide variety of phenomena), and depth (different
levels of observation inform and constrain each other) To achieve the
criteria of falsifiability explanations aim for depth, or an increasingly
augmented vision that simplifies the variables considered, and allows
them to be factored to apply to emergent events for practical
understanding and use and to make predictions that are subject to
falsification or test. Augmented observation or depth is an inductive
strategy, and surveys all aspects of reality, from the very large to the very
small. It does not give primacy to any level of analysis, as one
interpretation of a purely reductionist strategy would do, but instead
reduces the number of non-empirical events a scientist may hold because
it accounts for all of those events, or specifically the events that count for
the level of prediction desired. Thus the augmented observation
 40

provided by the telescope allowed scientists to replace non-empirical

assumptions such as the heliocentric and geocentric description of the
solar system with one overarching empirical observation, namely the
fact that the planets and earth rotate about the sun.
However, although augmented vision can reveal facts, induction does
not suffice to derive the present and possible relationships between facts.
This requires a deductive approach, epitomized by Newtonian laws, that
make testable predictions of how events interoperate or correlate. Thus,
as we have noted, Newtonian laws are tested every day through the
mundane technologies that govern our physical world, from cars and
trains to rockets to the moon and beyond. Through continual test, a
scientist can reaffirm or challenge the validity of the hypotheses that
underscore the relationships between observations and their emergent
attributes, resulting in their improvement or even abandonment. To
understand the importance of depth, or reducing a phenomenon to its
basic elements and how it remerges from those elements, or
reductionism, we must understand that in its essence reductionism just
comes down to simple numbers and their surprising implications, and
makes scientific progress easier, and sometimes infinitely so.

Prime Movers
Take any prime number, which is a whole number greater than 1 that
cannot be exactly divided by any whole number other than itself and 1
(e.g. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11). Next, multiply that number by itself a hundred or so
times. The resulting number can be derived from the prime with ease,
but deriving the prime from a very large number is downright
intractable, as it would require computing resources exponentially
greater than the computing power of all the atoms in the known
universe. The reason is that there is no efficient algorithm or formula to
factor the small from the large, whereas in the opposite direction a simple
calculator will do. In other words, deduction cannot help us to derive
basic facts from general observations. So, if you are going to compute
something very complex, and have the metaphors to understand how
 41

this is done and what that complex entity does, you must first reason
from a reductionist perspective that assays all facts and their
subcomponents first, or induction.
The inductive strategy of reductionism, or explaining the large from the
small, does not reduce the number of events one must engage with; they
are as innumerable on the atomic level as there are stars in the infinite
sky. Furthermore, it does not mean that you reason from a blurry
avalanche of events or variables or a highly complex series of equations.
What reductionism does is make events more similar or homogeneous.
So rather than talking about horses and rocks and trees, on lower levels
of analysis you are examining strands of DNA and other molecular
structures, and on still lower levels you are looking at a sea of near
identical particles blinking in and out like quantum ghosts. So although
the number of events may soar on the microscopic level, the types of
events are much more limited, and these limited events allow us to use
a more elementary data language to construct algorithms that can be
upwardly factored into the physical objects we see about us. In other
words, reductionism allows us to make the world numerical, and thus
computable. Thus, understanding DNA patterns can allow us to predict
the external and internal contours of an animal, and understanding the
mechanics of the quantum can allow us to engineer computer chips and
the internet. Reductionism allows us to divine the abstract properties of
existence, and use them to compute the world, or an IT from the bit. But
whereas we can compute the large from the small, the opposite, though
mathematically possible, is near intractable because of the lack of
efficient algorithms for the job. Thus deducing Newton’s laws from the
traffic patterns of a big city, the nature of DNA from a flock of sheep, or
Quantum mechanics from a thrown baseball is not possible.
A reductionist or bottom’s up perspective does not mean that we should
be using Newtonian mechanics to drive to work, but rather that we use
the metaphors of Newtonian principles to govern how we view the
mechanical world, its possibilities and limitations. In other words, a
lower level or reductionist level of analysis merely sets the parameters
 42

for the ‘emergent’ metaphorical language that one uses to describe and
manipulate the data observed. Thus, an ignorant peasant transplanted
from the 12th century would infer any number of animistic and fantastical
causes when confronted with planes, trains, and automobiles, but can
understand very quickly the principles behind these objects when
explained using these emergent metaphors, or first principles, and thus
be able to divine what these objects can and can’t do.
These ‘first principles’ are not reductionist principles in the logical but
rather in the metaphorical sense of the term, and start with the level of
analysis that allows you to make generalizable predictions about
progressively more complex systems. First principles are sets of
metaphors that can scale up or down in precision to meet the needs and
capabilities of the audience. Thus a child can talk about what a disease is
and how to mitigate it, a physician can talk about symptoms and
physiology, and a molecular biologist can use a different set of
metaphors for the genetic roots of disease.
First principles are fruitful, or make novel predictions if their logic is
extended to different circumstances. Thus a physicist can use Newtonian
mechanics to predict the movement of pistons and of galaxies, and
following Einsteinian principles can predict black holes, time dilation,
and the ends of the universe. Finally, first principles also constrain what
you can or cannot claim about classes of events, and keep the resulting
procedures within the bounds of reason and effectiveness. Thus,
understanding how diseases occur will constrain one from invoking
spirits, hormonal imbalances, or foggy days as the cause of a fever.
Reductionism does not grant us fine grain predictive power as much as
significantly improves the general ability to predict by eliminating
inferred variables that make no predictions at all like ‘ether’ and
‘phlogiston’, the imaginary entities that were the physical media
allowing for the passage of light and the heat from a fire. Thus, knowing
how disease works means that we can abandon animistic and physical
causes and effects and attend to real causes and effects, not simple
correlations. But how can we know what is real? Do we need
 43

observations first, an inductive approach where we can see all, or can

deduction suffice when the facts are not totally at hand, and still allow
us to derive simple truths? In the case of deducing elemental facts from
general observations, we have noted from the case of factoring
downward, deduction has its limits. But what if we are on a level playing
field?

On the Level
Perhaps the greatest fictional character who could unerringly divine the
real from the unreal and do so through pure deduction was Sherlock
Holmes. He could reconstruct the scene of the crime, including the crime,
the criminal and his motive, and all would be validated when the
malefactor confessed. However, this ‘proves’ nothing, as unless you have
video cameras observing the scene of the crime as it was committed,
there would always be room for conspiracy theories to dispute
unchallengeable ‘facts’.
The point is that pure deduction can never reveal facts, but can only
arrive at the lawful relationship of observations that can be
parsimoniously codified in metaphors of language, whether rendered in
the grammar of mathematics or common language. The seeming
exception being the emergent attributes of relationships, or the subjective
‘qualia’ of experience such as water emerging from the relationship
between atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. But this is simply the
experiential side of a coin, and does not represent a new fact but rather
an aspect of a relationship of facts. Indeed, one simply cannot do science
without a level of vision that provides an ensemble of observations to
work with, a matter indeed of simple induction. Locking Isaac Newton
in a garret without a view of nature, let alone an apple tree, would
prevent him from deducing the laws of motion, gravity and force
codified in a single falling apple. His level of observation would simply
not be adequate for any scientific conjecture or deduction. Indeed,
science requires using combined and interlocking levels of observation
that remove or limit the postulation of non-empirical events that impede
 44

true explanations. In other words, to do science observation must be level

adequate, which is a level of observation that reduces the number of non-
empirical assumptions in a theory to an acceptable minimum.
Hume’s classic observation about all swans being white on the basis of
local observations is a case in point. His observation did not have
empirical scope, thus the claim all swans are white included the non-
empirical assumption that swans had to be white that could only of
remedied by an adequate survey of the world. So only induction, not
deduction could resolve the issue. Similarly, observations by Ptolemy,
Copernicus, Brahe and Kepler did not have empirical depth. Although
Kepler’s model had theoretical simplicity, elegance, and predictive
power, nature is in its rights to be quite ugly, and epicycles may indeed
rule for an earth enclosed in crystal spheres or even on the back of an
infinite regress of turtles. Indeed, Ptolemy’s model was a theoretical
ramshackle, a complex and barely useful model that was continually in
need of the tightening of an epicycle here or there like unbound screws
to make the whole celestial clockwork work. Nonetheless, unless you can
see the celestial mechanics up close, you could never refute its reality, no
matter how absurd and unlikely that reality may be. So regardless of
how many logical holes you can punch into the model through
deduction and test, the assumption that deductive procedure rigorously
applied can eliminate acceptance of non-empirical events is simply not
true. Or as the philosopher David Kuhn stressed, “reality is not resolvable
through proofs.”

Getting Real
A harsh verdict on the state of medical science in the year 1820 would be
that it was not level adequate, as deductions or non-empirical inferences
on how disease worked on a molecular scale sufficed to replace the actual
observations or inductions that were then precluded due to the lack of
observational tools such as microscopes that could reveal the essence of
disease up close. Likewise, a harsh verdict on the state of social science
in the year 2020 is that is also not level adequate, as deductions as to how
 45

behavior worked on a molecular scale (e.g. drives, need, feelings) replace

an actual bio-behavioral account of incentive motivation.
So how to fix this issue? More often, you don’t. If you can’t or won’t look
closer, you can just bend, break, or ignore the rules of science, and change
how you test for reality within the range of the facts of the ‘normal
science’ you accept that is based on no small degree on non-empiric
principles. In other words, rather than resolve your unrealistic
assumptions, you simple use the relationships of the facts at hand, and
make sure they fit by fair means or foul. Reality testing means always to
test your ‘theory’ of the world within the scope of the facts you have at
hand. Every day we re-prove the law of gravity, and are reproved by
nature if we are ever to test it by falling down or falling off a building.
Reality testing, however, can come up with different results if we bend
the rules by ignorance or design. Thus gravity didn’t apply to the
rotating planets to a medieval observer because the observer couldn’t or
wouldn’t get up close. We are also selective in what we believe mainly
because it is hard to know what to believe. For our individual behavior,
how we move right or left is a much simpler proposition than why we
move right or left. In other words, the physics of behavior is much
simpler than the psychology of behavior. Indeed, what is in our minds
and what makes up our minds is as obscure and distantly observable as
the etchings of stars and planets before Galileo’s time. And like that
hidden cosmological vista, our vision of ourselves and our behavior is
clouded by a multitude of conscious and non-conscious variables that
are constantly changing, from memory of times past to feelings and
thoughts in the present to projections of futures to be. And it is much
harder to test our psychological reality if we do not know how to do so,
or know the ground rules to understand the interplay of memory, affect,
and reason which makes what we are and what we do.
We think pretty well and with scientific precision, realism, and
predictive accuracy when it comes to plumbing, carpentry, and the more
complex disciplines of engineering and mechanics. That is when we
construct the world, our words have unquestioned meaning and
 46

importance. However, when we think of behavior, outside of the general

truisms of economics and family morality, we often think not outside the
box but off the rails. The sources of behavior are hard for sure, but are
made much more difficult to understand if we bend or break scientific
logic to make them fit within the constraints of our speculative notions
of the truth, or in our case, human nature. We will see in the chapters to
follow how this acts to the detriment of the core ideas and principles of
the social sciences, but first let us return to physics to provide a
cautionary illustration.

Cannonball Run
Galileo’s and Kepler’s observations confirmed a new reality for the life
of cosmos, but the lawfulness of orbiting planets and outward stars were
specific to these creatures of the astronomical bestiary. It was from their
regularities that the 17th century mathematician and physicist Isaac
Newton derived his laws of mechanics, and the mathematical language,
the calculus, that could map and predict the motions of the world. So, if
you wish to shoot a cannonball and have it land in a certain place, and
want to be scientific about it, you would use Newtonian mechanics, and
from first principles, namely equations for mass, force, velocity, and
distance, you will be able to predict where the cannon ball will go.
Varying the numbers for any of the factors in the equation will get you a
prediction that matches your particular goals, whether it is shooting the
cannonball over a fence or shooting it into high orbit above the earth.
When Isaac Newton derived his laws of motion, gravity, and mechanics,
he not only followed the principles of science, but understood that if his
syntax and semantics were a bit off, then his theory would not get
anywhere, let alone the cannonball. The accurate prediction of the
cannon ball proved his theory, but one instance when it did not would
‘disprove’ it or at least force a reconfiguration of Newton’s laws. For the
workaday applications of Newtonian principles, from the dynamics of
an engine to the orbit of a shooting star, Newtonian principles work just
 47

fine. However, when we look to the galactically large to the

infinitesimally small, Newtonian principles break down, and one uses
Einstein field equations or quantum mechanics to predict their particular
worlds.
Newton was the supreme example of a successful scientist, but almost
all of his professional and non-professional peers were not, and it is easy
to see how they could have gone wrong. Even granting them the wits
and intelligence, they could all have been easily led astray by straying
from the rules of science. We can demonstrate this through a simple
mind experiment, putting us in the odd place of not following in
Newton’s footsteps, but erasing them. But if you are to emulate
Newton’s reasoning without a Newton to follow, where would you
start? Well with an experiment using a device that can demonstrate
through induction the lawfulness of an object cast into motion. For this
purpose a cannon would suffice, a necessary instrument to deduce the
laws of motion and force that could lay the groundwork for Newtonian
principles that guide the physics of our modern world. But what could
go wrong? Many things, it just depends upon ignorance, lack of
competence, or mal-intent, or more likely, all three. Just violate or bend
a scientific principle here or there, and you can prove, disprove, or just
make unworkable the physics of nature, depending upon your motives.
And you can create your own revolutionary footsteps, even though they
are more than likely to end up crashing into a wall.

How to game a science:

Syntax: Make theory less logically consistent or not consistent at all
Semantics: Make the theory have inadequate or no basis in reality
Parsimony: Make the theory more complex than necessary
Generality: Reduce the number of instances a theory may apply
Depth: Deny need to reduce to constituent parts
 48

How a Cannonball Runs20

Too Narrow Predictability (Generality) Observation has limited or no

generality. Equations for cannonballs are not extended to the orbit of the
moon or the fall of an apple. So instead of a theory of gravity or
mechanics, you just have a theory of cannonballs.
Too Broad Predictability (Generality) By observing hundreds of
instance of cannons firing you only know that how cannons in general
fire.
Minimal Explanation (Syntax and Semantics) Anything goes, as
obscurity in logic and meaning is not a defect but a virtue. Cannonball
just shoots, and ends up somewhere, the devil is in the details and may
even be part of the equation. Logic and meaning follows ‘folk’ rather
than scientific criteria, and is ad hoc, simplistic, and meets unquestioning
group norms rather than is subject to individual inquiry. Good for
religious, cultural and political standards where you can have traditional
folkways and mores and eccentric gods and spirits who may literally
move mountains and worlds.
Minimal Logic (Syntax) Just report a collection of facts without any
supervening theory. Thus cannons shoot, and cannonballs fly high and
fall.
 49

Minimal Facts (Semantics) Like unicorns and angels, cannons and

cannonballs are hypotheticals, and would act in certain mathematical
ways if they existed.
Surplus Logic (Syntax) Added theoretical propositions that are mapped
to inferred and obscure rather than real events or no events whatsoever.
Thus force equals mass times velocity divided by the invisible ether.
Surplus Facts (Semantics) You add wind speed, the pull of the moon,
friction in the gun barrel and other variables that make calculation near
intractable for a marginal gain in predictive power.
False Processes (Semantics) Inferred variables that have been falsified
but are added anyway, such as a cannonball’s arc being influenced by an
invisible substrate or ether.
False Observations (Semantics) Observer of the cannonball wears
opaque glasses and gets the measurements wrong.
Neglected Observations (Semantics) Local variables are ignored, such
incline or wind speed, with the heavy lifting done by other variables.
Also occurs when local variables are detailed but supervening variables
are inferred (or eclecticism), such as the nature of gravity.
Irrelevant Observations (Semantics) Correlating the cannon ball with
the time of day, number of clouds in the sky, and the steady hand of the
cannoneer.
Level Confusion (Depth) Conflating levels of analysis, or ‘level
confusion’. Thus putting forward the equation ‘’force equals mass times
velocity times a loud percussive noise” is putting two different levels of
analysis, the physical and the phenomenological, on the same level.
Incorrect level of Analysis (Depth) You don’t mind your distance or
don’t mind too much about it. So you view the cannon from ten miles
away, or so closely that you can count its atoms. Through either pole of
perspective the relevant variables are impossible to observe and control.
An incorrect level of analysis also denotes the wrong level of description
used to address the nature of the problem involved. Thus to say that a
hot pan hurts or that the sensation of hot pans is caused by the excitation
of nerve endings and resulting activation of brain centers depends upon
 50

whether you want to communicate that hot pans or to be avoided or how

hat pans cause pain.
No level integration (Depth) Levels do not mathematically or
metaphorically integrate. Thus a cannoneer does not envision a firing
cannon through Newtonian principles and a physicist is ignorant of the
application of Newtonian physics to cannonballs.

From Physics to Psychophysics

Physics is concerned with predicting and observing the movement of
heavenly bodies, whereas philosophy, and of late, psychology, is
concerned with predicting and observing the movement of human ones.
But physicists, as is the case with nearly all biological and physical
scientists, want more than mere prediction, they desire explanation.
Without explanation their fields of study become intractable, with an
inability to predict and account for the facts of existence.
All of the major schools of psychology, from evolutionary and social
psychology to personality and abnormal psychology to affective and
cognitive neuroscience nominally share this goal, with explanation sadly
lacking due the baggage of the accumulated prejudices of how human
nature should be, and in service of this desire to protect and validate the
inferred processes that make their career and the core paradigms of their
field from economics to neuroscience. Because of this perverse incentive
we will demonstrate in the next two chapters how social scientists often
do not work scientifically within their own paradigms, and can bend and
often break the rules of science to save the appearances, or the non-
empiric or inferred facts that sustain their belief system and that of their
sub-discipline itself. This can stall or impede the progress of science, and
inhibits its application as well as its understanding. This results in
theories of questionable logic and doubtful validity, and worse, the
corruption of entire sub-disciplines in the social sciences through an
implicit acceptance or even adoption of non-scientific principles.
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Part 2

Ab-Normal Science
 52

Chapter 4
Paradigms Lost
Science, as expected
The social sciences are sciences, or so they call themselves, and for better
or worse must be treated that way. As such, they are human institutions
built to serve humans, and are accountable to all humans. Common folks
have a say in how science works, is understood, and is funded. We know
this from the studies funded to show the origins of obesity and of stars,
and from its practical applications from the Manhattan project to the
Moon program. Good science is also a requirement of the popular
applications of science, from the internet to vaccines. So if your theory
doesn’t work in the physical and biological sciences, funding and
popular acclaim is not in the cards, and your moonshot collapses like a
house of cards. This is why nonsense in these realms has a shelf life of a
care bear in the Cretaceous. If it doesn’t make any practical sense, the
environment would swallow it whole, unless it is merely marked for an
academic audience, which in a different sense may also swallow it whole.
So what does the popular or common man or woman expect from
science? Let us restate our four criteria for good science.

1. Intelligibility (syntax and semantics)

The terms used in a scientific premise must map to real events. Thus John
picks up the ball and E = mc2 are intelligible statements because their
terms match real events.
2. Parsimony
The terms used in scientific theory may be scaled up and down to meet
the needs of the audience. Thus disease may be explained in the complex
data language of biochemistry, or in much simpler terms of germs and
infections to a grade school child.
 53

3. Generality
A scientific theory applies not only to the facts at hand, but also to related
facts in different domains. Thus Newtonian laws may be generalized to
not just cannonballs in flight, but orbiting moons and piston engines.
4. Depth
By deconstructing molar events to their molecular components, we can
more easily explain reality, and exclude non-realistic phenomena that do
not add anything to our hypothesis. Thus, by understanding the
molecular components of disease, we make a higher understanding of
disease more intelligible, parsimonious, and generalizable.

A reason why the social sciences have little imprint in human affairs is
that they require none of the above, or at the very least, merely the
semblance of meeting these criteria. That is because its literature is geared
to an audience as narrow as the scholastics that entertained and rejected
Galileo. That social scientists routinely break, bend or ignore these rules is
the reason why they are damned with faint praise, or not even that. So
how can we demonstrate this?

Ab-Normal Social Science

All schools of thought in the social sciences have core beliefs either explicit
or implied that are unobservable or non-empirical, and these beliefs often
cannot be resolved through the data languages and procedures they
normally employ. For example, the scholastics in Galileo’s time would
need Newtonian and Keplerian mechanics and the use of the telescope
before they could even venture to explain how the planets moved and
whether the earth indeed was the center of the universe. Even if their
curiosity was not circumscribed by institutional prejudice and pressure,
they simply did not have the means or language available now to even a
grade school student to explain the solar system and how it moved. The
issue is similar for social scientists, as they cannot hope to resolve the
issues of the paradigms that govern their individual schools of thought
 54

without integrating their beliefs with at least a rudimentary

understanding of how motivational processes are instantiated in the
human brain.
What direction to take for a dissenting voice could lead to stark
consequences. So to explain a non-empirical event a revolutionary
scientist may need to derive a new data language and use different tools,
and like a modern Galileo, abandon the camaraderie and approval of his
peers, or he could use the procedures and tools within his discipline, and
change the interpretation of the data at hand to save the appearances.
This could be adding an epicycle here and there like Ptolemy, or
rearrange the orbits of the planets and sun like Tycho Brahe. However,
if he chose the Galilean path, he would be alone, or worse, in exile.
Normal science could also be called traditional science, a metaphor that
can better serve the emotional and logical reasons why scientists would
prefer to work within their own paradigms, and leave their respective
essential non-empirical truths unchallenged. Breaking any tradition
comes with its own risks that are often just not worth the effort, no matter
how confident one would be in its value and results. Like a church goer
questioning a major tenet of the faith, faith does count for something, and
practitioners are often better served by working within their own
scientific congregation rather than be cast out into the cold.
In this regard it is not surprising that the revolutionaries that challenge
scientific dogma come from the outside and with few affiliations and
allegiances that can make them reconsider their heresies. Copernicus
was one of those rare non-traditional thinkers who threaded the needle
by publishing his revolutionary hypothesis after his death. Galileo,
Newton, Einstein and the many other revolutionaries that followed him
chose not to have their works be their tombstone, and had no concern
with the approbation their views would cause. Luckily for almost all of
them that the Inquisition had seen better days.
But if non-empirical assumptions are left unchallenged this can often
lead a practitioner in a quandary, as he or her would have to juggle the
variables in their own paradigm to account for the inconsistencies and
 55

inaccurate predictions of their governing paradigm. To do this, they

simple stretch and often break the rules and norms of science, and save
the appearances by tying their subject matters into metaphorical knots
that can only be understood by their compatriots, or so they assume. And
as for the uninitiated public as well as rival schools, they are regarded
with condescension or indifference.
A core assumption of how to do science, prove science, and how science
develops is that when working within any scientific paradigm that a
scientist will work scientifically. In this and the next chapter we will
illustrate from many examples in the social sciences that this is often not
the case. We will demonstrate how the syntactical and semantic terms
that frame any hypothesis can be omitted, distorted, over complexified
or simplified, or lack generality. In other words, we will show how in
many cases, social scientists do not work scientifically within their own
paradigms. They save the appearances of what they don’t know by
distorting what they do know, and through this metaphorical fun house
can mirror a universe entirely of their own making.
In this chapter, we will demonstrate how social scientists can save the
appearances, or the inferred truths that are core to their discipline, by
bending, breaking or outright ignoring the key principles of science.
Subsequently, in the chapter to follow we will discuss those inferred
truths themselves that define the major schools of psychology from
social psychology to behaviorism, and how they are at variance from
what we do know about behavior when observed neurologically, or up
close.
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Too Narrow Predictability

Too many paradigms
“Those who believe that prudence and common sense demands that one must
avoid a commitment to any particular research strategy fail to realize that such
a belief constitutes a commitment to a definite research strategy-the strategy of
eclecticism. This strategy scarcely qualifies as prudent or scientifically sensible.
By picking and choosing epistemological and theoretical principles to suit the
convenience of each puzzle, eclecticism guarantees that its solutions will remain
unrelated to each other by any coherent set of principles. Hence eclecticism
cannot lead to the production of theories satisfying the criteria of parsimony and
coherence. Rather, eclecticism is a prescription for perpetual scientific disaster:
middle range theories, contradictory theories, and unharmonious theories
without end.”21 Marvin Harris

One of the characteristics of being dogmatic as reflected in one’s political,

religious, and social orientation is a belief in core inferred principles or
facts. But all paradigms are not created equally, and many problems in
the social sciences are addressed without a firm commitment to any
particular scientific point of view. Using an astronomical example, a 17 th
century astronomer, if still bereft of a telescope, may encounter the
problem of explaining the orbits of Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, and use
separate paradigms for each of them. Thus Venus’ orbit may be
explained through a Ptolemaic model, Mars’ orbit may be described
using a Copernican model, and Jupiter’s path would track according the
Tycho Brahe’s unique design. The problem is that the solution for each
of these problems would be unrelated to the others, and the
methodology and results for one planet would not be generalizable to
the others. This is the problem of eclecticism, where the commitment to a
paradigm is dependent upon singular questions, not classes of questions.
More often however, eclectic solutions have no commitment to any
 57

paradigm, and have no demarcation between what is real and what is

inferred. The best example of this are the helpful hints, aphorisms,
mottos, and suggestions which populate social media, self-help books
and the internet. Anchored to the status or reputation of a single pundit,
psychologist, or self-help guru, eclectic solutions are parsimonious, but
lack generality and depth, and are thus more resistant to falsification and
test. This raises the question, are they helpful, unhelpful, and if so, in
what ways and in what other social and individual contexts? Outside of
unreliable testimonials, no one knows for sure. In addition, because
eclectic research is derived from no single principle, it is in effect un-
principled, and devolves into simple lists of unrelated principles that are
easy to understand in themselves, but are unrelated to each other and
derive from no single overarching principle. Thus, just as having
separate physical laws for baseballs, cannonballs, and orbiting moons
may be separately simple but in the aggregate confusing, so too are
having separate psychological laws for the psychological domains of
leadership, kinship, class, prejudice, social bonding and more are
attractive in the singular, but baffling in the plural. Finally, because
eclectic principles have too many theoretical commitments, they in effect
have none, and devolve into simple heuristic rules or rules of thumb that
can get us by for individual problems, but can never have the universal
acceptance or generality that can unify policy alternatives whether in the
personal or in the aggregate for society at large. But what happens when
a scientist eschews making inferred inferences or theoretical
commitments about hidden causes, and just goes with the data that is at
hand and not looking beyond? That as we shall see is a problem as old
as science.

Hypotheses non Fingo

In 1687, Isaac Newton published his landmark work “Philosophiæ
Naturalis Principia Mathematica”, or the ‘Principia’ which explained his
law of motion, his law of universal gravitation, and the derivation of
Kepler’s law of planetary motion. In the second edition of the book
 58

published in 1713, Newton added the essay “General Scholium,” where

he proposed his famous “hypotheses non fingo.” Newton admitted that
he had not discovered the reason for the properties of gravity, and he
refused to speculate on its explanation.
With Newton’s laws, gravity was mathematically described, but not
explained. To his credit, he did not hypothesize an inferred or non-
empirical cause of gravity as an eclectic placeholder for what he did not
know. Nonetheless, there is a difference between not knowing how to
answer a question and dismissing the importance of the question entire.
If the mechanics of everyday and celestial objects is what you are looking
for, then the importance of an explanation of gravity is not important,
but if an explanation could offer extended predictive power to those areas
of knowledge where your theory only imperfectly or does not apply,
then that question is of first importance. That of course was Einstein’s
key insight, when his theory or relativity not only preserved Newton’s
vision, but expanded it to areas where Newton in his time could not see,
from the relativity of time and space to the birth of the universe itself.
In the social sciences, the plethora of incompatible paradigms is matched
by the absence of the interlocking of paradigms, or as E. O. Wilson put
it, the ‘consilience’ or unity of knowledge. For science, and the social
sciences to advance, eliminating inferred processes is the first step, but
interlocking observed processes is the second. Only then can the
boundless possibilities of nature and human nature be revealed, and
with luck, enhanced.

Too General Predictability

Undefined Paradigms
One of the distinctions between human beings and cannon balls is that
humans have a lot more moving parts. Because human beings are not
cannon balls or shooting stars, the gravity of a personal situation that
gets you down is not quite the same as the actual gravity that pulls you
down. Throwing a ball from a to b is easy to calculate using simple
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physical laws, however the motivation that gets you to throw that ball in
the first place is well-nigh intractable. There are just too many variables
to account for to predict what any individual would do if simply given a
ball. So if you cannot predict specifically, you predict generally. And here
is why statistics come in to measure up by measuring in between.
Consider a standard experiment to illustrate this. Take two groups of 100
people, and for each group dispense a sugar pill or pain reliever pill
while making sure that the experimenters or the subjects do not know
which is which. This ‘double-blind’ experiment insures that subject
reactions are not swayed by a placebo effect, and that the experimenters
also cannot tilt the results by how they communicate to the subjects. If
the subjects who receive the pill generally respond better than the sugar
pill, this result is gauged statistically, and a high ‘confidence level’
insures that the results are most likely not the result of chance. Although
an experimenter can demonstrate through this and similar experiments
the generality of a result, the specificity of the result for an individual
subject cannot be predicted. Thus one person may respond better or less
well than her peers, and may also report side effects to the medication
which may or may not be due to the medication itself.
This underscores the fact that between group designs can only measure
correlations, and do not provide explanations. This guarantees that your
paradigm will only harbor general truths, and not explain how in this
case a medication actually works. Statistics has its place, but it cannot
take the place of explanations that constrain where your inferences will
take you and allow you to in turn make testable inferences. To
understand this, let us return to our cannonball, and put it in orbit about
the sun. If the sun and the cannonball were all there was in the cosmos,
the trajectory and precision of its orbit would be easy to calculate.
However, adding in asteroids, planets, moons, and other stars soon
make an accurate calculation near intractable, as their gravitational pull
would throw the calculations off. Now let us say that you were an
observer from afar who knew nothing about Newtonian mechanics.
Trying to deduce the trajectory of the cannon ball in a cosmos busy with
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innumerable celestial objects would be near impossible, as there would

be no efficient algorithm possible to calculate it. So instead, you can
deduce the general principles of the cannon ball in one solar system by
comparing it statistically to another solar system which has a different
planetary arrangement. On the other hand, if you studied the physics of
only one orbiting cannonball and one star, you could not only deduce
Newtonian principles, but have the efficient algorithm to make effective
calculations as you add in more and more celestial objects. Of course,
even this would require extensive calculations, so you would settle for
less efficient predictions from the calculations you have, but still know
pretty well where the cannon ball will go.
In the former example, statistical operations could provide the general
pattern of the cannonball’s motion, but it could not derive the Newtonian
algorithm that predicts the motion of cannonballs, whereas in the latter
example, Newtonian principles could be derived from individual events
and allow you to derive generalizable truths. Extended to the social
sciences, this means that using statistics to derive differences between
groups of subjects will result in findings that are not interlocked by a
common elementary principle. This applies to people and cannonballs
equally.
Because research programs in the social sciences are dominated by
between group designs, they have devolved to endless comparisons
between groups, individuals, and individual cases, with the true causes
of behavior wholly inferred rather than real. In other words, because
motivation is complex it is therefore permanently obscure, and at most
can only be resolved not by deduction, but by inductive procedures that
look to correlations rather than causes. By comparing one group to one
group, or a between group design, rather than looking at individual
changes within individual subjects at various levels of analysis, or a
within group design, the nature of things becomes fuzzy, with a resulting
social scientific perspective that is all syntax, or word play, with little
semantics, or rooting words to actual behavioral or neurological events.
By holding to the standard of a similar and often provincial syntax
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(unified language) rather than similar semantics (unified meaning), the

social sciences lose their moorings, and becomes less science than
literature, and become not unified under common principles, but
divided into endless provinces bounded by the incommensurate
paradigms.
Not that this is a hard choice for social scientists, as coming up with
general or fuzzy results allows you to validate your paradigm in a way
we often validate our appearance through a clouded mirror. But there is
one major difference between within and between group designs which
tips the scales in the latter’s favor, namely that correlational experiments
are much easier to design, execute, and publish. This is because within
group or explanatory designs have to delve deeper, and require ever
changing and specialized instrumentalities and data languages to
resolve the problems at hand. For the social sciences that must consider
its complex subject of human behavior and its multiple mechanics and
motivations, the choice is obvious when trying to ferret out the ‘why’ of
behavior, as correlational studies compose more than 95% of published
papers in these disciplines, with explanation eschewed or neglected
altogether.22 But the natural incentive of the simplicity of correlational or
‘between group’ studies does not account for the added perversity of the
incentives which brings the social scientists to exponentially increase
their studies, even when passively interested in subject matter.

Minimal Explanation
Folk Psychology
The lawful regularities of life are not so much learned as outsourced, and
that includes the application of the biological and physical laws which
keep our planes flying, our computers running, our hearts beating, and
our trains running on time. These laws succeed because they are
dependent upon deep explanations of our physical and biological
worlds. However, explanation is absent for the psychological regularities
of life that for all their diversity and seeming import, are the province of
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academics, therapists, marketers, prelates and politicians, who each have

a mind, and a unique explanation of minds of their own.
Basic psychological as well as physical laws are something we infer from
the rudiments of experience. This may be from personal experience or
from the observed behavior of others in family and work places as well
as the public at large through the economic, political, and religious
institutions that guide them. They are the lessons that if proven
repeatedly useful become the mores and folkways that guide our lives.
This ‘folk’ psychology is parsimonious in its prescriptions, but has no
explanatory depth, and supports a bounteous number of inferred
motivational processes such as habit, temptation, will power, needs and
drives. There is little formal logic in folk psychology, and less meaning,
as ad hoc correlations prove the rule. In other words, folk psychology is
inductive reasoning that we accept because of personal experience,
tradition, revelation, or coercion, and we accept it because we conclude
that our perception that conforms to our peers or superiors cannot be
wrong. We use these correlations to pre-judge behavior and its causes,
and as prejudices can have results that are benign (hard work is good),
to useless (pizza is bad for breakfast) to harmful (racial prejudice).
Fortunately, sound explanations can constrain the often-erroneous folk
ideas we may have about how the world works. Thus the minimal
explanations that even children can use about how jet engines, cars,
disease, and orbiting moons work are derived from and are constrained
by their more complex counterparts. However, folk psychology is not so
constrained, as it is not informed by a generally accepted explanation of
motivation. Ironically, the opposite is the case. Indeed, folk psychology
influences psychological science through the latter’s formalization of
folk concepts of drive, temptation, habit, will power, reward, and more.
In this way, popular psychology is accepted and promoted because of its
face validity, or its coherence with the normal ways people categorize
and think about motivation. These are the ‘self-evident’ truths that for
better or worse we use to justify our individual and collective behavior.
The irony however is that self-evidence is not evidence at all, but an
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inference that evidence must be there, and therefore any questioning

would be of no value, and indeed would be erroneous in itself, and even
worthy of condemnation, as independent thinkers like Galileo
unfortunately found out for themselves.

Self-Evident Truths
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these
are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”-Preamble to the American
Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson

Ultimately, our day-to-day behavior is dependent on the heuristic rules

or rules of thumb that we learn from our daily experience. It is only
when their general application is considered that these personal rules
can falter, as what is good for you individually is not necessarily good
for the population at large. Here we again accept from tradition the
formal rules for behavior derived from or moral, religious, economic, or
political institutions. Sometimes these rules derive from a well-
considered egalitarian philosophy, an influence from the French
philosophers of the age of enlightenment taken to heart by the American
founding fathers.
But self-evident truths can be as unsurprisingly harmful as they are
beneficial. In such philosophies, it may be equally ‘self-evident’ that the
individual must be subordinate to the group, and sometimes
additionally subordinated due to his or her race, religion, sex, or class.
Thus political philosophies such as communism, socialism, and
totalitarianism work with beneficent clockwork if their estimate of
human nature was correct and profound, but when it does not as is the
usual case, then like the prelates who disputed Galileo, one could just
put dissenters out of mind or even in jail.
All social and political philosophies are founded on inferred or ‘self-
evident’ truths about the nature of mankind and how and why men and
women are motivated to do the things they do, and self-evident truths
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require no explanation. The different religious, political, and social

movements that rend society today and in the past are due to these
warring ‘truths’ that are unresolved and are compounded by the social
sciences, which introduce a multitude of ‘truths’ of their own. Still, the
only certainty is that there is only one certainty, and to find that we must,
as Galileo did, look not more widely but more closely at why we are
motivated in the first place. This of course restates the primacy of
explanation, and the importance of continuous criticism in act and
application that test even the most assured and sacred truths.

Minimal Depth
The devil made me do it
There are some facts of life that we just have to take on faith. Not that
faith is a bad thing, as it is a useful placeholder until we ultimately face
reality, whether it is in this life or the afterlife. In past eras, animistic
beliefs were foundational not only for psychology, but for the physical
and biological sciences as well, and God spun the cosmos about with
mankind in the center, and outsourced to nefarious satanic agents a
multitude of temptations to sway us from our right behavior. The belief
in literally disembodied entities that slanted our behavior from its
rational course has been replaced by figuratively disembodied entities
residing in our own minds that have similar agency that follow not
heavenly rules but mentalistic ones. Thus willpower, ego, and various
disembodied drives, need states, and other inferred mental processes are
proposed to fill in the gap between reason and behavior or stimulus and
response. Mentalisms are inferred properties in the human mind whose
properties are as changeable and amorphous as the epicycles that a
Ptolemaic astronomer could adjust at will to explain the erratic
movements of any celestial body. Mentalisms don’t explain anything
because they cannot predict anything, and are ‘a-postoriori’ entities
whose existence is justified after the fact, and like Ptolemaic epicycles,
constitute no ‘facts’ at all.
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Mentalisms are not consistent because they have no explanatory depth

that can unite them under one explanatory hierarchy. Whereas medical
therapies derive from and are constrained by singular explanations for
disease, infection, and of knowledge of how cardio vascular and neuro-
musculature systems work, psychotherapies are generally based on
wholly inferred processes that are fitted to a therapy and its outcome.
And when the therapy changes, so do the processes, so by changing an
epicycle or two in the human mind, protocol matches process, and all is
well.
The problem with this mentalistic approach is that it invites an endless
series of theoretical models that all in their eclectic fashion succeed in
explaining the narrow problem defined. Nowhere is this more apparent
than in the innumerable mental models psychologists use to establish
and justify their procedures for individual behavioral change, or
psychotherapies. As Eleanor Cumming noted in an article in the
magazine ‘Wired’, therapies tend to be individually dressed for success.
“And while therapy is commonly discussed as if it were a single entity, there are
hundreds of distinct theoretical models currently used, from EMDR to Gestalt
to CBT. Depending on whom you ask, at least 20 orientations fly under the
banner of psychoanalysis alone. Each provides its own model of the brain or
mind, the nature of distress, and the path to healing—in other words, its own
value system. Even so, therapists commonly mix and match a number of
techniques learned in graduate school, from early mentors, and at weekend
workshops. This is done mostly for pragmatic reasons, as every client needs a
slightly different form of support. The practice has also been supported by the
‘Dodo bird verdict’ of psychotherapeutic models—named for the Lewis Carroll
line, “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes”—which claims that all
models are equally helpful or unhelpful.
But it’s unclear if the verdict holds up, says Alex Williams, program director of
psychology at the University of Kansas. In fact, very little about contemporary
psychotherapy is actually backed by credible evidence. In a meta-review of 70
purported empirically supported treatments,23 Williams and his colleagues
found only 20 percent of the interventions are based on reliable studies. An
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additional 30 percent were in the “murky middle,” and fully half of the
treatments under review didn’t have the evidence their boosters thought they
did. For Williams, contemporary therapy is resting on more of a “don’t-know
bird verdict.”
So here we have eclecticism write large, with explanations fitted to the
styles of psychotherapeutic conversation and support, and with all
therapies working as they should, and all therapists winning prizes. But
as we will see later in this chapter, the more mundane facts of
psychological life, neglected by and large by psychotherapists, are a
better alternative to mentalism, but at a cost.

Surplus Logic
Word Salad
“If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.” Voltaire

All the facts in the world don’t count if you can’t make sense of them,
and we can easily make sense of the world by mapping them to logical
rules. Thus we can more easily understand events through simplifying
them, paring redundancies, eliminating meaningless syntax, or in other
words, just getting to the point. These become the rules of thumb that get
us by, and allow us to make quick and reliable decisions. That’s practical
wisdom for the individual, but often impractical to an individual who
wants to communicate something else to you far less easily and get paid
for it.
Words can be powerful and imposing, even if you don’t know what they
mean, as it’s the context that counts. And from the context of a
document’s source can be perceived the value, competence, and
importance of the individual or entity communicating to you. However,
simplicity can be the enemy of perceived competence, particularly if you
are incompetent, or wish to raise your stature as well as your fees. That’s
the practice of law for you, where the incentive to be unnecessarily
complex can be very pecuniary indeed. This extends to many other
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documents from cell phone plans to psychology journal articles. For

example, let’s say you want to sign up for a new phone plan and want to
decide which one is best for you. In addition to the advertising by words
that grab your attention, it’s the fine print that will get you in the end.
Similar items like mobile phones are advertised at various price plans
according to different combinations of available minutes, text messaging
capabilities and other services, thus making these offers practically
incomparable when it could be easy to price similar units of usage to
allow informed comparisons. In addition, to make a sound decision, you
need to make sense of all the provisos, rules, regulations, fees and more
that are explained to you in print that is exceedingly fine but not so fine
for your ready understanding. In other words, as a practical matter, is
just pays to be confusing. Scott Adams, the author of the comic strip
‘Dilbert’, coined the term ‘confusopoly’ as a marketing tool designed to
prevent the buyer from making informed decisions. He defined it as "a group of
companies with similar products who intentionally confuse customers instead
of competing on price or performance.”
Being confusing is not necessarily bad in itself, as a do it yourself manual
on how to fix your toilet or set up your internet can be confusing too, and
a college chemistry or calculus text can be downright incomprehensible.
The issue is whether a complex argument is a meaningful argument, and
uses terms that can map to real events that can be arranged in predictable
and falsifiable ways, and that minimize meaningless or arcane words, or
useless phrases, or syntax. The likes of legalese and cell phone plans are
confusing because they add unnecessary syntax that is merely linguistic
embellishment, and have no meaning in itself. A needlessly confusing
document forces us to sort out the meaningful from the meaningless, a
chore that many consumers understandably give up on and the authors
count on, being practically minded as they are.
For the social sciences, adding complex words as linguistic
embellishment or mapping syntax to inferred and nebulous processes is
like throwing a metaphorical rock in the conceptual gears, and forces the
reader to accept a confusing or miraculous event that ties the equation
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together, or else to reject the whole theory. Compelling a reader to accept

an explanation that he cannot understand doesn’t work in a logical
manner, but it certainly works as a practical manner. And as a practical
matter is just pays to be confusing. Indeed, psychology journal articles
are getting more complicated, with readability steadily decreasing.24

This concept of pragmatism, championed by the Victorian psychologist

William James, is resolutely inductive (i.e. correlations prove the rule),
with no commitment to absolute truth, but rather the belief that truth can
be modified; and that ideas are to be evaluated by whether they promote
consistency and predictability. In other words, usability is the true gauge
of the efficacy of an idea or principle, an agreeable notion to Galileo’s
critics at least. But usability comes at a cost, namely the ability to
generalize to other phenomena, and to be rendered usable to other
individuals of less intellectual acumen, or its lack or parsimony. As a
good example of this, consider a theory of language based on behaviorist
principles called ‘relational frame theory’ that birthed in turn
‘Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’, another cure for all. “It proposes
that human cognition and communication are founded in our capacity for
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identifying and creating relational links between stimuli, and made possible by
our arbitrarily applicable relational responding ability.”25 Simple enough,
until you get to the details. Thus…
“According to RFT, the core of human language and cognition is the learned
and contextually controlled ability to arbitrarily relate events mutually and in
combination, and to change the functions of specific events based on their
relations to others. For example, very young children will know that a nickel is
larger than a dime by physical size, but not until later will the child understand
that a nickel is smaller than a dime by social attribution. In addition to being
arbitrarily applicable (a nickel is “smaller” than a dime merely by social
convention), this more psychologically complex relation is mutual (e.g., if a
nickel is smaller than a dime, a dime is bigger than a nickel), combinatorial (e.g.,
if a penny is smaller than a nickel and a nickel is smaller than a dime then a
penny is smaller than a dime), and alters the function of related events (if a nickel
has been used to buy candy a dime will now be preferred even if it has never
actually been used before). 26
And from this not so clear explanation devolved Acceptance and
Commitment Therapy, which is equally unclear. “The core conception of
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’ or ‘ACT’ or (as it is usually called
outside of a therapy context, Acceptance and Commitment Training ... also
"ACT") is that psychological suffering and a failure to prosper psychologically
is usually caused by the interface between the evolutionarily more recent
processes of human language and cognition, and more ancient sources of control
of human behavior, particular those based on learning by direct experience.
Psychological inflexibility is argued to emerge from six basic processes. Stated
in their most general fashion these are emotional inflexibility, cognitive
inflexibility, attentional inflexibility, failures in perspective taking, lack of
chosen values, and an inability to broaden and build habits of values-based
action. Buttressed by an extensive basic research program on an linked theory of
language and cognition, Relational Frame Theory (RFT), ACT takes the view
that trying to change difficult thoughts and feelings in a subtractive or
eliminative way as a means of coping can be counterproductive, but new,
powerful alternatives are available to deal with psychological events, including
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acceptance, cognitive defusion, mindful attention to the now, contacting a

deeper "noticing" sense of self or "self-as-context", chosen values, and
committed action. These six flexibility processes are argued to be inter-related
aspects of psychological flexibility. Each of these in turn can be extended socially.
For example, acceptance of emotions can extend to compassion for others; chosen
values can extend to social values; a "noticing" sense of self to healthy social
attachment; and so on.”27
When encountering this word salad, more than a few behaviorists just
threw up their hands in confusion and derision. The behaviorist Jose
Burgos, no slouch when it came to writing complicated arguments, was
caustically dismissive of the whole RFT/ACT enterprise. “In sum, I found
the concepts, logic, and justification of RFT to be unintelligible, and when not,
incoherent, misguided, trivial, and sterile. Of course, in the presence of
unintelligibility, any criticism can be rendered as “misunderstanding.” Being
unintelligible thus can be quite a useful practice, which is all-too consistent with
a commitment to pragmatism, at least of the Jamesian type…. If functional
contextualism is a form of Jamesian pragmatism, then I cannot but see the book
as a result of the kind of intellect…., where nonsense is rampant (largely a means
for convincing the unwary and coping with criticisms from the cautious) and
the reader is blamed for the writer’s carelessness. In this sense, the book strikes
me as yet another application of Harry S. Truman’s maxim “If you cannot
convince them, confuse them.” Under Jamesian pragmatism, anything goes,
even nonsense, as long as it is useful to someone. Such is the misery of Jamesian
pragmatism, for which behaviorists (and scientists in general) would be better
off by distancing ourselves from it as quickly and far as possible… In sum, I
found the concepts, logic, and justification of RFT to be unintelligible, and when
not, incoherent, misguided, trivial, and sterile. Of course, in the presence of
unintelligibility, any criticism can be rendered as “misunderstanding.” Being
unintelligible thus can be quite a useful practice, which is all-too consistent with
a commitment to pragmatism.”28
Of course, proof is in the pudding, and RFT/ACT is just one recipe to be
added to the myriad others that explain behavior by emphasizing syntax
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over semantics, or in other words, not defining your terms. It may be

right or wrong, but it certainly is practical.

Surplus Facts
The N-body problem
“When I read academic literature, all too often by paragraph three I'm lost in a
morass of quantitative analysis that is far beyond not only my abilities but those
of almost every businessperson I've ever met. In my view, the authors devote far
too much of their time conducting research and writing about it in articles that
only their peers understand and spend too little time actually teaching. As a
result, their students are getting progressively less for their money, a guarantee
of future serious trouble for higher education.” Larry Zicklin, Professor at New
York University’s Stern School of Business.”

Knowing that the world is a complicated place and all the parts that go
into it becomes infinitely harder when its set-in motion, and the universe
can become an intractable clockwork that beggars our understanding.
We solve this issue by our ability to distill or abstract the foundational
elements of a problem, and compute from there. So we pare the variables
that we can track and use our best and most reliable predictions that will
allow us to catch the bus on time. From the timing of a bus we can move
to the timing of a moon, and here the loss of precision is not taken very
well. Certainly Isaac Newton recognized this when he tried out his
equations, and failed.
“Knowing three orbital positions of a planet's orbit, Newton was able to produce
an equation by straightforward analytical geometry, to predict a planet's
motion, i.e., to give its orbital properties: position, orbital diameter, period and
orbital velocity. Having done so, he and others soon discovered over the course
of a few years, those equations of motion did not predict some orbits correctly or
even very well. Newton realized that this was because gravitational interactive
forces amongst all the planets were affecting all their orbits.”29
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The ‘n-body’ problem30 that Newton encountered demonstrated that

even the most robust theories become near intractable to employ when
the number of facts, or in this case worlds, multiplies. We see that
precision has its costs, and by narrowing the scope of the variables
considered, Newton was able to predict a planet’s orbital properties to
an acceptable degree of accuracy given his need to parsimoniously
communicate and employ his mathematical theory. If he was reluctant
or not able to do so, then the usefulness or even validity of his theory
could be called into account.
Intelligibility in any argument means that it must not only make sense
but be sensibly followed. Physicists know this and can parsimoniously
communicate the most complex mathematical ideas by reducing their
theories to the variables that count. Some precision may be lost in the
process, but what is gained are parsimonious theories whose functional
and testable predictions can be used from engineers to school children.
When communication is lost, so too is testability compromised as the
theory become impossible to disprove and just as hard to understand.
Unfortunately, since their research is geared to journal editors rather
than the general public, all of these provide a perverse incentive to add
in many variables along with a similar boost in diverse nomenclature
that can gain academic acceptance but not general understanding or
general or even academic criticism.
Below is a lesson on how to communicate how the brain works, as well
as how not to, depending upon your audience that is:
The top-down self-regulation of emotion—which necessarily involves the ability
to be aware of one’s current emotional state—similarly recruits regions of the
brain’s central-executive network, including the dlPFC.. A meta-analysis of the
neural correlates of emotion regulation indicates that the dlPFC facilitates the
regulation of emotion through its more general function in top-down self-
regulation. Research from our laboratory has found that individual differences
in functional connectivity between different sectors of the PFC and amygdala is
a significant predictor of objective measures of the regulation of negative
emotion, with greater inverse connectivity associated with better emotion
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regulation. In a subsequent study, we found that inhibiting lateral PFC with

transcranial magnetic theta burst stimulation interferes with automatic emotion
regulation, thus establishing a causal role for the lateral PFC in emotion
regulation. This may explain why abnormal functioning of the central executive
network, and lateral regions of the PFC more specifically, are associated with a
range of psychiatric disorders.” 31
In other words, emotion regulation is difficult when the pre-frontal
cortex (the thinking part) is disconnected.
As the above passage underscores, heavy with observation and light on
ready understanding, the human brain is the most complex of all our
bodily organs, and neural processes like the ones accounted for above
are not the exception but the rule. Replete with innumerable organelles,
neurotransmitters, cellular structures, and processes that govern all
aspects of our existence, from hunger pangs to the pangs of love, the
quest for parsimonious explanations staggers in the face of such
complexity. Fortunately, as existence requires a division of labor, from
walking and talking to perceiving, thinking, sensing, and remembering
to even conscious itself, we can reduce these functions to the neural
traces embodied in different areas of our brains. Still, precise prediction
even if all processes are accounted for is impossible, so what can one do
when confronted with this intractably complex machine called the
human brain?
Well, it helps to pare our logic in order to spare our predictions, and for
this physics can again be illustrative. In order to understand and predict
the world sometimes you have to do without, and this means paring the
number of variables you consider and the accuracy they would
otherwise bring to your predictions. As we illustrated earlier,
Newtonian physics arrive at generally accurate predictions when only a
few variables are considered, but precisely accurate predictions are also
possible, if you consider a host of other variables held in abeyance, but
the near intractable calculations involved comes at the cost of ready
explanation and test. Making an explanation more understandable by
reducing the number of variables also increases its capacity to be
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validated or falsified, a primary requirement for theory building. Indeed,

Newtonian mechanics could never have been tested if it required the
inclusion of all the variables required for perfect predictive accuracy.
This is indeed the case for all good theories, as they include not all
possible variables but all manageable variables, as we will demonstrate in
our parsimonious survey of motivation in the final chapters of this book.

Neglected Observations
Psychotherapy
Take any medicine for a cold, and chances are within a week you will
feel better and the cold will be gone because of your naturally occurring
immune response aided or perhaps unaided by the medication itself. In
addition, because you believe the medicine will alleviate your symptoms
or your ailment, the belief alone or placebo effect will have you feeling
better in no time, or simply because of a common-sense suggestion or
insight you receive from the media, like the therapeutic benefits of a bowl
of chicken soup. These mitigating variables are often completely ignored
by the suffering party, and conveniently omitted in the sunny advert on
the front of the box, which after all is there to sell you on the ‘cure’.
For our mental problems, these misattributions are the same. Consider
any troubling issue in your life, and regardless of the psychotherapeutic
effort of a self-help book, your psychotherapist, or your grandmother,
your problem will in short time.be mitigated or gone. So for our mental
health crisis du jour, from a lost loved one to a lost job, the pain just
passes or habituates, you figure out a solution on your own, or your
belief in the therapists advice makes you feel better.
Teasing out how non-clinical advice, great expectations, or simply father
time can heal psychic wounds is an exercise in futility, as our personal
trials are a never-ending fact of life. We are constantly in a
Shakespearean sense always buffeted by the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune, being outraged, depressed, and otherwise stressed
by the vicissitudes of life. We do recover from it all, as we could not
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otherwise survive the unabated accumulation of emotional sleights and

traumas. The issue is not that psychotherapy is useless, as this is a long
running debate that is still without issue. Rather, it is important to
understand how non-clinical factors can temper the often-grandiose
claims of psychotherapeutic models. These variables are generally
neglected in any academic or personal consideration of the value of
therapy, but neglect is not a research strategy, and is the result not just
ignorance, but perverse incentive. Neglecting non-clinical variables
refers behavioral change to clinical variables, some permutation of which
can transmute our psychological ills into robust mental health, and for
the psychotherapists school of thought, psychological gold. However,
this magic procedural elixir is still evasive, as all psychological therapies
still have roughly similar outcomes. This "Dodo Bird Verdict", first
suggested in the 1930s by the American psychologist Saul Rosenzweig,32
proposes that the many and various forms of psychological therapy are
all equally effective. It makes no difference whether, for example, a
person is being treated with techniques drawn from psychoanalysis,
neurolinguistic programming, or cognitive behavior therapy (CBT).
What really helps a patient to recover are straightforward factors such as
the opportunity to discuss their worries with a skilled and sympathetic
therapist or the degree to which they are prepared to engage with the
treatment.
The fact that non-clinical variables have such significant influence on
psychotherapeutic outcomes does not dilute the importance of therapy,
but it does impair if not invalidate the hard learned explanations for
behavior as well as the unique procedures that derive from them.
Psychological distress is better treated like the common cold rather than
an exotic syndrome or disease, and understanding the ecological reasons
for the cold a better way of treating it than by some medicinal cure. But
how does ecology translate into therapy? 3

3 Neglected observations are very common for self-help procedures, which use
slight of hand to infer processes where there are none, and procedures that
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Behavioral Ecology
Ecology represents the complex interplay of environmental variables
that allow organisms to survive and thrive, and behavioral ecology
extends this metaphor to the environmental variables that allow humans
to psychologically survive and thrive. For example, cold viruses exist in
their own ecological niche, and are passed along from one human to
another, lying dormant sometimes, destroyed quickly by antibodies at
others, and for still at other times make for one’s very bad week. For
ourselves, in our own biological niche, we take pains to avoid the
circumstances that can lead to colds by washing our hands, keeping our
distance from other infected, and maintaining our overall health and
hygiene. And when we catch a cold, the palliatives are bed rest, a lower
amount of physical activity, lots of chicken soup, and of course a cold
medication that makes you feel better because of its activity and your
belief. If this was not common knowledge, then the uncommon advice of
a doctor would be welcomed, yet only part of the doctors prescribed
regiment would be clinical, namely a medical prescription. If our ailment
was psychological rather than biological, we may not have as much
confidence in our prescriptions as for the common cold, and a therapists
insight would be most welcome. However, like the doctor, psychological
distress has similar non-clinical causes, with a medicinal treatment, like
an antidepressant, only a small part of the cure. The rest are the common-

work for reasons that derive from common sense rather than magic. Consider
stress. You see a train coming straight at you, how do you reduce the stress?
Well, you can focus on a mantra (meditate), think of nothing (mindfulness
meditation) or simple focus on the breath. Since all of these procedures work,
should we believe in separate neural mechanisms for each, or just the more
common-sense fact that with all of them you are not attending to the oncoming
train? The neglected observation, in this case avoiding thinking about the train
or avoiding the train altogether, is supplanted by similar procedures justified
by psychological magic. Par for the course for psychologists who would make
wisdom arcane (and profitable) rather than simple and free common sense.
 77

sense solutions that a therapist is more apt to have derived from clinical
experience than from novel theories of the mind. Like the proverbial
wisdom of the elders, the psychotherapist is wise beyond his or her
years, but unfortunately not experience but credentials pays, as your
wise grandfather would be a bit wiser if he had a shingle to hang on his
wall.
Still, whether a therapist offers a helping hand or just sleight of hand,
good advice is still worth it for reasons other than the peculiar healing
powers of a therapy. The neglected variables in therapy, from the
experience and empathy of the therapist to her knowledge of community
helping resources to the symptoms of true psychiatric disorders are
invaluable to help an individual recognize and change their own
behavioral ecology, with perhaps brand name therapies being more
deserving of a little neglect.

Irrelevant Observations
Neural Pinball
Explanations not only detail how a process works, but make testable
predictions of where the process will take you once it is set in motion.
Adding variables to explanations that do not increase predictive power
or are not necessary for the level of prediction required are eliminated,
leaving parsimonious explanations that can suit one’s level of
understanding and predictive or operational requirements. Newtonian
principles are the best example of this, which when applied to planets in
the solar system reduces the variables (number of gravitational objects)
to make the calculations tractable and a level of prediction, while not
absolutely precise, is precise enough to get your lunar lander pretty
much on the spot required.
Irrelevant observations can complement or supplant necessary
observations. In the former case the explanation can become
unnecessarily complex, and in the latter case it loses its ability to make
predictions at all. The issue is most apparent in situations where
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behavior is complex or subtle, and easily recordable variables that light

up the experimental landscape but have no bearing on the question at
hand are given explanatory power that they do not deserve. To
understand this, let us consider how metaphorical ‘bright lights’ can
paradoxically dim an explanation.

Flow Experiences
When playing the arcade game of pinball, the pinball lights up lots of
areas on the playing surface, but it is the pinball that counts, not the
lights. Of course, we can see the pinball and the lights, but to meet our
desire to see where and how the pinball is going, we give explanatory
authority to the pinball, the bumpers it bounces into, and the spring fed
plunger that gives it its impetus. The human brain can be like a game of
pinball too, but provides researchers a much-reduced vision that often
tells us only where the lights are, or perhaps the heat. Consider as
another example a car. If one did not have access to see what’s under the
hood when the car is in motion, then one could at least monitor the heat
signatures of the car’s fluid levels and flow, from gasoline to oil, and
develop a fairly good approximation as to how cars work, except for the
radio and accompanying electronics, which require subtle
measurements all their own that require direct access to the processes
involved.
As a rough analogy, the human brain is the same, and its understanding
is dependent upon the capabilities and limitations of the observational
tools at our disposal. Some of these tools are adapted for humans and are
quite widely used, but others require not only different procedures and
experimental apparatus, but also different kinds of brains. The first set
of tools is called functional magnetic resonance imaging or fmri, which
measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood
flow.4 This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and

4
The fmri uses magnetic fields and radio waves to form images of
hemodynamic responses, or changes in blood flow. Whenever a particular
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neuronal activation are coupled. When an area of the brain is in use,

blood flow to that region also increases. Like the heat signatures on a
running car, the fmri can determine which areas of the brain are
activated separately or in concert, however it cannot detect the course of
the fine grain neurochemical activity or ‘electrons’ that are responsible
for affect, and needs a different type of ‘voltmeter’ to get to the source of
the cognitive energy that propel not bodies but minds.
Affective processes are activated by cortical areas in the brain that
govern perception and thought, but are not embodied in those areas, but
rather by very small neuronal groupings or ‘nuclei’ no larger than the
nub of an eraser on pencil. These ‘hot spots’ are located is different areas
of the midbrain, and their activity cannot be recorded by the fmri, but
only through direct measurements and manipulations of these cellular
structures themselves, or ‘in-vivo’ measurements. Ethical reasons
forestall such interventions in human brains, and these processes have
been studied instead in the brains of laboratory animals such as mice
whose midbrain structures generally mimic those of their larger
mammalian cousins.
So where to start if you can’t physically record in people the neurological
processes that embody affect? One way to do so is to chart the parallel
informative or environmental contingencies that parallel such processes
in mice, and simply apply them to people who will be glad to comment
on their resulting feelings. In this manner, affective states can be
predicted and validated as processes from in-vivo measurements in mice,
and as affective states from self-reports from humans. This controls for the
fact that for mice affective states can be observed but the subjects cannot

brain area is active, it consumes oxygen, which requires increased blood flow
to the region. Performing even the most mundane tasks, such as viewing a
picture of a political candidate or solving a simple addition problem, causes
specific areas of the brain to increase their oxygen consumption. fmri maps
these physiological changes and creates images of the areas with elevated
blood flow. These maps are used by researchers to discern which areas of the
brain are involved in completing certain tasks.
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speak and that people can speak of such experiences but cannot observe
them.
So what can we infer from this? Simply that if you want to measure
something, you have to have the right measuring stick. You can’t
measure the electronics in your car with an oil dip stick, and you can’t
measure the biochemical source of affect by measuring heat signatures
in the brain. However, that doesn’t stop neuroscientists from giving it a
go, revealing a lot of heat but little light. Consider the well-known ‘flow’
experience. Equivalent in many ways to the concept of peak experience,
flow occurs when an individual is engaging in touch and go behavior
that demands her full attention while in a state of low autonomic arousal
or relaxation, and is characterized by an affective state or ‘feeling’ of high
arousal and pleasure. But is any of this explained using the standard tool
set of neurologic inquiry? Well, yes and no.
In flow, using the fmri, the activating centers in the brain are a fireworks
of activity, with activation of many brain centers increased during flow,
particularly in the anterior insula, inferior frontal gyri, basal ganglia and
midbrain, with relative activation decreases during flow observed in medial
prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortex, and in the medial temporal lobe
including the amygdala.33 Coupled with subjective reports of the
experience, from time dilation to the merging or action and awareness to
intrinsic reward, explaining affective aspects of the experience, or why
the experience feels so different, remains unexplained, and it is the
affective aspects of flow that makes it so greatly valued and it may be
argued truly define the experience.
In contrast to this approach, by extrapolating from ‘in-vivo’ (direct
cellular manipulation) laboratory studies in lower mammals, we may
use a different set of tools to explain flow and provide testable
hypotheses rather than a mere description of the brain areas that ‘light
up’ during flow. Flow experiences are inherently touch and go, which
means that behavior is always on the cusp of failure, but remains still
under a high confidence level of success. This requires naturally a high
degree of attention, but attention only underscores the high degree of
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moment-to-moment risk, which continuously resolves itself positively

every second. This results in a continuous stream of resolving positive
act-outcome discrepancies or surprises (similar to exploratory behavior)
that induce a heightened release of the neuromodulator dopamine,
which feels like a state of arousal but not pleasure. In addition, if opioid
receptors (which induce feelings of pleasure and are adjacent to
dopamine neurons or nuclei) are activated as well due to physical
pleasures such as eating and drinking or neuromuscular relaxation, then
both will co-excite the other, and for humans result in a feeling of arousal
and pleasure. Finally, dopamine activity scales with the salience or
importance of a goal, as an animal would have higher dopamine release
stalking a prey and humans a similar dopamine high while climbing a
challenging mountain. It also increases the perception of time, making
time to seemingly fly by, and conforms with self-reports that time seems
to pass faster in flow.34 When a person is relaxed and engaging in a touch
and go behavior of high salience, then a high state of arousal and
pleasure will be achieved, or the well documented ‘flow experience’. So
in this case the biochemical pinballs move and embody the experience,
while the cerebral ‘lights’ are mere sideshows, but it is the former that is
generally neglected.35 As we will discuss in a later chapter, the activity
of these neuronal ‘hotspots’ in the brain are weaved continually in all
experience, and are critical for motivation and emotion. However,
because these processes can only be directly observed in lower animals
marginalizes their importance and causes their neglect, with primacy
given to irrelevant measures of the mind that fail to explain the
lawfulness of affect and how it is inextricably bound to motivation. And
so flow experiences, through hinging subjective reports to irrelevant
observations through the use of the wrong observational tools, results
not in explanation but in mere neurobabble.
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A Note on Neurobabble
The leg bone's connected to the knee bone,
The knee bone's connected to the thigh bone,
The thigh bone's connected to the hip bone,
Now shake dem skeleton bones!
Classic Children’s Song

In general, naming areas of the brain that light up during different

behavioral and affective states, from lassitude to anxiety to just thinking,
doesn’t really explain anything because it makes no testable predictions.
However, a saving grace is that even intelligent audiences think that it
does explain something after all. Indeed, it has been noted that college
students more readily accept explanations attended by superfluous or
irrelevant information on the brain because of the lay belief that citing
activated parts of the brain is the best explanation for mental
phenomena.36 This is akin to knowing anatomically which parts of the
body are in motion, but not knowing how these parts work intrinsically
and work together to achieve locomotion. These process level
distinctions are important but often subtle and require a bit more
explanation and fine grain analysis than the mere observation that the
shin bone is connected to the ankle bone, or for that matter that the
anterior cingulate cortex is connected to the neocortex. The
overwhelming reliance on fmri and similar brain scans marginalizes the
subtler processes that account for behavior that cannot be measured by
the procedure, such as the interconnectedness of neural networks and
neurochemical activity in the brain, and the fact that activation of certain
areas of the brain can be manifested by widely different affective
outcomes. For example, activation of the amygdala can reflect “anxiety”
about a particular candidate, but amygdala activation can also be caused
by arousal and positive emotions.
Overall, the fmri has its uses, but must be qualified by what it actually
observes and measures, which is localized brain activity measured
indirectly by oxygen content in cranial blood flow and not by measuring
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any real-time, chemical or electrical neural activity. To infer from fmri

more fine-grained neural processes leaps past what the technique can
actually do, and must be supplemented by a more granular analysis of
brain activity that is often absent in fmri studies. Without that it descends
to mere neuro-babble, a philosophical blight that doesn’t need a brain
scan to understand.

False Processes
Hypnosis, Meditation
One of the magical things about product marketing past and present is
that it thrives on magical thinking. Take branding for instance. That you
are more inclined to buy Morton salt, Bayer aspirin, and Dasani bottled
water is that the brand imputes, but does not claim, superiority over its
generic equivalent. If it did, then the makers would have the Food and
Drug Administration hard on their heels. Unfortunately, generic
psychological processes have no such protection, and simple and non-
descript mental events can be granted a name and reputation wholly
unearned, except of course for those practitioners who hawk the stuff,
who can earn quite nicely. This extends to physical processes too, which
fortunately are a bit more resistant to marketing malarky, unless you
count a few odd historical anomalies like an earth resting immobile in
the center of a rotating universe.
For example, consider the cases of fire and light. In the 18 th century, fire
was then, as it was in paleolithic times, a remarkable thing to be reckoned
with, except that no one could reckon how it actually worked. A
combustible question required a combustible answer, and in this case it
was a hidden element called phlogiston, an unseen material that enabled
fire. It was later proven that only the concept of phlogiston was
combustible, metaphorically that is, and phlogiston has been justly
relegated to the mythology of physics. Similarly, it was once thought that
nature abhors a vacuum, and since light like other material substances
required a medium to pass through a invisible substance called the ether,
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ether was inferred as the enabling variable that permitted the

transmission of light. If the ether had properties similar to the other
transmissible media, such as the vibrations passing through the air and
ground, then such interfering factors could in theory be measured. In the
classic Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, the two physicists used a
special arrangement of mirrors to measure the speed of light in
perpendicular directions. The result of this experiment and the many
replicating experiments to follow was zero. Now phlogiston and ether
may still exist, but certainly are not necessary to enable any theory in
chemistry or physics, and haven’t turned up in any similar experiment
as well.
Now let us move our attention to that of human motivation. Like the
transmission of light and the enabling of fire, it is remarked upon when
aspects of motivation seem remarkable, and when we do, think, and feel
things that are not explainable through our normal folk explanations for
behavior. It is here that unique processes are inferred to save
appearances, but like these two discredited physical entities of
phlogiston and the ether similarly have no experimental leg to stand on.
When folk theories make predictions that do not match reality, to save
the appearances inferred mentalistic forces can be inferred that only a
select few can understand and train you to reproduce. Thus to elicit these
nebulous processes requires trainers, explainers, or gurus, whose
perverse incentive, like the magician on stage, it not to reveal you on
source of the trick, and that there is no magic behind the rabbit in the hat
at all. This could be bad news for those who need to pull rabbits out of
hats, not literally but metaphorically. To understand this, let us consider
two hypothetical processes that like a ghost in the machine, can
respectively enable motivation and calm.

Hypnosis
As reasonable people, we can do unreasonable things. For elemental
processes of motivation, sometimes we can do remarkable things that
cannot be easily explained through the common motivations that guide
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our lives. So to keep folk ideas of motivation unchallenged, the inferred

process of ‘hypnosis’ was created to reflect an extra-motivational cause.
The psychologist T.X. Barber denied that invoking a unique hypnotic
state was necessary, but rather that credible motivate-try instructions
could reproduce all ‘hypnotic’ behaviors, and required no demarcation
between regular motivational processes and hypnotic processes. Barber
observed from hundreds of experiments conducted by him37 and allied
experimenters that ‘motivate-try’ instructions were no different in their
success than those same instructions attached to the invocation of a
special inferred hypnotic trance state. There was no need to hypothesize
a unique mental process or a unique hypnosis induction process or
‘trance’ state, as remarkable behavior can be subsumed under the same
motivational principles that are just as responsible for us making our
beds as storming the beaches of Normandy.
Hypnosis is a special neurological process that makes motivation more
amenable to suggestion. It is a state activated by suggestion, or
information, and makes information more motivating in the bargain. But
what is special about information besides its content is its credibility.
Whatever I may suggest to you, such as walking into a wall or jumping
off a cliff, is wholly dependent upon whether you believe what I say.
People can do a wide range of behavior that would not have been
considered individually if it was credibly warranted to them that they
would go to heaven, save their family, protect their country, or just get a
hefty reward. If I was a stage hypnotist, my credibility is assured to the
audience, as magical powers are imputed to what I say and how I say it,
or the invocation of special trance states which are mere diversions from
the motivational principles involved.
Ultimately however, hypnosis can only be truly validated if there is a
distinctive neurological signature to hypnotic states, or in other words, a
unique hypnotic process in the brain. That such a unique motivational
process has never been demonstrated is enough to dispel the illusion, not
that people are capable of extraordinary behavior if motivated, but rather
that such behavior requires a unique neural process that switches on and
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off when novel or unusual behaviors are the result, a relativistic standard
that is in the eye of the beholder. As such, hypnosis is no more useful
and validated than phlogiston, though unlike the latter, it still finds its
place in clinical practice and stage shows.

Meditation
In 1987, the psychologist David Holmes published an article in the the
flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, the
‘American Psychologist’, an overview and critique of the procedure and
process of meditation. Reviewing the extensive literature of meditation,
with due criticism of experiments that lacked the necessary rigor and
lack of bias, Holmes concluded that meditation was no more effective
than simple resting protocols, and was no different from rest across a
score of physiological and neurological indices.38 In other words, resting
and meditation were the same. From a linguistic perspective, this
interpretation is obvious, as instructions to just be aware of the moment
and to ignore distractions are identical to standard resting protocols.39
Needless to say, his article elicited a storm of protest, calling out the
author for “attempting to establish artificial differences between similar
states and citing the literature in an incomplete, inaccurate, and biased
manner.”40 It was also argued that Holmes ignored the fact that
meditation was a successful self-regulation strategy that surpassed mere
relaxation in its effectiveness and clinical import.41 42
Indeed, reduced
somatic arousal could not possibly account for the many clinical benefits
of meditation.43 The inference from these criticisms was that since it was
presumed without evidence that relaxation or rest could not account for
the affective and behavioral attributes of meditation, relaxation needed
a metaphorical igniting fire, a psychological phlogiston is you will, called
a unique meditation process. This process could be studied without
consideration of the input of the inactivity of the covert musculature, or
relaxation. So rather than studying the neuropsychology of relaxation
that could account for these affective and behavioral processes
correlating with meditation protocols, the focus instead was on
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meditation as a disembodied process that occurred independently of the

body, and could be mapped to the activity of different areas of the brain
that ‘lit up’ during meditation, and were recorded using fmri or brain
scans.44
Generally, people meditate because it is a positive affective state and
because it inhibits negatively affective states, as the relaxation it induces
inhibits muscular tension or anxiety as well as feels pleasurable. This is
because of the release of endogenous opioids that are induced by
relaxation and sustains it as steady reinforcing state. As we have noted
earlier, opioid release is also modulated by the release of the
neuromodulator dopamine that would be elicited by positive
expectancies or expectations that accompany relaxation, and explain the
heightened sense of arousal and pleasure when we are relaxed while
doing and thinking about productive work or outcomes, which we will
discuss in much greater detail in a later chapter.
The inference that relaxation is a simple phenomenon that does not
influence the neurochemistry of affective states has not been challenged
because the incentives have been to neglect it in both in academic and
popular inquiry. Like bottled water, meditation is a unique process that
can be conjured by unique procedures that require teaching. And thus
you get the billion dollar plus meditation industry. In other words, like
Galileo removing God from the equation in the natural world, removing
the magic from meditation will eliminate not your heavenly reward, just
your monetary one, and like the writer Sinclair Lewis said, it is difficult
to argue against your paycheck.
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False Observations
Egos deplete; incentives demotivate, losses are for losers, choices lose
your mind, and meditation builds brains
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its
shoes.” Mark Twain (which is a lie too, because no one knows who wrote it!)

“An idealized view of science is that theories are accepted or rejected based solely
on empirical evidence. In fact, science is not simply an objective search for truth,
but also a social process, in which proponents of a theory must convince other
scientists, through logic and argumentation, of how evidence should be
interpreted. However, this process advantages incumbent theories over
challengers for a number of reasons, including confirmation bias, social proof,
ideological complacency, and the vested interests of scientists whose reputations
and even sense of self are tied to existing theories. A consequence is scientific
inertia, where weak or ill-founded theories take on a life of their own, sometimes
even gaining momentum despite evidence that puts their veracity in doubt.
David Gal45

One of the ironclad facts of the laws of nature is that they are laws, and
breaking one at any times pay the penalty. However, if the law of gravity
stopped working just once, we would have a serious problem on our
hands, and would need either to modify the law or come up with a new
law altogether. Indeed, mainstream physical laws such as relativity,
quantum mechanics and even Newtonian principles are continually
tested, and even one negative result can upset the theoretical applecart
and force a rethinking of the foundational premises involved.
The social sciences are much more forgiving in their analyses, and one
bad prediction or one hundred are scarcely enough to move the needle
of judgment, or at least call into question the presumed certainty of an
idea. So if you have one bad prediction, you counter with accounting for
one hundred mainly good ones, and the lawfulness of behavior is
replaced by the law of averages. So bad principles still stay on the books,
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like jaywalking and speeding limits, and are brought up countless times
while ignoring their countless exceptions.
By making so many exceptions to the lawfulness of behavior, behavior
is becoming increasingly lawless, and in addition to our present
mundane concerns come an unlikely number of new ones replete with a
multitude of cures, all equally unlikely as it turns out. As if death and
taxes are enough to worry about, we now have to be concerned about
our egos or will power depleting, our incentives demotivating, our
choices disconcerting, and every loss depressing. Never fear though, as
a relaxing day at the beach can literally build your brain.
Coming up with inferred processes is a lot like postulating an Easter
Bunny, but unfortunately postulating an Easter bunny is a lot easier than
disproving the Easter bunny. It’s interesting, novel, and can explain to
our children at least where all those candy eggs come from on Easter
morning. But no amount of polling will determine whether the Easter
bunny exists, as there will always be children or folks with childlike
minds that would attest to their existence, and who knows, they may be
right. So if you cannot get to the bottom of the problem by disproving
the reality of the Easter Bunny, perhaps you can solve it on the surface.
Thus, if you figure you cannot know the truth in actuality, at least you
can do so statistically. So how do you find that the results of an
experiment are incorrect? You can guard against error in individual
experiments by surveying a lot of them, or a ‘meta’ analysis. If you turn
out with a lot of null hypotheses then odds are your hypothesis is wrong.
That’s safety in numbers, because everyone can be wrong in different
ways, and yet wrong in the mean. A second approach is doing one
experiment right the first time, with attention to controlling all sources
of error, from small sample size to faulty use of statistics to poor
observation. A third way if for the experimenter to admit to the
limitations of the experimental design, or its lack of depth, and can then
opt to explain the phenomenon in question which may take him out of
his depth, and so too with much of his peers.
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Here we will consider five widely accepted concepts in social

psychology, personality psychology, and behavioral economics that are
touchstones of their schools of thought, and are provocative,
revolutionary, and wrong. They have been proven wrong, or at the very
least unreliable because of contradicting and disconfirming studies, but
also because of how a deeper understanding of the causes of behavior
make their conclusions untenable and even absurd. Unfortunately, all of
them continue to have wide currency in the social sciences, mainly for
the indirect currency that they provide to sustain academic careers and
the careerism of advisers, consultants, therapists and assorted pundits.

Willpower Depletes
Ego depletion is the controversial idea that self-control or willpower draws upon
a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up. When the energy for
mental activity is low, self-control is typically impaired, which would be
considered a state of ego depletion.46
In an experiment by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister and
colleagues in 1998, they showed that people who initially resisted the
temptation of chocolates were subsequently less able to persist on a
difficult and frustrating puzzle task. The fact that effort for one task
impaired the ability to perform another dissimilar task was called ‘ego
depletion’.47 The metaphors that describe ego depletion such as lack of
mental and physical energy refers the concept to those negative affective
states that impair one’s ability or interest in performing subsequent
simple and complex tasks. However, energy can be explained in
different ways. Indeed, the metaphor of energy can mean many things,
from a purely subjective state to a neurological process, to just being
more physically active. Loss of ‘energy’ can be due to biological reasons
such as a poor or inadequate diet or deprivation of necessary nutrients,
or because of neuromuscular tension due to stress, or neurochemical
deficiencies due to depression causes by environmental or biological
factors. What does not deplete energy are affective states themselves, as
the neurons for arousal (dopamine) and pleasure (opioid) do not ‘wear
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out’ after use, but their activity can decrease or increase due to simple
habituation or new salient outcomes,5 or the over familiarity with
sensory (eating the same food too often) compared to the new found
arousal for different foods.48 This is a critical point, because if the major
biochemical factor behind motivation, namely pleasure and arousal
systems (or opioid and dopamine systems) cannot deplete, then the
entire concept of ego depletion is false, as ‘energy’ or affective arousal is
due instead to unremarkable physiological (physical exhaustion, low
blood glucose) or informative causes (habituation, novelty).
Motivational ‘energy’ is an affective state that does not deplete like other
sources of energy (food or drink) that are necessary for maintenance of
homeostasis, or the regulation of basic bodily processes, but upon
informative events that can ‘recharge’ motivation in heartbeat.49 For
example, let us take a common example of ego depletion such our daily
struggle to resist temptation.
You eat a healthy breakfast and lunch, and even resist the sweet snacks
that a co-worker brings into the office during your mid-afternoon

5
Listen to the same track of music over and over again, and your initial interest
or attentive arousal will soon wane, and you will be bored. Attentive arousal in
the anticipation and experience of novel stimuli is embodied in the release of
the neuromodulator dopamine, but its release it modulated by neo-cortical
structures that determine its relative novelty and importance, or incentive
salience. Although drug abuse can harm dopamine receptors, and make arousal
for even normal pleasures more difficult, habituation does not, and as memory
of a habituated stimulus fades, its ability to induce arousal increases again, so
that over familiar stimuli become unfamiliar again, and we can again enjoy the
music, food, sunsets or more that became dull by being so predictable. The
faddish self-help procedure of dopamine detoxification, or going without any
stimulation for a day or days at a time, is due to this misunderstanding of how
habituation works, as if dopamine systems are somehow dulled, depleted, or
impaired through overuse, when it is the more mundane concept of stimulus
novelty, regulated by cortical structures, that is the true cause. The problem is
that by introducing inferred and wholly false neural processes to account for
the generic and well-known process of habituation, the useful procedure of
avoiding distractions gets new theoretical legs, and seems like a new procedure
when it is not, and also occludes a true understanding of how neural processes
actually work.
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break. Because you have expended so much mental energy throughout

the day resisting the urge to indulge, you have reached a state of ego
depletion by dinner time.
Having to choose between rational (staying on your diet) and affective
(the prospect of tasty snacks) creates a choice-choice conflict or dilemma
which cannot be resolved rationally because one alternative has value
logically and the other affectively. The result is muscular tension, or
stress, which if unabated can leave you exhausted, pained, and in a bad
mood. To assuage these bad feelings, you may eat more, and certainly be
more motivated to relax on the couch than do anything more productive
that your normal motivation may incentivize you to do. In this case there
is no ego or ‘willpower’ to deplete, as you are simply alleviating physical
exhaustion from a mentally trying day. Mundane physiological and
neurological processes can attend any of the examples of ego depletion,
which is more aptly described as how incentive motivation predictably
changes with corresponding changes in brain and body.
Ego depletion extends the metaphor of energy which sustains
homeostasis, of the ability to move about with the ‘energy’ which
sustains mental and physical activity, from simple cognition to the
cognitions that attend physical activity. The concept of ego depletion is
the province of social psychology, which uses aggregate observations of
subjects in social situations to confirm or disconfirm hypotheses about
inferred mental states. So what do the aggregates tell us? Well, different
and contradictory things. Some experiments confirm ego depletion,
some disconfirm it, and even different ‘meta’ analyses or comparison of
clusters of studies, come to different conclusions. Indeed, many
psychologists have simple thrown up their hands in confusion. Thus “All
the old methods are in doubt. Even meta-analyses, which once were thought to
yield a gold standard for evaluating bodies of research now seem somewhat
worthless. “Meta-analyses are fucked,” The psychologist Michael Inzlicht
warned me. If you analyze 200 lousy studies, you’ll get a lousy answer in the
end. It’s garbage in, garbage out.”50
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Statistical level distinctions are different from process level distinctions

because the former tolerates error while the latter eliminates it. The fact
that falsification is not possible due to the between group models
characteristic of social psychological inquiry makes the discipline an
imprecise science full of imprecise predictions, of which ego depletion is
only one. Since ego depletion denotes inferred and not real and testable
processes, it cannot be refuted, a problem that we will note also for the
concept of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards that we consider next.

Rewards De-Motivate
One of the more counterintuitive ideas in psychology is that rewards or
incentives de-motivate, or interfere with internal or intrinsic motives that
are generated through an individual’s natural curiosity and needs for
autonomy, competency, and acceptance. Extrinsic rewards, such as
money, prizes, or peer regard and fame are presumed to inhibit the
intrinsic enjoyment of a task, and when imposed the activity loses its
value. So what is the basis of this findings? It was group surveys, and
comparison between groups, or between group designs.
If intrinsic and extrinsic reward are distinct mental processes, they
should interact in ways that are observable socially, and one would also
assume, neurologically. Extrinsic rewards such as prizes, money, or
popular regard are distinguished as events that are outside or extrinsic
to an organism, and cohere also to the behavioristic metaphor that
extrinsic reinforcement fixes behavior at the moment it is introduced,
and has little or no cognitive or intrinsic connotations. On the other hand,
intrinsic reinforcement is derived from cognitive aspects of the behavior
itself, whether it be creating art, writing a novel, or just the satisfaction
of mastering a new skill. However this is not true, as both extrinsic and
intrinsic rewards mediate cognitions, namely the positive uncertainty in
the moment (as in the novelty of creating art) or projected into the future
(as in the branching novel possibilities denoted by a cash reward). They
also interact, as a high reward for a behavior that is rewarding in itself
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(e.g. playing a game) increases the salience of importance of that

behavior, as a participant in any sport playing a championship game will
attest. But do they more often clash in a behavioral and neurological
sense? The answer, at least through the perspective of the empirical data,
is no. A study by Judy Cameron and David Pierce demonstrated that
extrinsic rewards do not decrease intrinsic motivation at all.
Per the authors, “A prominent view in education and social psychology is that
rewards decrease a person's intrinsic motivation. Our meta-analysis of 20 years
of research suggests that this view is incorrect. The findings from approximately
100 studies indicate that rewards can be used effectively to enhance or maintain
intrinsic interest in activities. The only negative effect of reward occurs under a
highly specific set of conditions, circumstances that are easily avoided. Not
surprisingly, these results have not been well received by those who argue that
rewards produce negative effects on intrinsic motivation under a wide range of
conditions.”
“So let us be clear in stating that our research demonstrates that rewards have
either positive or negative effects depending on the way they are administered.
Importantly, the only negative effect of reward on intrinsic motivation occurs
under a circumscribed set of conditions, namely, when rewards are tangible and
promised to individuals without regard to any level of performance.” 51
It is important to note that how these intrinsic and extrinsic rewards are
instantiated in the brain is a question that is generally begged in all of
this.52 Indeed, for mammals, motivation is single source, with no
dichotomy between intrinsic and extrinsic processes. Indeed, all learning
is cognitive, or intrinsic in nature, and extrinsic events simply represent
publicly available markers of information, whereas intrinsic events are
privately available markers of information. The difference is a matter of
the relative observability of behavior rather than the existence of
different kinds of behavior. In the end all behavior mediates
expectancies, or in other words, has conscious or non-conscious novel or
expected consequences. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivators or thus not
different in kind, but different in terms of what outside observers can
perceive from the private events that we know ourselves perfectly well.
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Losses hurt more than gains satisfy

Human behavior can be very ornery, and on the individual level, we
often make decisions at odds with what logic would entail. For economic
choices, these consistent maladaptations to similar events can evolve into
rules for behavior that can not only be explained differently, but perhaps
don’t even occur at all.
Consider the concept of loss aversion, a key concept in the field of
behavioral economics, which merges psychology with economics, and
often in an ad hoc way.53 As the behavioral economist David Gal noted,
“Loss aversion is the notion that losses have a bigger psychological impact than
gains do — that losing $5, for example, feels worse than gaining $5 feels good.
Behavioral economists point to loss aversion as a psychological glitch that
explains a lot of puzzling human conduct. But in an article54 published this year,
the psychologist Derek D. Rucker and I contend that the behaviors most
commonly attributed to loss aversion are a result of other causes.
For example, in a classic experiment, participants who were given a mug
demanded, on average, about $7 to sell it, whereas participants who were not
given a mug were willing to pay, on average, about $3 to acquire one. This
finding has been interpreted by behavioral economists as evidence for loss
aversion: The loss of the mug was anticipated to be more painful than its gain
was anticipated to be pleasurable.
But Dr. Rucker and I note that there is an alternative explanation: The
participants may not have had a clearly defined idea of what the mug was worth
to them. If that was the case, there was a range of prices for the mug ($4 to $6)
that left the participants disinclined to either buy or sell it, and therefore mug
owners and non-owners maintained the status quo out of inertia. Only a
relatively high price ($7 and up) offered a meaningful incentive for an owner to
bother parting with the mug; correspondingly, only a relatively low price ($3 or
below) offered a meaningful incentive for a non-owner to bother acquiring the
mug.
In experiments of our own, we were able to tease apart these two alternatives,
and we found that the evidence was more consistent with the “inertia”
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explanation. Dr. Thaler has dismissed our argument as a “minor point about
terminology,” since the deviant behaviors attributed to loss aversion occur
regardless of the cause. But a different account for why a behavior occurs is not
a minor terminological difference; it is a major explanatory difference. Only if
we understand why a behavior occurs can we create generalizable knowledge,
the goal of science.”55
Finally, not only can loss aversion be explained differently, but it may
not exist at all. In a meta-analytic review of ninety-three studies
comparing disease prevention messages, the analysis found no
statistically significant differences in persuasiveness between gain- and
loss-framed messages concerning other preventive actions such as safer-
sex behaviors, skin cancer prevention behaviors, or diet and nutrition
behaviors.56
As Gal noted, anomalous behaviors point to the inadequacy of
explanatory paradigms to account for them, which are not dependent
upon individual or group observations that cannot explain the
rudiments of motivation, leaving the discerning reader with lots of
paradigms to choose from, and more than a little unhappiness as we shall
see next.

Lots of choices make you unhappy

A major argument against the internet is that it provides us with
abundant choices, and because of this people become reluctant to make
choices. This represents the emerging conventional wisdom, postulated
by the social psychologist Barry Schwartz among others57 58
that
abundant choice is a bad thing, and results in indecision, stress, regret,
and unhappiness. It would follow that reducing choice by individual
decision or perhaps by executive or political fiat would be a wise ‘choice’.
Certainly, this is the current conventional wisdom tells us, and it is all
epitomized by a simple choice between jams.
The theory of choice tyranny holds a similar premise, that having
innumerable variations of one product, even if carried in store that has
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many other products, is also naïve and dumb. When confronted with
these choices, people simply are less likely to buy. After all, the data do
not lie. Or do they?
Enter social psychologists, who with Newtonian thoroughness work for
those odd human consistencies that they liken to immutable law. The
simple experiment and like-minded versions proved the rule, and in our
case, it was a simple jar of jam that did the persuasive trick, lots of them.
Conducted by the psychologist Mark Lepper and Sheila Iyengar 59, the
experiment was simple. In their first study, they set up a tasting table
with exotic jams at the entrance of an upscale grocery store. The table
displayed either a small assortment containing six jams or a large
assortment of 24 jams. Every consumer who approached the table
received a coupon to get $1 off the purchase of any jam of that brand. In
line with the idea that people are attracted by large assortments, the
authors found that more consumers approached the tasting table when
it displayed 24 jams. Yet, when it came to actual purchase, 30% of all
consumers who saw the small assortment of six jams at the tasting
display actually bought one of the jams (with the coupon), whereas in
the large assortment case, only 3% of the people redeemed the coupon
for a jam. The authors interpreted this finding as a consequence of choice
overload such that too many options decreased the motivation to make
a choice. Along the same lines, Iyengar et al.60 found that the number of
401(k) pension plans that companies offered to their employees was
negatively correlated with the degree of participation in any of the
plans61. These experiments resulted in astonishingly strong effects that
were utterly counter to mainstream economic theory.
The choice between Welch’s jam and Smucker’s jam may be irritating
and of no practical consequence to an individual, but you can bet that it
has consequences for the two companies, who would not want to reduce
their profits by offering too many varieties of a good thing. If too much
choice was intrinsically a bad thing, this would imply that lots of retailers
could simultaneously eliminate 75 percent of their inventory and
increase sales by 900 percent. That would be the natural result of Lepper
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and Iyengar’s hypothesis, but because retailers don’t reduce choice

means that their hypothesis doesn’t fit the data. Their universal
prediction is wrong. In other words, there is more to making a choice in
the aisle of multiple choices that meets the eye.
Verifying this conclusion from the product marketplace comes also from
the marketplace of ideas, namely the host of studies performed on choice
overload. The psychologist Benjamin Scheibehenne and colleagues
performed a ‘meta’ analysis on a host of studies on situations that created
information overload, including the jam experiment, and concluded that
choice wasn’t necessarily overloading us at all, and that the data were
decidedly ambivalent on the issue.62 The average of all these studies
suggests that offering lots of extra choices seems to make no important
difference either way. “There seem to be circumstances where choice is
counterproductive but, despite looking hard for them, we don’t yet know much
about what they are.” Overall, says Scheibehenne: “If you did one of these
studies tomorrow, the most probable result would be no effect.” Perhaps choice
is not as paradoxical as some psychologists have come to believe. One
way or another, we seem to be able to cope with it. One practical
response to such experiments is that choice can be a good thing overall
even if it does discourage us, or in other words, choice is bad and good.
The question that remains begged is why.
As we have discussed earlier, there are of course innumerable conscious
and non-conscious cognitive reasons why one will or will not make a
choice, or perhaps defer a choice. But ultimately cognitions alone are not
sufficient, as we need to have deeper explanations of why people make
the choices they do. You still need in other words explanations that are
informed by how human brains actually work. Some scholars63 have
recommended going to such a process level, or in other words, a deeper
explanation, but statistical correlations continue to rule the social
psychological roost, as it is assumed that people behave according to
statistical norms that reflect disembodied thinking that is unaffected by
the embodiment of idiosyncratic brains. And as will be discussed in the
chapters to follow, this is where distinctive neural processes come in to
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make forecasting choice behavior more predictable or less predictable,

depending upon your point of view.

Meditation Builds Better Brains

Meditation is simple to understand, just think of nothing or concentrate
on next to nothing and your muscles will relax and you will feel a sense
of mild pleasure that is un-buffeted by the cares of the world. Naturally,
when we use our brains to learn a skill or acquire knowledge, our brains
do change, and doing nothing is not just therapeutic but is also mind
bending, and in a literal and good way. But what may these good ways
be?
Does meditation make you nicer, smarter, live longer, control your
emotions better? None of these outcomes have been empirically
demonstrated, but this does not alter the inference that as exercise
changes our muscles mass and cardiovascular system, so too must the
mental exercise of meditation in some way build brains. This is the
concept of ‘neuroplasticity’, or the ability of the brain to form and
reorganize synaptic connections in response to learning or experience.
This is a non-controversial issue, as the neurophysiology of learning
derives from evidence of how neurons synoptically interconnect from
experience or thinking. The problem is that meditation does not involve
learning, or at the most entails just passively attending to stimuli without
evaluation or judgement. Naturally, meditation or just being in the
moment does correlate with the activation and deactivation of different
parts of our brain, but so too do are levels of neuro-muscular
deactivation which are induced by thinking of nothing, or just relaxing.
In other words, meditation is not a disembodied mental state, but is
always tethered to concurrent changes in the musculature that
themselves impact neural systems, from positive affect (activation of
opioid systems) to the activation of resting state brain networks that
induce mind wandering or day dreaming.
So, if meditation or more precisely, relaxation protocols do not involve
learning, then they will not be shown to impact the morphology or shape
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of our brains in any way. Unfortunately, this null hypothesis, sound as

it is, has not resonated with the meditation neuroscience research
community, which has served up a bounty of research claiming that
meditation increases gray matter (preserves aging brains), increases
cortical thickness (improves mood), and changes self-control areas in the
brain (fights addiction).
These studies have not been above reproach, and have been criticized for
small sample sizes, inadequate controls, and a failure to be replicated. To
address these issues, a well-controlled study of the neurological effect of
meditation was recently performed by Kral and colleagues64, who found
that for short term meditators at least, no structural changes in the brain
were demonstrated. The Kral study was unique because it was
conducted by true believers in the efficacy of meditation, and admirable
that they accepted the fact but did not remark on the implications of their
study, which toppled a pillar of the meditation enterprise, that
meditation itself could be considered a unique process because of its
indirect effects on brain morphology. Of course, they left a final
judgement on the neural effects of meditation in abeyance, as they did
not consider longer time frames that could indeed demonstrate that
meditation builds better brains. Ultimately such a question need not
have been answered, as if we conclude that there are no process
distinctions between the neuropsychology of relaxation and meditative
states, the primary inference would be that relaxation does not build
brains, but thinking does, irrespective of whether it is right or wrong.
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Chapter 5
The Ill-Disciplines of Psychology

Reality Testing
To get anywhere in life, like the bus stop, thinking must have a basis in
reality, and for systematic thinking necessary for getting to the moon,
much more so. Human beings and the communities that foster them are
built on a currency of information. When information is accepted among
all parties to facilitate the exchange of goods and services, we have actual
currencies, and to further the reality of our understanding of the world
and its applications, we have the currency of science. Science is built on
standards of inquiry and commonly accepted knowledge. For the
physical and biological sciences these core principles and the data they
describe form the empirical bedrock which informs and constrains what
can be inferred from existence and what can be made of it. Without these
core facts and the theories that bind them, then like the prelates in
Galileo’s time all manner of paradigms about the world may be
postulated and believed, and all defined through a subset of non-
empirical facts, from orbiting suns to planetary epicycles, and all
accepted by their own true believers because its believers either cannot
or refuse to look closer.
For the social sciences, individual facts of behavior are like celestial
planets in the sky that can be charted and analyzed, but go nowhere
unless you show how they get somewhere. But the how in the equation
does not speak to the why, and it is the latter that is the stuff of
explanations. The true issue is whether reality may be determined
through induction, or correlations that are presumed to prove reality
when they by definition cannot point to reality. In other words,
correlating the movements of the planets and stars with the fate of
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humanity is no different that correlating the behavior of humans to the

fatalism of biology or to the vagaries of inferred motives, drives, and
other animating forces that form the essential elements of their defining
paradigms. And as we have argued, the individual disciplines in the
social sciences cannot communicate with each other because they have
too many paradigms, incommensurate paradigms, or no paradigms at
all. So they remain separate islands of knowledge that address their own
questions, affirm their own believers, and are ignorant and even
disparaging of the rest because in no small measure they speak different
languages and adhere to different inferred ‘facts’ or realities.
In this chapter, we will consider some of the major disciplines of
psychology and how they ignore the unifying realities that make for
science and scientific progress, or in other words, how they ignore,
disparage or misunderstand the importance of scientific explanation,
and condemn themselves to increasing impotence and irrelevance.

‘Pop’ular Psychology
Testing Reality
Pop psychology approaches are often characterized by an emphasis on personal
feelings, the latest trends in popular culture, and self-help techniques. These
approaches may not be scientifically supported or researched but have become
popular with people who want to improve their mental well-being.65

Bringing a horse to water is different from bringing it to drink, and if the

water becomes a waterfall, the horse will still drink, when it is thirsty
that is. Motivation is not a complex issue with animals, as they will do
without hesitation what they need to do to survive, and they don’t need
to aggrandize their needs to meet them, so for a horse a bucket of water
is just as much an incentive to drink as torrent of water. Of course, the
horse does not have to know how to construct water wells, negotiate
water rights, pay its water bill, and need to be considerate of the water
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needs of other horses. It just drinks it fill and leaves. And that’s the
contrast between survival for animals versus humans. We can’t just pick
fruit from the tree of life and retire with God’s chosen mate for us under
some blossoming palm and a clear sky. That’s paradise lost, if not in
myth, than certainly so in practice, for as befitting the human condition,
living sparely under a palm tree is not anyone’s prescription for a good
life.
So the good life depends upon the results of chains of behaviors, each
with different demands, likelihoods of success, and their own rewards,
with the ultimate benefit often in the far horizon. Rationally, we can
perform them, and like counting rosary beads invariably lead to a state
of grace, fulfillment, or just our next meal. The problem is that if
motivation falters in just one segment of the chain, then all is for naught,
the chain breaks, the goal is lost, and we fall into a state of lassitude or
depression.
In practice, we can plan our day logically, and map out what we need to
rationally do to maximize our productivity, our health, and our
pleasures, but logic falls away when we become distracted, distressed,
or just uninterested in the tasks before us. ‘Non-popular’ psychology, or
academic psychology, recognizes that this is a complex problem
deserving complex analysis and no sure procedures for amending
behavior, but popular psychology takes a contrasting position, and
claims that motivation is simple, just an affirmation, good habit, positive
thought, or clear-eyed perspective away.
In popular psychology, the salve or salvation for motivation is simple
procedure that requires scant explanation, and is vouched for by the
assurances of the motivational speaker, writer, cleric, or guru who gains
credibility by his or her status, station, or elevation through popular,
social, or academic regard. If it doesn’t work it’s your fault, and
invariably it doesn’t after initial success, until you look for another
fountain of youth. But when it does work, as it often does however
briefly, its success is often assured whether the procedure is complexly
reasoned and based on scientific data or is merely the product of a flight
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of fantasy. Does this mean that all remedies from popular psychology
engage a unique mental process, or that all procedures unknowingly are
successful because of a single cause? Here we will argue for Occam’s
Razor, or the principle that the simplest explanation is invariably the
correct one, which through its practical adherence means all who
knowingly or unknowingly follow it must have prizes.

Everyone must have prizes

‘First the Dodo marked out a racecourse, in a sort of circle, and then all the party
were placed along the course, here and there. …they began running when they
liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race
was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, the Dodo
suddenly called out `The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting,
and asking, `But who has won?' This question the Dodo could not answer
without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed
upon its forehead while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said,
`Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.' From ‘Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland’, by Lewis Carroll

The difference between psychotherapeutic interventions and the do it

yourself or self-help kind is that like engaging a plumber rather than
your own clumsy self, you can be sure an expert is on the job with the
tools and skills to do the job right. And what are these tools? For a
plumber, nothing less than the same ones you can normally find around
the house, and for the psychotherapist, these tools are no different than
the one’s you are doubtless aware of through self-help literature or the
advice of a caring friend or relative. That they all work, regardless of
which one’s are employed and how they are employed, speaks to a
common motivational thread in all of them that brings relief, namely a
placebo effect, or the mere expectation that feeling better is only a single
affirmation or revelation away. In addition, as we discussed earlier, a
mental issue may often resolve itself on its own, and practical advice is
of greater import than clinical advice, and no model of motivation or
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special procedure can replace imparting basic common sense. Thus logic
holds that if experts armed with self-help procedures all have the same
outcomes irrespective of the procedures involved, then using the same
procedures for yourself and by yourself will have the same outcome.
The advantage pop psychologists have over academic psychologists,
who have to test their hypotheses, and psychotherapists, who use
standardized procedures that are subject to test, is that their procedures
do not require serious and systematic test because they are in fact ‘true’.
Inadequately tested procedures are not acceptable in professional arenas
of inquiry or application, from the clinical researcher to the family
doctor. However, in popular psychology testability is informal, with
casual endorsement, cherry picked and misquoted studies, and the
confidence and promise of the popularizer taken at face value by an
audience that has no training or inclination to be skeptical, giving
credence again to the time worn adage that a fool and his or her money
are soon parted. Still, there seems much to recommend popular
psychology if you simply extend folk psychology a little, and make
practical matters of motivation seem practical, until you realize they
aren’t.

Carrots and Sticks

In folk psychology, we behave because of proverbial carrots and sticks
that are arranged by family, friends, society, or just dire necessity.
Naturally, it follows that by positioning just the right carrot in front of
you at the right time, distance, and personal need, self-motivation is a
snap! The face validity of simple rewards and punishments can be
extended to rewards and punishments self-imposed, until you look a bit
more closely.
Many self-help procedures simply extend the premise that if you can
contract with others you certainly can contract with yourself. This
contract can be with clear goals and rewards, be easy or hard to do, long
or short in duration, or just be doable because of proper mindset, level of
inspiration, or level of energy.
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Presumably, contingency contracting with yourself is a cinch if you

break your goals into small tasks, give yourself rewards, set goals,
prioritize goals, envision success, and have a growth mindset.66
However, like a perpetual motion machine, these procedures often entail
not arranging awards but recycling them. In other words, by rewarding
yourself with what you already have, then you can keep up the chain of
motivation forever. This works fine in theory, except for the fact that
when we are faced with the choice of working for a goal or just having
the goal without any work, the resulting conflict can cause tension,
resulting in ignoring the self-contract and just taking the goal. This is
why for contingency contracting to work it always engages a finality of
act and outcome, as there are no other ways of obtaining a goal except
for the work required. If this was not the case, then we could be literally
chasing our tail, or in this case, the carrot forever.

Reality Reframing
Finally, clarity, mindsets, positive thinking and more only add grease to
the proverbial motivational wheel, and can mean that you are either
getting real or getting religion, a distinction that is often hard to make,
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and determines whether a psychological procedure changes reality in the

moment, or perhaps for all time.
Popular psychology procedures generally need renewing, relearning, or
refreshing, often in different terminology that is reassuring and
confident, in the moment that is. In other words, popular psychology
nostrums have a short shelf life, and need constant reapplication. (There
is perhaps a perverse incentive in doing this, for if their procedures
permanently worked the first time, pop psychologists would be out of
their jobs.) Reality testing is replaced by constant reality reframing, as
you are constantly in need of a shot of inspiration to keep the
motivational wheels turning. However, if psychological insights have
the sheen of actual reality, then behavior can permanently change, but
so does our perception of the insight itself. For example, one can respond
to an inspirational appeal to God and country to modify some aspect of
our behavior, from momentary courage to a commitment keep the
courage of our commitments. However, if we believe that God and
country really suffer from our lack of commitment, our change of
behavior is not due to therapy, its due to patriotism or for divine favor.
This pertains to all aspects of life, as realism is always coupled with
positive uncertainty couched in faith in the future, whether it be in
getting a good job after graduation or a good seat in heaven after we
graduate from life. In this case popular psychology changes into popular
beliefs, which are fully within our control to change given our
environments and capabilities, all for the better, and without the advice
of any psychologist, either popular or academic.

Evolutionary Psychology
Behavior Mods
Before Galileo, the solar system was thought to be a massively modular
mechanism. Each of the planets and suns looped the loops in their
courses to fit the observations of an unaided human eye. If the
predictions didn’t work, instead of changing the variables, you changed
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the constants, and saved the appearances as well as the model. So

epicycles were heaped upon epicycles, and each were loosened or
tightened like bicycle chains to make the solar system go round.
Human nature has its own constants that are also invariant, though they
may be expressed differently. These are nativistic or instinctive impulses,
as we like sweets, meat, music, and are attracted to others of the opposite
sex. But the complex behavioral patterns involved in attaining sweets or
sweethearts are different, and require not just a tendency and sensitivity,
but a whole new game plan. Is the brain up to it? Should it be wired for
it, or just allow learning to take its course with the ‘wires’ already
available? Evolutionary theory leads you to believe the former, as
morphological structures of exquisite complexity and purpose have
presumably evolved to allow us to see, feel, and think in ever unique
ways if they served the survival of the individual, and it would follow,
the species. So as the morphology or physical structure of the human
brain evolved, evolution also shaped the patterns of behavior that served
objective ad hoc purposes. These tendencies were metaphorically etched
into the human psyche and neo-cortex, with the physical engravement a
matter of inference. However, this begs the fact that the human neo-
cortex evolved as a general-purpose thinking tool that was highly
adaptable to many situations and worked in concert with lower level
‘affective’ parts of the brain. The question is, do you need an inferred
mental module made to do one specific function, or just use the parts you
have? And if you don’t know the parts you have and what they can do
in concert, then to give up and insist that an entirely new mental module
has evolved is simplistic and if not wrong, then certainly premature.
Dropping in a new inferred process to save the appearances certainly
made for ecclesiastical careers in Galileo’s time, and they certainly do so
now. Consider the discipline of evolutionary psychology. It is based on
the premise that evolution often enhances the complexity and purpose
of basic instinctive urges to meet niche psychological goals that
presumably increase the fitness and thus survivability of the race. The
problem is the finality of the process, as it is not subject to test, and
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supplants other explanations that are. Take human sexuality for

instance. We know that the sexual drive can be suppressed once an
individual detects that an otherwise sexually attractive person is close
kin. This detection may be due to information overtly or covertly
perceived, leading to the hypothesis that there is a kinship detector
system evolved in the brain to serve this purpose. Besides an innate
kinship detector, it has been conjectured that sexual drive can also be
‘turned off’ either consciously or non-consciously when a person
consciously recognizes that inbreeding causes genetic defects, or family
discord, or when unconscious processes occur such as Freudian
psychodynamics, or just familiarity with siblings breeding contempt, or
at least indifference.
What is common among all of these explanations is that none of them
are complete, as they have no foundation on elementary neurologically
based explanations of motivation. In other words, they have no
explanatory depth, and are not constrained by first principles as to how
motivation works, as we shall see.

Primed and Ready

Nature evolved a neo-cortex which promotes flexibility and
adaptiveness in behavior, but there is often an inability to explain why
this flexible and rational part of the mind can stray off course. You can
explain it through neuronal etchings in the cortex, or through an
interface with more primitive areas of the brain that are relatively
unchanged by evolution.
Where to start? Perhaps it is when you start. Before you do anything, you
first must pay attention to it, and attention is fixed by the utility or
importance of the goal which varies dependent upon information and
deprivation. So, one could work for food because of the knowledge of its
importance, and also because one is hungry. Attention to salient or
important stimuli also requires one to be ‘primed’ to act, and this focus
is not only rational, but is bootstrapped by affective impulses which have
a ‘mind’ of their own. This ‘priming' effect is caused by the release of the
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neuro-modulator dopamine, a neurochemical which modulates or

activates arrays of neurons, as compared to neurotransmitters which
regulate the firing between individual neurons. Dopamine induces
arousal (but not pleasure) which fixes attention, and changes the salience
or ‘decision utility’ or momentary behavior. However, dopaminergic
activity does not follow the logical act-outcome rules of declaratory or
rational thought, but responds to the non-conscious memory or
predictability of act-outcome correlations in the past, and in this way
makes sure that we are not erratically guided by the often-transient
logical reality of a situation. Often it conforms with the logic of the
situation, but more often it does not, and it is here that behavior takes a
course quite different from what it should logically entail. For example,
consider what to have for breakfast. Logically, sushi or fried chicken is
just as sensible as a breakfast meal as bacon and eggs, however we are
not primed to change our dietary choices because we have a history of
never eaten dinner foods for breakfast. Correlation proves the rule, and
as inductive animals the ‘habit’ of eating only certain foods at certain
times trumps the explanatory logic which is agnostic to eating any food
at any time. By not being attentively aroused by the thought of sushi for
breakfast, our behavior follows a preference for the foods that do. Now
consider sexual attraction. If we are continually in the presence is a non-
sexual context a person of the opposite sex, whether as siblings or simply
as friends, one may find that person sexually attractive, but not sexually
arousing, even if there was no societal prohibition against sexual contact.
In these cases, there is no breakfast food or kinship detector, but a more
general availability detector. In other words, we just don’t get hyped up
or aroused for events that we cannot attain, or have historically not
attained. If a desirable outcome is not available for us, we can logically
desire it but not affectively desire it, and when the logic changes the affect
is slow to follow. So even in a world of infinite sushi and ready and
willing best friends of the opposite sex, ham and eggs and anyone but
the girl next door will still be preferable.67
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Modular Eclecticism
Just as an orbiting sun was self-evident if one but looking to the sky. The
virtue of the incest taboo was that it took the general course of least
explanatory resistance, namely that different personality traits are
explanatory worlds into themselves through the postulation of
evolutionary mental modules that integrate nativistic or instinctive
sensitivities with overt behavioral patterns. By just accepting an inferred
evolutionary trait, then the behavior is parsimoniously ‘explained’,
regardless of the fact that it has no explanatory depth, or refers to actual
and discoverable neurological processes. Modularity also means that
evolutionary psychology has little generality, as you cannot test broadly
its major premises. Mental modules do not interoperate with others and
their components don’t do so either because the components are specific
to that process. Thus every epicycle around every moon has its own
unique dynamics that are incompatible with other rotating moons. This
modularity metaphor can extend to even how we think.

Contagious Memes and Selfish Genes

Modularity accurately describes the discrete genetic codes from which
people and behavior emerge, and it is extending this concept to human
behavior is where evolutionary psychology becomes out of its depth,
literally as it prefers, but metaphorically as it truly is. The most general
application of evolutionary psychology pertains to how information is
transferred and spreads, using lower-level genetic metaphors to explain
higher ones. “This evolutionary model of cultural information transfer is based
on the concept that units of information, or "memes", that have an independent
existence, are self-replicating, and are subject to selective evolution through
environmental forces. Starting from a proposition put forward in the writings
of Richard Dawkins, this model has formed the basis of a new area of study, one
that looks at the self-replicating units of culture. It has been proposed that just
as memes are analogous to genes, memetics is analogous to genetics.”68
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Because nature on its more rudimentary levels tends to be modular, with

the building blocks of nature described as self-defined entities that are
practically is not essentially irreducible, the inference is easily extended
to higher levels of cognition and experience, which can in turn be
extended down to elementary biological processes. This cross mapping
of metaphors or ‘level confusion’ extends the metaphor for lower
processes to apply for higher processes, and for the latter to map to
analogous genetic processes. Thus we have ‘memes’ or ideas that
replicate like genes, and ‘selfish’ genes, where human intentions map to
genetic codes.
Metaphors allude to an aspect of reality, but do not necessarily conform
to reality. We act upon information not separately, but in the context of
our social and physical environments. Thus memes that ‘catch on’ such
as a vengeful God in the heavens have no meaning unless we attach
credibility to it from inductive reasoning, namely your friends, family
and society that assure you it is so, to deductive inferences from your
own observations. Similarly, genes are suppressed or expressed due to a
confluence of many supervening biological processes, and ‘selfishness’
imputes a cognitive import that they do not have, any more than a comet
has a mind of its own.
Overall, the modular aspect of evolutionary psychology is appealing
because it is parsimonious, but fails all of the other standards for
scientific explanation. It’s fault is that by conferring upon itself the
semblance of explanation, it is thus explanatory, and escapes further
questioning that could reveal the actual causes of behavior. But again,
skepticism of such nonsense does seem to be a genetic trait that pops up
from time to time.
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Social Psychology
The Body Eclectic
“Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and
behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people or by
social norms. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result
of the relationship between mental states and social situations, studying the
social conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur, and how
these variables influence social interactions.”-Wikipedia.

In physics, the natural order of things follow logical rules or laws that
map to the clockwork of the universe, and as with all clocks, you cannot
only tell time but also predict where everything will be in a timely way.
This is good when you are predicting the movement of planets, stars,
and engine pistons, but when you look closer, really closer, all the neat
laws go haywire, along with all their predictions. This occurred when
physicists looked closer to the sub-atomic granularity of nature, and
discovered that this quantum world behaved by rules completely at odds
with the reliable physical models that guide our everyday lives, and with
testable outcomes and reliable applications that still escape human
comprehension or explanation.
Similarly, the social sciences which observe and deduce the lawfulness
of macro or aggregate elements of human behavior, from economics,
business management, marketing, and politics can infer economic social
or political rules from an inductive assessment of basic correlations or
trends. There is no need to infer more elementary processes than a
weatherman needs to explain the chemistry of water. However, when a
social science expands its purview from the social to the individual, then
prediction becomes less reliable when behaviors goes off on tangents
from the illogical to the bizarre.
For many of the disciplines in the social sciences, the sources of
individual behavior is the primary focus, and like tracing the path of a
comet in the sky, its trajectory and speed can be predicted relative to its
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neighboring planets and star. But in fact, its behavior is influenced not
by one or two celestial bodies, but scores of them. The same is the case
for human behavior, which is the result of the consideration of often
hundreds of humans in a social milieu. However, whether a person’s
behavior is influenced by one person or thousands of people, individual
motivation in psychology follows the same contours. Yet whereas the
line of influence from one person to another can be well defined, when
you toss in the influence of other people who have different demands of
you and at different times and circumstances, just like postulating the
movement of a planet circled by many worlds, prediction is unreliable,
and generalities must suffice.
This is more complicated than when you are regarding an individual
human body, and not just how but why it moves. Then, one must
consider the near limitless ability of language to categorize the many
cognitive and affective variables that influence behavior. Given the fact
that as social animals, humans must consciously and non-consciously
consider the behavior not of one human but of many humans and their
social, religious, and political views, different cognitive strategies, both
learned and innate, are necessary to cope. The study of the regularities
and lawfulness of these coping strategies is the province of social
psychology.
Leadership, conformance, decision making, social bonding, group think,
and many other topics are separate areas of discussion, research, and
scholarship. All are united by a single non-empirical governing
principle, that cognition is one sided, and is not affective in itself, but
leads to, induces, or precedes affective states that can often be kept apart
from the rational calculations that drive behavior. In fact, language and
cognition are disembodied, and are generally detached from affective
states, which are metaphorically assumed to conflict with reason rather
than aid it. This reason verse emotion metaphor is dominant in literature
and the arts, and finds ample representation in the literature of social
psychology.
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This dichotomy between reason and emotion is apparent if one considers

the application of basic motivational principles for self-governance or
self-motivation. “Self-regulation involves steering one’s behavior toward a
desired end state. End states, or goals, can be defined as specific desired behaviors
(e.g., physical exercise), thoughts or attitudes (e.g., being compassionate), or
emotional states (e.g., being content). Self-regulation, therefore, subsumes the
regulation not only of behavior but also of thoughts and emotions. Self-
regulation can be thought of as an umbrella term that includes a wide array of
goal-relevant activities, such as deciding which goal to pursue, planning how to
pursue it, implementing these plans, shielding goals from competing concerns,
and sometimes even abandoning goals.”69
“Some models, for example, focus entirely on goals, whereas others focus on the
fragility of willpower. Some models center on human personality and traits,
whereas others focus on conflicts between goals and temptation. Still others
construe self-regulation as dependent on a self-monitoring process, whereas
others construe it as a series of learnable strategies. All of these models provide
insights about self-regulation, but sometimes they talk past each other, make
only shallow contributions, or make contributions that are underappreciated by
scholars working in adjacent areas.”
From these examples, we note that social psychological models are
prolific, each with inferred mental events that jostle for attention such as
intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, satisfiers and maximizers, temptation
vs. reason, growth vs. fixed mindsets, and many more. These are
impulsive and deliberative processes that conflict with each other, serve
different problems or roles, are affective or rational, conscious or non-
conscious, sporadic or continual, and all requiring the acceptance of
inferred processes untethered to the neurophysiology of learning or
incentive motivation. As eclectic principles, they address specific and
middle range problems that cannot be systematically related because
they are not derived from first principles. And because they are not, they
lack the generality that can allow them to be accepted by the public at
large, which relies of folk psychology to make their own judgements on
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what constitutes motivation in all of its niche roles, from leadership to

friendships.
To be effective, reasoning must be derived from universally valid and
understood premises, and if these are different for every circumstance,
then every proverbial moon and star can have its own unique rules and
own unique mysteries. This remains the issue for social psychology, that
all of its research offshoots are not grounded and constrained by any
clearcut idea as to how incentive motivation works, and are focused on
exceptions to the rational rules of behavior rather than why behavior is
exceptional. As we shall see, this extends from large-scale aspects of
behavior governing the behavior of people in the aggregate that are the
province of the allied disciplines of social psychology such as sociology,
economics, and politics to the individual personal decisions that often
defy rationality.

Behavioral Economics
Epicycles upon Epicycles
Behavior revolves around incentives, in perfect circles one may add,
making its predictions a sure thing in the large, until you look a bit
closer, and discover that they aren’t. In classical economics, the decisions
regarding the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth are made
logically, and follow the bounds of logic, if not necessarily of ethics. Thus
we wage war, make love, buy cars and stocks because of their
instrumentalities towards our personal welfare, and all are denominated
in similar coin.
Except of course when behavior does not behave so logically. The
effective reason behind all of this, as we will later demonstrate, is that
behavior is uniformly and consistently affective, and represents the
conscious and non-conscious feeling or affective states that guide and
distort behavior. Like gravity bending light into an inexorable arc, the
influence of affect is no less profound on the science of economics as
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Einstein’s relativity principles have on the straight and narrow principles

of Newtonian laws of motion and force.
Newtonian laws work perfectly fine with objects in our cosmological
neighborhood, but break down when you approach the unimaginably
large and small. Similarly, economic laws work well when are engaging
with events in the large (macro-economic) to the small (micro-
economics), except that as you scale down to smaller economic decisions,
we find that people often don’t act very economically at all.
So you work within the paradigm and come up with epicycle and
epicycle, or you redefine what human nature is really like. Creating
epicycles is certainly not a yeoman’s work, and is definitely worth a
Nobel prize or two if you discover enough of them. But like the many
limited theories in social psychology, so many principles taxes the
practical mind, as if every tire on every car has to be changed differently.
Is psychology butterfly collecting, and be like collecting members of a
genus or taxonomy, or can you derive infinite butterflies from first
principles, or how they could evolve in the first place?
But economics as a discipline has a core non-empirical assumption that
humans are rational actors, a premise that is broadly true when one
gauges broad statistical trends of masses of people, but becomes only
sporadically true when you look at the behavior of individuals, which
can become far less predictable and often just ornery. So rather than
following rules, humans are known to take exception to the rules, and
their behavior uses biases, tendencies, and heuristics such as mental
accounting, herd behavior, framing effects, loss aversion, confirmation
bias, familiarity bias and more to provide exceptions to the rational rules
that a circumspect and intelligent mind should otherwise followed.
Indeed, these bias have multiplied to the extent that it would take an
accountant to classify them all, let alone understand them. Citing this
profligacy of unique mental processes, the economist Jason Collins
provided a ‘stellar’ critique of behavioral economics, using metaphors
the reader will find familiar.
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“So, I want to take you to a Wikipedia page that I first saw when someone
tweeted that they had found “the best page on the internet”. The “List of
cognitive biases” was up to 165 entries on the day I took this snapshot, and it
contains most of your behavioral science favorites … the availability heuristic,
confirmation bias, the decoy effect – a favorite of marketers, the endowment effect
and so on ….
But this page, to me, points to what I see as a fundamental problem with
behavioral economics.
“In 1500, the dominant model of the universe involved the sun, planets and stars
orbiting around the earth. Since that wasn’t what was actually happening, there
was a huge list of deviations from this model. We have the Venus effect, where
Venus appears in the evening and morning and never crosses the night sky. We
have the Jupiter bias, where it moves across the night sky, but then suddenly
starts going the other way. Putting all the biases in the orbits of the planets and
sun together, we end up with a picture of the orbits that looks something like
this picture – epicycles on epicycles. But instead of this model of biases,
deviations and epicycles, what about an alternative model?

The earth and the planets orbit the sun.

Copernicus, of course, it’s not quite as simple as this picture – the orbits of the
planets around the sun are elliptical, not circular. But, essentially, by adopting
this new model of how the solar system worked, a large collection of “biases” was
able to become a coherent theory. Behavioral economics has some similarities to
the state of astronomy in 1500 – it is still at the collection of deviation stage.
There aren’t 165 human biases. There are 165 deviations from the wrong
model.70
It was not choosing the right model or paradigm, but rather the right
explanation that can minimize the inferred facts you can assume from
that model. By admitting a score of deviations to the rule but maintaining
the rule is an attitude that Galileo fought, and is paradoxically
supportive of the core economic principle of autonomous reasoning, or
reasoning that is based on rational principles alone. The fact that the
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basic principles of economics are challenged by such exceptions to the

rule underscores not the invalidity of behavioral economics, but the
invalidity of core aspects of economic theory. In other words, it’s not
adding epicycles to the planet to fit the model that’s necessary, but
altering their orbits to fit a new one. But of course, like shiny buttons,
exceptions do have their way of filling intellectual space as well as
economic journals. This need for an underlying explanation as the
primary basis of incentive was underscored by the marketing professor
David Gal.
“Only if we understand why a behavior occurs can we create generalizable
knowledge, the goal of science. In practice, much of behavioral economics
consists in using psychological insights to influence behavior. These
interventions tend to be small, often involving subtle changes in how choices are
presented: for example, whether you have to “opt in” to a 401k savings
plan versus having to “opt out.” In this respect, behavioral economics can be
thought of as endorsing the outsize benefits of psychological “tricks,” rather than
as calling for more fundamental behavioral or policy change.
The popularity of such low-cost psychological interventions, or “nudges,” under
the label of behavioral economics is in part a triumph of marketing. It reflects the
widespread perception that behavioral economics combines the cleverness and
fun of pop psychology with the rigor and relevance of economics.
Yet this triumph has come at a cost. In order to appeal to other economists,
behavioral economists are too often concerned with describing how human
behavior deviates from the assumptions of standard economic models, rather
than with understanding why people behave the way they do.”71
To overthrow Ptolemaic principles means also to provide new governing
principles as to how planets and stars move in space. Even without the
revealing perspective of the telescope, Newton’s laws of gravity would
have made epicycles unnecessary, and outline new ways planets must
move. Similarly, laws of affect make cognitive biases unnecessary, and
derive from the first principles that underscore the real ways people
must move. Unless of course there can be a bias to correct for the bias,
and make clocks and solar systems seemingly run on time.
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Let Bias be Bias

We have noted that the Ptolemaic model of the solar system collected all
the ‘biases’ forming the eccentric movement of the planets under a new
celestial gear box of orbits and epicycles, and the criticism in modern
times that Ptolemy was also biased in how he measured all of these
eccentric movements.72 Thus in retrospect a wrong theory was calculated
wrong, and perhaps on purpose thus multiplying the error and the
confusion.6 73
That we are not troubled by such nonsense is due to the
fact that we can see the mechanics of the celestial bodies up close.
Unfortunately, human behavior is not immune to observations which are
biased by an author to meet a publishers expectations that are also
biased. In other words, if you have a journal that advocates a flat earth,
authors will slant their research results to validate the purpose of your
journal, and publishers will select those articles that exaggerate that bias
the most. This is quite the opposite of the virtuous circle that journalistic
authors and editors normally espouse, where objective research is met
by objective criticism, with null results as important as positive ones.
This problem is exacerbated by the surfeit of eclectic theories of behavior
that range from grand theories of personality to how one is biased to
choose breakfast food.
The best exemplar of this is ‘nudge theory’ by the Nobel prize winner
(presumably for profound ideas like this) Richard Thaler. As he defined

6 That Ptolemy fabricated his data or at least was careless in making sure his
data were correct is a fault line in all of the sciences whose fissures spread also
into the present day. Indeed, several studies on being honest have been
determined to be dishonest, an irony that should not go unremarked.
According to a 2012 paper by two distinguished social psychologists, when
people signed an honesty declaration at the beginning of a form, rather than
the end, they were less likely to lie. As it turned out, this conclusion was equally
a lie, as not only was the experiment repeated with null results, but the data
for the original experiment were fabricated, with responsibility referred to
other parties, namely an insurance company, that conveniently had no record
of the experiment!
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it, “A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that
alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or
significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the
intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting
fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.”74
A better way of defining this is as friendly reminder from a tickler file of
yours’s or another’s devise to let you know is a subtle way of what you
need to do or should be tempted to do. It is based on the idea that
behavior is often on a precipice, and we need a psychological ‘nudge’
now and then to get us on the straight and narrow, for our own good of
course, as we are often nudged to agree. Nudge bias sounds reasonable,
and better yet, requires no postulation of unique mental processes to
demonstrate its efficacy, but rather the familiar ones of securing attention
and remembering important things to do. So do people need a lot of
reminding? Apparently not, as we pretty well know what we need to do,
regardless of fruit, forbidden or not, being on eye level. The problem is
that nudge bias suffers from publication bias, or the tendency of journal
editors to select for publication findings that have novel and flashy
appeal rather than research that just proves the novel ideas have little or
no validity whatsoever. Indeed, when publication bias is corrected for,
then nudges are demonstrated be less than ten percent effective as
advertised, or not effective at all.75 76
Overall the problem with behavioral economics is, like social
psychology, its profound eclecticism, or its guidance not by a systematic
theory derived from first principles, or a neuro-biological explanation of
incentive, but by multiple tiny theories that address singular problems
and infer singular supporting processes. In addition, the relative efficacy
of each of these biases is not known, and can often be distorted by biases
from authors and journal editors as well as a public at large who give
credibility and authority to processes they do not understand. As such,
the applicability of behavioral economics is as marginal as the guiding
aphorisms, heuristics, and helpful hints that we learn from experience,
which thankfully we do not need do not need a journal editor to judge.
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Philosophy
Story Telling
“It must, however, be confessed, that this species of skepticism, when more
moderate, may be understood in a very reasonable sense, and is a necessary
preparative to the study of philosophy, by preserving a proper impartiality in
our judgments, and weaning our mind from all those prejudices, which we may
have imbibed from education or rash opinion. To begin with clear and self-
evident principles, to advance by timorous and sure steps, to review frequently
our conclusions, and examine accurately all their consequences; though by these
means we shall make both a slow and a short progress in our systems; are the
only methods, by which we can ever hope to reach truth, and attain a proper
stability and certainty in our determinations.” ― David Hume, An Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding

“Philosophy, if it is to be responsible, cannot simply spin out theories of mind,

language, and other aspects of human life without seriously encountering and
understanding the massive body of scientific research. Otherwise, philosophy is
just storytelling, a fabrication of narratives ungrounded in the realities of
human embodiment and cognition. If we are to know ourselves, philosophy need
to maintain an ongoing dialog with the sciences of mind.” -George Lakoff and
Mark Johnson

The best criticism of philosophy is by a philosopher, in this case, the

Scottish philosopher David Hume. His concern was not what philosophy
is, but where to start to be a philosopher. Self-evident principles are
universals, observances that approach the closest to certainty and are
agreed upon by nearly all observers. You don’t argue from conclusions,
but with rudimentary premises that are empirically true. Emerging from
these elementary premises are inferred processes that are constantly
subject to confirmation and test, and their ability to be falsified is the
essence of the scientific enterprise. In other words, Hume called for an
empirically responsible philosophy, that has depth along with breadth.
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Being empirically responsible means that you must seek to integrate

empirical knowledge on successive levels of observation to conform
your hypotheses to what the evidence demands, and that takes not just
acuity of reasoning but the tools and ability to closely observe.
Integrating them on different observational levels to enable
understanding and mastery of physical and behavioral universe is the
essence of scientific inquiry.
Before the advent of modern science in the late 16th and 17th century, the
tools were not available to examine nature up close, and the depth of any
inquiry from the physical and biological sciences to the social sciences
was anyone’s guess, which everyone it seemed did guess. This was the
pre-scientific age of ‘natural philosophy’77 where the place you were
going was merged with why you were going, and supernatural entities
were a major part of the mix. However, with the rapid development of
observational instruments that successively revealed nature up close, the
physical and biological sciences became divorced from the social
sciences, which had to wait until modern times before instrumentalities
and observations allowed it to fitfully assume the depth it needed to
aspire to science. As we have seen from the physical and biological
sciences, first principles have a way of overturning quite a few
theoretical apple carts, and making scientists in effect start over in their
approximations and explanations of the world. The problem with
philosophy, as well as with its offshoots in the social sciences, is that its
first or governing principle is entirely wrong. For all philosophy and the
philosophies that govern the social sciences, the first principle is that
humans are reasoning creatures. What neuroscience reveals is that we
are affectively reasoning creatures, or in other words, affect and effect,
emotion and cognition are not separate entities but are intertwined.
Reason is not a separate artifact, to be effective it must always be
affective, or embodied.
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Embodiment
The relevance of the interaction between body and mind is a given, but
its importance is not, as the faculty of reason is generally conceived in
folk and academic philosophy as independent of the body, with people
moving in proverbial straight lines impelled by reason until they bump
into a metaphorical motive, emotion, drive, need, or other force that
changes the direction of their behavior. Hume was of a different mind,
and conceived of philosophy as the inductive science of human nature,
and he concluded that humans are creatures more of sensitive and
practical sentiment than of reason. He characterizes moral goodness in
terms of “feelings” of approval or disapproval that people have when
they consider human behavior in the light of agreeable or disagreeable
consequences, either to themselves or to others. Hume was not the first
philosopher to grapple with the interaction of affect and reason, as had
philosophers from Aristotle to Spinoza. So philosophy it may be said has
always been aware of the mutual influences of affect and reason, but the
lawfulness of affect, contrary to reason, could not be easily deduced, as it
was dependent upon not logical but analogical events instantiated in the
workings of the human brain that were beyond one’s vision. Like the
errant motions of the planets as they zigzagged in their courses to an
unaided eye, there is no rhyme or reason to affect, and when it is
lawfulness was deduced, it was replete with metaphorical epicycles, and
we have a flowering of philosophies that only agree in their
disagreement.
Embodiment means the deconstruction of reason as being not just
computation or thought, but how affect changes and is changed by
thought. But deconstruction requires depth, or an ability to see a mental
universe of epicycles up close. But does this cast philosophy out into the
cold as irrelevant because of a paucity of questions answered? Quite the
contrary, as philosophy is relevant because it enables an abundance of
questions to be asked. The reason why philosophers and philosophies are
important, regardless of their practical implications, is that they point to
unresolved mysteries whose explanations, given a lack of depth, are
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merely placeholders. The non-empirical inferences regarding

perception, reality, motivation, emotion and more raise questions that
like an eternal tease, is their narrative allure. As we will note, add a little
drama, and even philosophy can be entertaining.

Literature: The Allure of Narrative

To know oneself biologically requires depth of observation and breadth
of knowledge, from the symptoms of a bad cold to the observance of a
cold virus replicating. Without depth, you would have in medicine
merely old wives tales, and for philosophy, mainly tall tales. But tall tales
have their purposes, and their lessons. And to know oneself personally,
we must also be aware of the lessons of experience known to us and for
literature, told to us.
To encompass the breadth of knowledge but without verifiable depth is
a recipe for storytelling, as you can just as easily put the earth on the back
of infinitely regressing turtles or in the center of rotating crystal spheres,
and make for a wonderful narrative with perfect predictiveness, but only
within the story itself. Sometimes the turtles are clearly inferred,
sometimes their existence is tenuously glimpsed, and sometimes there is
room enough to believe in turtles yet to see them for real, see their
contours, and calculate how they balance worlds. The latter requires a
depth of observation required by the physical tools that allow us to look
closer at all of creation, from turtles on down. With science there can only
be one narrative, and to follow the convergence of observations to one
final truth is the transfixing narrative of popular science as well as
science itself. In science fiction, physical and natural science narratives
are combined with a personalized journey of discovery, embodied in a
fictional character’s behaviors, emotions, and the personal conflicts and
technologies that impact and guide them. In popular fiction, or literature,
this journey of discovery is limited to the winding course of our own
behavior alone, yet suggests the interplay of personal motives whose
sources and mechanics are just as mysterious.
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So instead of contemplating the bizarre orbits of Mars, one can with

equal fascination follow the bizarre mental orbits of Hamlet. The
narrative of behavior in literature uses not examples but exemplars, so
the elements that motivate a Hamlet are tantalizingly obscure, and
enthrall not only Hamlet’s audience but the many commentators of
Hamlet and the play itself. Shakespeare was certainly not a philosopher,
much less a scientist, but he presented in his own tall tales intriguing and
identifiable narratives that asked timeless questions in timeless prose.
Literature uses metaphor, allusions, rhyme, and intriguing plots and the
mental plotting and accompanying pleasures and torments. It makes us
empathize, and we are not just put in the shoes of our neighbor, but
kings, princes and princesses, ogres and beauties, criminals and saints. It
makes us question our personal reality, and alters our own behavior by
being placed virtually in the shoes of others. Literature and poetry do
not have aspirations to philosophy, but rather for their metaphors or
conceits, and as such are foundational to the questions that makes all
science be.

Humanistic Psychology
Becoming soon!
“Humanistic psychology is a holistic approach in psychology that focuses on the
whole person. Humanists believe that a person is ‘in the process of becoming’,
which places the conscious human experience as the nucleus of psychological
establishment. Humanistic psychology was developed to address the deficiencies
of psychoanalysis, psychodynamic theory, and behaviorism. The foundation for
this movement is understanding behavior by means of human experience.” 78

Ever since Galileo and his telescope rudely kicked mankind from the
literal center of the universe, humanity still remained in the eyes of many
in the virtual center of the universe, and remained the apple of God’s
eye, notwithstanding a forbidden apple or two that mankind still had to
pay for in suffering, and later to be hoped, redemption. Since then,
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science has not been kind to this perspective, and the successive impacts
of a mechanical universe and an evolving genome progressively
sequestered God into the realm of faith and mystery. Nature is at worst
cruel and at best indifferent, and to redeem human nature without an
appeal to a deus ex machina, or God intervening from the heavens,
perhaps a saving grace for mankind is that humans possessed after all a
core element in their psyche that when cultivated would redeem the race,
the existence of God notwithstanding.
This is the core element of ‘humanistic’ psychology, which is based on
the premise that individual human needs conform with the needs of the
race, not a racial subset of master race, or racism, but all of us, the genus
homo sapiens. To remedy the problem of humans continually fighting
over limited material resources with value distributed illiberally, the
essence of reward was redefined as a virtual event, that like an un-
accessed bank balance was ‘consumed’ by what it could buy, or its
meaning. Meaning, whether it is denominated in the virtual control of
individual, things, or just a place in the heavens with loved ones and a
loving God, is the apex of motivation. and ‘becoming’ represents the
multiple ways that meaning can be attained. In this way, virtual goods
may be infinitely coined, and are a measure of boundless worth, so
everyone can have their cake and virtually eat it too. The problem is, how
does this actually work and be made workable? A deep question
doubtless, made all the more difficult when humanists proudly assert
that an answer could be found despite being out of their depth.

Emergence
The neurophysiology of motivation would seem to be an odd place to
start to deduce the importance of meaning in the world. We are after all
more than the sum of our parts, and consciousness, feelings, and the arc
of behavioral tendencies that emerge from feelings are undeniable.
Emergence from more rudimentary principles imparts a different reality,
but the question is whether it imparts a different direction for our
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personal reality, particularly for our behavior. This is a question avoided

by a holistic perspective on behavior, which assumes that becoming or
meaning is independent of a lower or molecular level of analysis, and
that such a perspective can be even detrimental to the proper analysis of
human values. Of course, the question of emergence has rarely been
asked, and for behavioristic or psychodynamic perspectives that ignore
or denigrate meaning, hasn’t been asked either, as both are tethered to
non-empirical assumptions as to where value comes from. This moves
us back square to the importance of depth in psychological analysis.
We have seen that the laws of physics are not predicated on common
sense assumptions of how the world works, but on how common-sense
perspectives of how world works are emergent from physics. The same
applies to all non-empirical events, even values, which are not
predicated on but are emergent from neurophysiological principles
underscoring motivation or learning. If this perspective is discounted or
denied, then inferred processes can reign supreme, and values can be
anything from petting your dog to burning witches, and can be
formalized and enforced through holy writ or the writ of political
constitutions. But we argue that value, like consciousness as an
emergent property, is nonetheless constrained by its parts, and to argue
against the parts is to disparage the whole. It is easy and emotionally
compelling to argue against such a reductionist perspective if it is used
to justify human dysfunction, as if human nature compels us to follow
life styles that are nasty, brutish, and short. But it may also be argued
that the opposite is the case, and that a neurologically grounded
explanation of human motivation implies the importance of a belief in
the natural course of human betterment, or meliorism, from individual
and social behavior to that of the future of the human race itself.

Meliorism and its Affects

Psychology is about humans, but if it is based on the premise that
humans are intrinsically good and how to make them better, it is
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‘humanistic’. So the world should revolve around people, rather than

people around the world. This view can be traced back to the 18 th century
French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who believed that man was
naturally good but was corrupted by civilization. This human centric
point of view is juxtaposed by behavioristic and psychodynamic theories
which minimize the importance of human agency or freedom. The latter
also assume non-empiric events, such as that behavior changes upon
reinforcement without the influence of accompanying affect, or that
unconscious motives or drives impel behavior.
The assumption is that ‘holism’ or looking at the molar or emergent
properties of behavior without regard to its constituent parts, will always
result in a melioristic outcome, or one that embraces the advance of
human progress and human values. The implicit judgement riding on its
logical coattails is that values are not derivable from a molecular
analysis, or at the very least are not informed or corrected by such an
analysis. This idea is at once complicated by the fact that meaning not
only implies heightened values, but heightened affect. Experiences such
as self-actualization, peak experience, a sense of fulfillment, and the like
underscore the implicit view that positive affect scales with the
importance of sustained positive values that are experienced virtually.
However, for the human prospect, a positive value must not be conflated
with a ‘good’ value, as what is positive for one individual, say Napoleon,
is not positive for the peoples he conquered. This returns us to the key
principle of a humanistic psychology, that in the interplay of humans in
politics, economics and society, the virtual economics of value is one in
which everyone may still share unequally to meet their unequal merits,
but all nonetheless share bountifully. That value is denominated in
virtual possibilities that are concurrently rational and affective makes
motivation a two-sided coin that cannot be operationalized without
knowing how affect and reason interplay on the most basic motivational
level. For humanistic psychologists, that is a deep question requiring a
deep understanding that can move their discipline from the merely
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sentimental to the scientific, and to accept its direction no matter where

it goes, an exploration that we will continue in the chapters to come.

Behaviorism
A rose by any other data language ain’t quite the same.
If the world only moved in straight lines, the physics of the world, or at
least for the movement of physical things, would be quite simple, and
the resulting mechanical laws would be easy to derive and uniformly
accurate in their predictions. That this is not the case is due to the unseen
force of gravity, the influence of which needed to be systematically
described, even if not explained. The incorporation of gravity into the
calculus of the behavior of objects was the triumph of Isaac Newton’s
mathematical calculus, which has proven to be a bane to students, and a
boon to engineers and physicists.
When Newton’s landmark work the Principia was published, physicists
soon transitioned to the new mathematical data language that with great
precision described and predicted the courses of moving objects. The
ability to move to this new syntax precisely mapped to and predicted the
newly revealed courses of the worlds newly revealed by the telescope.
Still, the scholastics of Galileo’s time did not go lightly into the shade of
intellectual irrelevance, but it didn’t matter, as science being science, it
simply moved on with new procedures, new tools, new findings, and
new researchers, and stayed true to its principles if not its name, which
was then called natural philosophy and was now called physics.
Schools of thought are differentiated by their unique data languages,
experimental apparatus and procedures as well as the intellectual
camaraderie of other true believers. But for a specific subject matter, if
the epistemological principles or core principles of science, within group
design, first principles, testability, generality, parsimony, and depth can
be transferred without loss to different data languages, apparatus, and
procedures, then the new science would be in principle the same as that
school of thought, unless it bumps up against human nature. Indeed, it
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wouldn’t be a school of thought at all, but a justly defined scientific

perspective on behavior.
That in a nutshell is the epistemological quandary of modern
behaviorism. Using observable behavior as its primary datum,
behaviorism seeks to inductively derive the lawfulness of behavior
through verifiable observation, and discounts or ignores behavioral
variables such as feelings or affect that cannot be observed. There are
many different types of behaviorisms, from the classical conditioning of
Ivan Pavlov to the mediational behaviorism of Clark Hull to the operant
conditioning of B. F. Skinner. Like the astronomical theories before
Galileo, all had to make do in their time with the data they had and the
correlations they provided. Some behaviorists inferred intervening
processes, like the epicycles of old, and others simply focused on
prediction and control, and ignored postulating any processes at all, but
focused on merely going where the correlations took you, and from them
inductively infer the lawfulness of behavior.
This latter approach represents the world of the ‘methodological’
behaviorist, who collectively as ‘behavior analysts’ rely on practical
procedures that have been honed to provide practical results.
Methodological behaviorism is based on the research and philosophy of
the psychologist B.F. Skinner, who using laboratory animals derived the
rules of ‘operant’ conditioning from his mapping of the correlations of
how rates and timing of rewards can shape behavior. Reinforcers are
discrete events that change the amplitude and direction of behavior, and
we know them from popular usage as ‘extrinsic’ rewards, or how
voluntary behavior is modulated by consequences or reinforcers that
follow.
By rigorously adopting within group designs that examine the behavior
of individual subjects over individual trials, you can methodologically
keep to your knitting, and only note the correlations between schedules
of reward and behavior, or you can look more closely or radically at
behavior, which can radically change not only what you see but how you
see. Skinner, knowing this, was not blind to the accumulating power of
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newer observational methods and tools, and adopted an alternative

model to this methodological behaviorism that accepted and endorsed
depth of observation, or a ‘radical’ behaviorism. This would include all
subjective or private observations that can be transitioned into public or
verifiable knowledge that encompassed the objective correlates of
feelings, emotions, and non-consciously perceived stimuli. But there was
an attending problem with this, for by making behaviorism isomorphic
with science, behaviorism became science, a true science of behavior that
does not need the name ‘behaviorism’ any more than physics needs to
be called natural philosophy.
To many behaviorists, behaviorism by any other name is not the same,
even though it is by all other measures behaviorism! Indeed, Skinner’s
radical behaviorism encompasses the methodology and principles of
science, but is tethered to a data language and procedures that are only
partially useful for its ultimate purpose. So it can be as tough a sell to
convince an academic behaviorist to change their language, procedures,
and familiar academic circles as it would be for me to convince you to
speak French and move to Paris, despite the evident superiority of
Romance languages and a gilded city. Indeed, this argument to move to
a gilded city was made before with empirical rigor and clarity, but with
predictable results.

Behaviorism gone vague

In 1993, the behaviorists John Donahoe and David Palmer, published
‘Learning and Complex Behavior’, a highly researched and well-
reasoned book that advocated Skinner’s radical behaviorism, and using
newer observational tools that could measure the brain ‘in motion’,
derived a new unified or ‘discrepancy’ model of reinforcement that
united Pavlovian and Skinnerian models of conditioning, and was a
precursor to the discrepancy reinforcement theory now generally
accepted in affective neuroscience or biological learning theory.
So what happened? After the chorus of praise in the house organ journal
of the behavioristic movement, the Journal of the Experimental Analysis
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of Behavior, or JEAB, very little. D and P’s work and principles were
ignored, not out of malice or prejudice, but due to sheer practicality.
Changing the detail but not the rules of the game in effect changed the
name of the game, and rather than adjusting their procedures to
incorporate D and P’s reductionist perspective, the interest in that
perspective was simply reduced, in this case, to almost nothing.
This presents an important question. Is behaviorism defined by its
empiric principles or by its procedures and data language? In the former
case, it is subsumed under science, and in the latter it is cordoned off by
data language and procedures that are scarcely adequate to describe
behavior in all its facets.
So what was left for behaviorism? As its sheen of novelty waned, and its
procedures relegated to fringe issues in psychology such as autism and
problem behavior, its prospects seemed limited until its banner was
taken up by an unlikely source, linguistics.

Behaviorism gone vogue

Contextual Behavior Science claims academic heritage from Charles Darwin, B.
F. Skinner, and Murray Sidman, all of whom emphasized the role of
environment × organism interactions in the variation, selection, and retention
of a given behavioral repertoire. Rooted in the philosophy of functional
contextualism, CBS emphasizes the centrality of situated action and sets a
pragmatic truth criterion, attempting to answer the question “what works in
this context.” It utilizes various behavior analysis methodology to develop a
basic behavioral account for complex organism behavior.

Behaviorism, or more specifically, a radical behaviorism is the perfect

example of how science should be thought of and how it should work.
The irony is that this view is not rejected but neglected by behaviorists
because a radical behaviorism cast them out of their safe zone of a
common data language and experimental procedural. In other words, to
be a radical behaviorist requires them to also integrate their knowledge
and their language with affective neuroscience, an additional chore for
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an educated few who are already settled in with their careers and ‘vitae’.
The greater irony is that a ‘replacement’ discipline, or ‘contextual
behavioral science’, abandons all of the principles that make behaviorism
scientific. From its overly complex syntax, uncertain semantics, and lack
of parsimony, generality, and depth, this new behaviorism only shares
with its predecessor a passing resemblance in its data language and
pragmatism, and little else. Derived from Relational Frame Theory or
RFT, a theory of language that uses the data language of operant
conditioning to map transformation processes in language and
conceptualization, it was foundational to the creation of ‘acceptance and
commitment therapy’, or ACT, one of a panoply of psychotherapeutic
cures. The data language of operant conditioning changed from one that
conceived of empirically defined units to merely their linguistic analog,
or contingencies interacting not in reality, but virtually.79 In other words,
contingencies acted and were transformed linguistically, and with only
a presumptive correspondence to behavior change. Regardless of the
efficacy of the therapy, which from findings using between group
designs is on par with other psychotherapeutic interventions, thus
meriting its own prize, RFT and ACT fulfilled a ‘pragmatic truth
criterion’, or if it works, it must be true, but retained little else of the
behaviorist agenda. Transitioning from the methodological behaviorist’s
model of simple syntax, rigorous semantics, within group design but no
depth to a new paradigm with complex syntax, uncertain semantics,
between group designs, and still, no depth, RFT and ACT have defined
themselves not just out of science, but even out of the most conservative
definition of behaviorism. Whereas a radical or biological behaviorism
isn’t a behaviorism, but yet is, a contextual behaviorism claims to be a
behaviorism, but isn’t. In other words, contextual behavioral science
adopted the metaphors of behaviorism, but not its principles.

Behaviorism out of the ashes

Overall, behaviorism has triumphed as a discipline, but failed as a
school. Following a discipline, whether it be good physical health or
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good mental health, requires an adherence to procedures built upon

explanations, and is agnostic to brand names, unique data languages and
procedures, or other labels which give ownership to one group or
another. We have noted that explanations for the efficacy of meditation,
hypnosis, and even psychotherapy itself escape ownership from a select
few, and simply flow from a progressively grounded explanation of how
motivation works. In other words, the rules of science are not the
province of any school, and those schools that aspire to the heavens are
inevitably absorbed in them. In this case, a radical behaviorism does not
die, but it simply merged into the language and practice of science, with
a vocabulary and meaning shared by all. In this sense it dies like a
phoenix, but rise again as science.

Theology
Knowing the unknowable
“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches
me to suspect that my own is also.” Mark Twain

Getting to the bottom of motivation does not get to the bottom of the
motivation of other intelligences beyond us. This is a non-empirical
assumption that can only be truly answered in death, a paradox of
existence since answers in science predicate that the one posing the
question of existence be alive. That is the theological position that
although we may physically give out, a higher intelligence has not given
up on us. These questions are unanswerable through any looking glass
even a Galileo can conceive. The truly unanswerable fact of existence is
that we have consciousness, an ‘emergent’ property that is still wholly
dependent upon its parts, like water being nowhere without two parts
hydrogen and one part oxygen.
We grant that consciousness may have reality, but does it have agency?
In other words, did my hormones or the devil make me do it? The more
behavior is attributed to traceable and physical causes, the less a role
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consciousness has in determining behavior, if it ever did. This does not

foreclose on free will, God, or an afterlife, but it does circumscribe what
religion can ordain or pre-ordain as good and evil, right or wrong. This
is all for the good, as normal human sexual, social, and physical
proclivities escape the proscriptions of actual and virtual inquisitions, or
at least for most societies.
Theology and its religious applications serve to mind us the gaps of
existence, of the non-empirical questions that will always be beyond us,
unreachable by us or perhaps due to through God’s calculation. That in
itself it worthy of respect, curiosity, and scientific inquiry. And that
uncertainty will cause us to mind our behavior, as it should, just as we
exercise caution when rounding a corner on a road, we are extra cautious
when we know it will eventually lead to the inevitable cliff. After all, God
may be watching.
The non-empirical realities addressed by theology also are addressed in
science. These currently have no clear resolution, from consciousness to
virtual reality, to the potentials and dangers of artificial intelligence.
What science is lately confident of is what a theist was always self-
assured, that an omniscient and wise intelligence exists, and if not where
it is to be found, then certainly when.
Religions are inductive, built on group tradition and the revelation of
facts that tradition and not proof vouchsafes exists. In other words,
religions are based on the ‘proof’ of non-empirical realities, or simple
faith. The folly is that induction omits explanation, or a certainty about
reality based on observation, deduction, and test. It seems that God is the
most non-empirical inference of all!
Nonetheless, the future development of intelligence, whether man or
machine will reflect this trend, and God, whether residing in this
dimension or extra dimensions, represents the epitome of value for all
living things. But values are something that we are always perfecting,
and what we think is right in the moment stands for correcting,
sometimes with nudge, and sometimes with a slap in the face. So by
trying to be God like, God in His/Her wisdom has to error correct,
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sometimes with human retribution, and sometimes with the heavenly

sort. This is because God has always been about retribution and
rewards, of an otherworldly arbiter of behavior who not only matches
but moves with societal expectations and norms. Nonetheless, God does
stand some convincing, as how mankind envisions value determines
how he envisions God, as what was sin in one age is a lifestyle choice in
another, and God it seems is ready to comply. But what are good and
evil?

Good, evil, and upsetting the apple cart

Good and evil are the enduring questions that separate us from the
animals and separate us from each other. We can’t get beyond good and
evil because ultimate judgments merit ultimate sacrifices and ultimate
offences. Sometimes even eternity is not enough to atone. Good and evil
apply to not just actions, but to their rewards or remedies. Good is easy
to understand, and your place in work, family, or heaven is ensured for
the productive and noble things you do. If they are productive but not
justifiable, you make sure they are repeated by rewarding them. If they
are unproductive or destructive and not justifiable. you make sure they
are not repeated by punishing them, and mischief can be promoted to
sheer evil, it just depends upon in a sense, the price of apples.
Consider an apple cart full of apples. To upset an applecart physically as
well as metaphorically, you are doing something that will call attention
to your behavior and its inferred causes. If someone pushes you into the
apple cart, spilling the apples, all is forgiven because you are not at fault,
but are ‘determined’ by the simple laws of physics. If you tripped and
fell into the apple cart because you are not paying attention, you will be
punished for your negligence, but if you upset the applecart because you
hate apples, you would need to be carted away lest you endanger other
apple carts. Furthermore, the severity of your offensive scales up or
down depend upon the value of apples.
For humans when confronted with severe transgressions, logical
determinism does not void emotional determinism. You still get angry
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and upset when someone upsets an applecart. One may upset the apple
cart when pushed into it, or when one did not know it was an applecart,
or had some prejudice against apples. When you don’t know the
motivation, you may assume the latter, and the miscreant, however
innocent in actuality, will get his or her just desserts, in this life, or the
next.
If we were entirely logical creatures, then everything is normalized, with
nothing exceptional and nothing to take exception too. By eliminating
affect, good or evil have no effects, and are as unexceptional and
predictable as shooting stars. A more fitting perspective is that if is not
punished for one’s mistakes, then one must learn from them. And error
correction is important for errors in judgement from the large to the
small and if we haven’t learned in this life perhaps we would in its re-
virtualization, or after life.
Our material essence is always in transition, for the stuff we are made of
when as a child changes from one moment to the next and most certainly
so myriad times before we are adults. Nonetheless, the pattern of
existence remains the same, and is replicated from moment to moment,
even if these moments span the lifetimes of universes. This ‘pattern’
definition of life means that it is the abstract and not material properties
that give life agency, consciousness, and meaning, then a
superintelligence can resurrect us at will, and for some commentators,
may already have.80 81
Whether through super-intelligence that is man
made or super-intelligence that makes man, we seem sure that God is in
on the action, and that you can’t get away from your deeds in this life
without some corrective retribution. The problem comes when you can
get away from error correction, which can be quite hellish indeed.

A Nice Place to Visit

In a classic episode of the 1950’s anthology series ‘The Twilight Zone’, a
small-time crook is killed after a robbery, and regaining consciousness is
greeted by a jovial sort in a white suit who promises him everything he
wishes. Happy at first with his largess, he soon recognizes that
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everything he does is totally predictable from his endless casino

winnings to his mastery over the ladies to pocketing all the balls with a
stroke in a game of pool. Bored to death from the afterlife of predictable
plenty, he asked his angelic companion to go to the other place, who
assured him laughing that that was where he was all along.
The moral of this story has a deeper meaning beyond the irony, namely
that if we go to heaven or the other place, God vouchsafes our human
nature. Unfortunately, if God keeps this part of the heavenly bargain, a
promised heaven will turn out not to be an exciting place in the clouds,
but one that is all too familiar and predictable. In other words, heaven
would be meaningless, boring, and eternally depressing unless God
changes our nature, like a heavenly lobotomy so we can stare out
blissfully at God’s glory forever. But if this was the case, then there
would be no purpose in being human, because without error correction,
there is only stasis, timelessness. So likely God will keep it all uncertain,
and we continue to learn, to correct our errors small and large, in this life
or the next, and its literally about saving time.

Cognitive Science
Cogito, ergo sum
“Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its
processes with input from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy,
computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology. It examines the
nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Cognitive
scientists study intelligence and behavior, with a focus on how nervous systems
represent, process, and transform information. The typical analysis of cognitive
science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic
and planning, from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the
fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be
understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and
computational procedures that operate on those structures." -Wikipedia
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“It seems natural to assume that the mind could be studied in terms of its
cognitive functions, ignoring any ways in which those functions arise from the
body and brain. The mind, from this “fundamentalist” perspective, was seen
metaphorically as a kind of abstract computer program that could be run on any
appropriate hardware. A consequence of the metaphor was that the hardware, or
rather ‘wetware’, was seen as determining nothing at all about the nature of the
program. That is, the peculiarities of the body and brain contributed nothing to
the nature of human concepts and reason. This was philosophy without flesh.
There was no body in this conception of mind.” George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson82

The brain is a most peculiar instrument. It is instrumental for

motivation, intelligence, and consciousness itself. And it does this all by
itself, so to speak. Indeed, cognitive science, and its subdiscipline of
cognitive neuroscience are detached from inputs from the musculature,
viscera, and peripheral nervous system. These inputs are segregated as
a matter of principle and of convenience. The brain is of course a
modular organ, and the mental attributes of vision, sensation, memory,
perception, and thinking have their physical correlates in specific brain
areas, and cognition can be studied and understood in isolate and
replicated in its non-human analogs, from adding machines to
generative AI, or nascent ‘thinking’ machines.
The problem is that human brains are connected to human bodies, and
humans as integrated systems have their own direction that activates
and points their human nature in specific directions. This brings us to
the concept of ‘teleology’, or inbred purpose. In
philosophy, teleology sees purpose in ends rather than stated causes,
making the outcome the actual, or "final" cause, the metaphorical magnet
that drives behavior. Results oriented thinking are general purpose for
humans, in contrast to the specific uses of our non-thinking tools like
hammers and wheels or those computerized tools that we aspire to think.
In the latter, cognitive science is successful in spades, advancing simple
and single purpose calculation from simple inputs to very complex and
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multipurpose calculation with inputs from nearly the whole of human

knowledge. The ability to model intelligence using the same ‘neural net’
models that actuate human brains can theoretically outpace human
mentality in nanoseconds, as intelligent agents can design more
intelligent agents in an ever upward spiral until it reaches unfathomable
heights, or a ‘singularity’.
However, this leaves out the problem of a purpose to intelligence, which
is as pressing for the artificial kind as it is the natural kind. Without an
overweening and governing end result or purpose, then purpose can be
anything an intellect chaotically determines or is determined by human
agents. Thus an intelligent machine that is given the end result of
producing the perfect paper clip may end up consuming the entire world
to fulfill its mandate of making paper clips.
That humans are not suddenly set on monomaniacal pursuits like paper
clips means there are biological constraints to manias that do not serve a
higher purpose. Without these constraints, what seems logically sensible
in the moment can command attention and performance and set one off
on a one-sided pursuit, and inevitably, off a cliff. This is why cognitive
science cannot be exclusively ‘cognitive’, as intellectual agency is always
modulated by an analogical or ‘affective’ agency that we know
subjectively as feelings. And indeed, we know this from daily
experience, as what seems reasonable in the moment is counteracted by
‘gut feelings’ that seemed to be mediated by anything but intelligence.
A purpose driven existence for an intelligent machine is the ghost or
should we say epicycle in the machine that is the conundrum for
cognitive sciences, as purpose is imposed upon rather than generated by
artificial cognition or intelligence, and can be adjusted as well for
benevolent and malevolent purposes, hence the present alarm by many
in the field of artificial intelligence that artificial intelligence is not a gift
box but a pandora’s box. However, it is overlooked that in the myth, after
Pandora unwittingly unleashed the impulsive horrors of creation upon
the world by opening a box bequeathed by the gods, hope remained, a
sustenance and guiding light for humankind, and as would seem, its
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purpose in the moment. As we shall argue in part three of this book, this
allure of uncertain boons to existence is instantiated in simple neural
processes that point to a solution to the teleological question by
eliminating the need for teleological ends as well. But to begin to
understand this, we must understand why brains, to be effective, need
bodies.

Affective Neuroscience
Theories of Cannonballs
Looking at things up close reveals their parts, but not necessarily how
they work together and in relationship to other objects in their
conceptual space, whether that space be in the human brain or in a
cosmos pondered by that brain. When Galileo revealed the physical
nature of the solar system and charted its movements, he dispelled the
physical basis of the Ptolemaic system but did not address its operational
basis, or how it worked. Although the planets and sun were obviously
not affixed to a rotating crystal sphere, they still rotated, and since objects
once set in motion should shoot straight, adding in an inherent
curvature forced Galileo to recognize metaphorically and literally the
gravity of the situation, and for Isaac Newton to finally solve it, but not
explain it. Newtonian mechanics recognized the importance of mass and
velocity, but it also recognized the ever-present constant of gravity in its
predictions. Newton did not explain what gravity was, remarking with
his comment ‘hypothesis non fingo’, or I make no hypothesis. It was left
to Einstein to reveal that gravity represented the curvature of space that
was imparted by the mass of any object, and was a constant and
pervading influence on all the celestial objects in the universe.
When we consider the neurologic processes that guide behavior, the
analogy is similar. Looking closely at the brain ‘in action’, cognitive
neuroscience identifies the neural processes behind memory, perception,
sensation, and cognition and how they respond separately and in concert
to information from simple perceptions to complex thoughts. The
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problem is that information alone, or in its philosophical guise as

rationalism, is an imperfect mediator and predictor of behavior, as
nature is always throwing us a curve as we continually behave at
variance from how we should behave. This is where affect, or consciously
or non-consciously experienced sensations or ‘feelings’ comes into play,
and like gravity, it is not an intermittent but continuous force that guides
our behavior.
Coined by the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp in 1992, affective
neuroscience is the study of how the brain processes and utilizes affect.83
Affect is comprised of the sensations of arousal and depression, pleasure
or pain and how affect changes the magnitude, rate, and direction of
behavior, and in its situational context is called emotion. Affect is a
constant property of experience and of behavior. It bestows value,
incentive, or utility to behavior that may be present or expected in the
future. Love, bonding, sexual arousal, play, and simple curiosity are the
behavioral manifestations of affective states that are bound and defined
through the behaviors they suppress, arouse, and incent.
As a science, affective neuroscience also has its non-empirical
assumptions that are not so much limited by its principles as by its
procedures. Specifically, affective neuroscience is also ‘disembodied’,
and affective states are generally considered to be intrinsic to the brain
and modulated by other brain areas, and with far less attention to inputs
from sensorimotor systems such as the viscera and musculature. This can
be attributed to the limitations of the tools used to measure only neural
processes such as the fmri or ‘in-vivo’ manipulations, which respectively
measure heat signatures from cerebral blood flow and small scale or
molecular signals using of neural groups or nuclei in the midbrain. The
inputs from the sensorimotor system escapes these measures, and are not
considered in large measure due to their inaccessibility using these
standardized tools.
This is a significant shortcoming of affective as well as cognitive
neuroscience, as any inputs from the viscera or musculature have
indisputable influence on brain states of arousal, pleasure and pain. For
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example, neuromuscular tension is painful and influence corresponding

areas in the brain such as the hypothalamus,84 but neuromuscular
inactivity or relaxation also induces activity in opioid or pleasure centers
in the brain, and can interact with arousal systems in the brain, as
documented by the flow experience documented elsewhere in this book.
Jaak Panksepp’s 1998 book ‘Affective Neuroscience’ arguably
established affective neuroscience as a scientific bonafide, and was an
academic tour de force. Like Galileo, he was among the first to catalog
the workings of the neurological correlates of affect up close. Panksepp
defined all the affective gears of existence, but not how they rotated in
unison to power an individual moving virtually or in reality from A to
B, or in other words, the psychology of motivation.85 His was a theory of
cannonballs, not of cannonballs in motion, or ballistics, or in the general
sense of the dynamics of moving bodies. Yet, anatomy is not destiny, and
neither is physiology, and knowing what makes the planets and stars up
does not tell us how or why they move. To that end we must add, as did
Newton, an element of gravity.

The Gravity of the Situation

Shoot a rocket in the air, and gravity will take it from there, and make
sure that your straight shot will soon curve inward and fall, or curve
outward and fall into an orbital plane. Without gravity, physics would
be a lot easier, as one would not have to constantly compensate and
calculate for a force invisible, undefinable, but inexorable and felt upon
every step. Gravity is not an intermittent force, to be reckoned with only
when we have to take note of it, like when we are falling down. It is a
constant of nature, and a constant to be reckoned with in order to
calculate all physical actions, from the fall of an apple to the collapse of
the universe. What affective neuroscience has revealed is that, like
gravity, affect is not an intermittent but a constant fact of existence. Like
Galileo’s observations and the Newtonian mechanics that described it,
this upends much of what present day psychology holds as true.
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Affect accompanies all behavior, whether it is passive, as in deprivation

of food and water, or active as when we are engaged in a pursuit that
makes us think and behave fast or slow. Sometimes affect conforms with
rational expectations and goals, and sometimes it acts at cross purposes
to it. Sometimes affect enhances motivation, and sometimes it reduces it.
Affect is bound to information, and changes as information changes,
whether those changes are due to private contemplation or overt action.
How affect binds to information, and can be used to predict and
manipulate behavior falls into the province of learning theory, or how
experience shapes behavior. As we will note in the next chapter,
cognitive neuroscience informed theories of learning that eschewed or
ignored the constancy of affect, and certainly had no means to know how
affect was instantiated in the brain. This, as we will see, has changed, and
learning theories are not just informed by affective neuroscience, but are
defined by it.
Finally, whereas the major disciplines of the social sciences have little
depth, and are not informed by a neurological foundation of incentive
motivation, one would surmise that neuroscience would provide it for
them, and thus allow for a more complete explanation for the many
principles and experimental data that guide these ‘brain-less’ disciplines.
However, affective neuroscientists rarely extrapolate upwards to
connect to and inform higher end concepts, thus restricting the
generality of their findings to rudimentary principles of motivation. This
is unfortunate, as it may be argued that if the logical rules can be
followed to predict the emergence of various forms of life from its
constituent DNA, the emergence of motivation in various forms of our
livelihoods can equally be predicted from the constituent neurological
elements of incentive motivation.
This takes the concept of a science without depth and turns it on its head,
as reductionism is not the issue for affective science, but its opposite, or
emergence. Emergence can of course apply to the phenomenological
aspects of life such as consciousness and the ‘qualia’ of feelings, but it
can also apply to how affective states guide behavior, and the systematic
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rules or guidance they provide to philosophers and psychologists who

aim to chart and explain the rules of human motivation and meaning or
the teleology of our existence. It is to that end that we will explore in the
final chapters of our book.

Cognitive Linguistics
Mind your language!
“The word embodied refers to the dual valence of the notion of body: embodiment
is a combination of a physical structure (the biological body) and an experiential
structure, which corresponds to the living, moving, suffering, and enjoying
body. From here it is possible to arrive at the dual acceptation of embodied
cognition, which refers, on the one hand, to the grounding of cognitive processes
in the brain’s neuroanatomical substratum, and on the other, to the derivation
of cognitive processes from our organism’s sensorimotor experiences.”86

“Two notable characteristics of these models are especially relevant to the

embodied cognitive perspective. The first is that our brain-body-mind tends to
recruit existing neural structures and processes (e.g. sensory and meaning
motor processes) to perform abstract conceptualization and reasoning. This is
the principal way evolutionarily prior bodily capacities are adapted for new
purposes and functions. Second, there is now experimental research showing
that when we read or hear or think certain sentences, we actually simulate in
our brains what is being described in the sentences. This view is known
as simulation semantics, and it reveals how perceptual images, motor actions,
action planning, and emotional responses are activated when we read or hear
descriptions of scenes and events. This is just another manifestation of the
embodiment of and understanding at the most visceral level of our making sense
of things.”87

“The basis of second-generation cognitive science is a large body of empirical

research that evidences a strong dependence of human reasoning on the
particulars of human embodiment. This embodied view of the mind suggests that
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at minimum, human intelligence consists of sensorimotor, affective, and

cognitive/analytic components that interact seamlessly and dynamically with
each other and with the real world.”88

In the first part of this book, we emphasized the importance of the ever-
increasing resolving powers of observation that are key to the advance
of science, or explanatory ‘depth’. Thus the symptomology of disease as
reported as subjective feelings is informed by a more fined grained or
‘reductionist’ observation and its accompanying metaphors of agents of
disease such as bacteria and viruses. In this way, the biological sciences
are ‘empirically responsible’ as they do not stop with surface
observations but integrate their primary observations with lower-level
observations and their descriptive metaphors that fit the needs of the
audience, complex for microbiologists and simple for common people.
The biological and physical sciences are, as we have illustrated,
empirically responsible because they embrace observational depth.
Depth however is generally ignored for the great majority of schools of
thought in the social sciences, and because of this abandonment of
scientific first principles, these are easy to criticize and even dismiss even
prior to a consideration of their ideological commitments. In other words,
the conclusions of any manner of thinking from behavioristic to
theological are moot if all we see is on the surface with the abandonment
of any desire to look closer.
The importance of explanatory depth is why cognitive science, and all
the social sciences, need not an alteration, but a second generation which
is empirically responsible, or in other words, adopts the epistemology of
science. However, this position is not original, and finds its genesis in the
field of cognitive linguistics. Linguistics is the study of language, and
how we construct language and use it to communicate and understand
our worlds. However, language is not just effective, but affective, and
recruits our unique physiology or somatosensory systems to use
conceptual metaphor as a verbal scaffolding to construct viable
explanations. From the literary metaphors of Shakespeare to Einstein’s
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thought experiments, metaphor not only gives meaning but imbues

language with affective life. This expansion of a literal explanation of
language, or as pure syntax, to incorporate a proper semantics, or
‘meaning’, distinguishes it from cognitive science, and by adding the
additional dimension of embodiment, creates a wholly new perspective
on how cognition works. Reflecting this, the term ‘second generation
cognitive science’ was coined by the linguists George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson, and uses the uniformly accepted epistemology of science to
correct for the uncertain epistemology of the social sciences, which they
proceeded to do in a fashion similar to ours for philosophers from
classical Greece to modern times.89
Embodiment means that we use inputs from sensorimotor systems for
thinking, but also use them to alter affect, or primary sensations of
pleasure, pain, arousal and depression that are contextually interpreted
as emotion and operationally as incentive. This has the effect of skewing
performance, as now even an intelligent calculator can get bored and
take time out to virtually raid the refrigerator, at which time as a pundit
once quipped we will know that artificial intelligence has finally arrived.
Embodiment also strongly influences how we think about the world, and
how we compose, express, and use language. For the study of language,
cognitive linguistics demonstrates this through its emphasis on
conceptual metaphor, defined as involving the understanding of aspects
of one idea (or conceptual domain) in terms of aspects of another, is
essential for communication as well as creative thought from literature
to philosophy to mathematics. Thus saying that sails were pregnant with
wind, that snow covered the land like a blanket, or that a person was
personally cold or hard to get a hold of all convey ideas through shared
images derived from sensorimotor experiences and which in turn evoke
same experiences. More specifically, the metaphors from physics such as
gravity, epicycles, force, and velocity all are used to illuminate the
domains of the science through our visual and kinesthetic experience of
the physical world. From Shakespeare’s imagery to Einstein’s thought
experiments to the boundless metaphors that shape our understanding,
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metaphors are not just figures of speech but modes of thought.

However, metaphors not only grant meaning, but can alter affect, and
this gives substance not only to thought, but as we shall see in our next
chapter, motivation as well.
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Part 3

Foundations of
Motivation
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Chapter 6
Incentive Motivation, with Effect
Brains tend to optimize on the basis of what they already have, to add only what
is necessary. Over the course of evolution, newer parts of the brain have built
on, take input from, and used older parts of the brain. Is it really plausible that
the brain would build a whole new system to duplicate what it could use
already? It is only from a conservative philosophical position that one would
want to believe in the old faculty psychology—in the idea that the human mind
has nothing about it that animals share, that reason has nothing about it that
smells of the body.” 90 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

The Cassandras of Science

In Homer’s Iliad, the prophetess Cassandra was gifted by the god Apollo
with unerring vision and foresight, but cursed by the same god after
refusing his advances with the fate that no one would heed her
warnings.. Warning of the wrong decision similarly too often finds an
incredulous audience, whether it was beware of Greeks bearing gifts or
scientists bearing gifts of knowledge, with a naïve public not looking a
gift horse in the mouth, or a theoretical paper in the validity of its data
sets. Of course, the Trojans eventually did believe her, but then it was too
late.
Predictions may have excellent reliability, induction assures that there is
always something that works, or can at least be falsely imputed to work.
But induction is always trumped by explanation, not only because of the
greater precision and reliability of its emergent predictions, but also
because of their greater scope. Thus by explaining disease, Louis Pasteur
provided the means to treat and forestall all disease. In the physical and
biological sciences, for a procedure to generally work is not enough, as
we have no tolerance for planes generally being able to fly, or vaccines
generally able to prevent disease. For the social sciences, the bar is lower,
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and being generally efficacious is good enough, as induction rules the

day.
So following Pasteur, where is our germ theory? It is in a proper
consideration of the neurobiology of incentive, which is not distinctly
human, but rather mammalian, as the former conceit dies hard. As
mammals, we normally concede that our bodies and minds work on
mammalian principles Processes such as respiration, digestion,
locomotion, and homeostasis are foundational to core sciences such as
immunology, neurology, physiology, microbiology, and more, and all
are rooted in basic science that is derived from humble laboratory
animals. As we have discussed earlier, these elementary processes
inform and constrain what you can hypothesize for more complex issues
that concern humans, from obesity to plagues.
However, when it comes to our mental attributes, humans are creatures
apart, and due to one specific part. Although the morphology or shape
of our bodies is different from other animals, our truly distinguishing
feature is the size of our brains. Whereas our appendages allow us to
plod ahead, our larger brain, or more specifically, greater size of our neo-
cortex, allows us to plan ahead. In other words, we can anticipate or think
about what’s around the next corner, and can visualize worlds within
our world. This embodied imagery can be communicated through
conceptual metaphor, and with planning comes proposing, or language.
While a larger neo-cortex gives us the ability to visualize and to
verbalize, our other sub-cortical circuitry has remained basically
unchanged, as well as the neurochemicals and basic sensory and
locomotor processes. The question is whether new motivational
processes are physically etched into our expanded cortex through
evolution, or whether motivational processes remain the same, and
through an integration with a virtualizing brain provide for new
cognitive traits that are not neurologically different but are rather
metaphorically different. Or in other words, are our basic motivational
principles much more in line with our mammalian cousins than we
think?
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Motivational principles are essential elements for what are called

learning theories. Learning theories seek to explain how experience
changes behavior, and incorporate the study of memory, perception, and
how experience in reality or virtual reality (thought) from moment-to-
moment changes behavior, or incentive motivation. It also incorporates
the innate sensitivities to stimuli that guide our preferences to specific
shapes (sexual attraction), sounds (music), or gustatory (taste) and
olfactory (smell) sensations. Finally, it includes sensations of pleasure,
pain, arousal, and depression that we will establish are essential aspects
of incentive motivation.
Learning theories are derived from the study of elemental or ‘molecular’
aspects of behavior, and are dependent upon research on lower-level
animals from multi-cellular creatures like planaria to more complex
animals such as primates. An understanding of these processes are
foundational to diagnosing, preventing, and treating behavioral
disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, addiction, and bipolar
disorders, but oddly enough, have little to no impact on how we
understand and use incentive motivation principles, which remain
tethered to metaphors that are ungrounded in the neuroscience of
motivation, or are derived from metaphors for motivation that have of
recent lost their validity in neuroscience. Indeed, incentive motivation as
explained by contemporary neuroscience radically changes how we
understand motivation, and requires a complete revision of the
metaphors we currently use to understand our individual and social
worlds, of which we will name three.

Pushed, Pulled, and Glued

Animals are blessed with one redeeming characteristic that makes the
scientific analysis of motivation much easier, namely that they have no
capacity for speech. Thus to describe how animals are motivated,
perceptual stimuli or inputs are studied, not conceptual or verbal stimuli,
as what an animal deals with and is motivated by are simple cognitive
reflections of correlations between events. With brains un-possessive of
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the ability to perform complex thought, animal behavior could be

predicted without the need to infer conceptual castles in their minds
populated with equally fanciful motives and desires. This permitted an
economy of design for the first experiments performed that sought to
describe the rudiments of learning.
In the beginning of the 20th century to near its close, theories for incentive
motivation were logical analogs to primarily simple behavioral
observations. Whether it was a salivary response in a dog, the key peck
of a pigeon, or the bar press of a mouse, the independent (changes in
stimuli timing, magnitude, and form) and dependent measures (how the
animal responded) were simple and adhered to equally simple
metaphorical forms, of which three are prominent in academic and folk
psychology. The first was that behavior could be pulled, or was
unconditionally elicited by a unconditioned stimulus, such as the sight
of meat eliciting salivation. By pairing a neutral stimulus such as a light
or bell just prior to or concurrently with the food, the neutral stimulus
could take on the eliciting properties of the unconditioned stimulus. This
Pavlovian model of ‘classical’ conditioning described fairly well how
involuntary behavior prepares an individual for action such as sexual
arousal, fear, salivary responses, etc. A second metaphor was that
behavior could be pushed, or was induced through changes in
homeostatic (regulatory systems in the brain for thirst, hunger,
reproduction, etc.) that are necessary for moment to moment functioning
and survival. These drives added momentum, direction, and form to
behavior, and were integrated with the basic data language of stimulus
and response to provide a more complex model of behavior. The work
of the psychologist Clark Hull and colleagues in the 1940’s and 1950’s
characterized these models. A third metaphor for incentive motivation
was that behavior was glued to a response. A response, normally
voluntary such as walking, talking, grasping was followed by a
rewarding or reinforcing event that increased the likelihood that the
behavior would be repeated, with the organism effectively operating on
the environment, or ‘operant’ conditioning. Following the work of the
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psychologist Edward Thorndike in the 1920’s and the later experiments

of the psychologist B.F. Skinner in the 1940’s and 1950’s, behavior
changed and was strengthened due to discrete reinforcers or incentives
that occurred at discrete intervals or following specific forms or
‘topographies’ of behavior, such as rate, form, amplitude, and direction.
The data languages for each of these models were simple and mapped
fairly reliably to observable behavior, though some included their share
of inferred epicycles like habit strength, drive, and so forth that made the
model work. These findings were not discordant with the popular
metaphors of how motivation occurred from the perspective of folk
psychology, and incentive motivation theory had no new lessons for
academics and common folk alike to supplant common-sense theories of
motivation that seemed to match animal data just fine.
Like their human counterpart, the various models for animal learning
had their own share of non-empirical assumptions, conflicting
predictions, incommensurate data languages, and differing procedures,
yet as with other disciplines in the physical and biological sciences, these
models soon coalesced as the rigor and acuity of observations grew in
time that allowed learning theorists to argue from facts, not assumptions
of what facts could or should be. Just as memory, perception, and
kinesthetics are explained from a systematic overview of facts with few
if any non-empirical assumptions, so too has it been for basic processes
of incentive motivation.
A key figure in this move to a unified theory of incentive motivation is
the work of the psychologist Robert Bolles in the 1970’s and 1980’s, who
emphasized the cognitive or relational aspect of stimulus and response,
and moved away from the metaphor of a hard wiring of stimulus to
response characterized by the Skinnerian (operant conditioning) and
Pavlovian (classical conditioning) models. In a key article in the journal
Psychology Review in 1972,91 Bolles argued that what is learned in
incentive motivation is not a hard wiring of reinforcement to response,
but rather a cognitive relationship or ‘expectancy’. Moreover, all types of
conditioning reflected at root such expectancies, of which there were two
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types: a stimulus event-stimulus outcome or S-S* expectancy equivalent

to Pavlovian or respondent conditioning, and a response event stimulus
event or R-S* expectancy that was equivalent to Skinnerian or operant
conditioning. Applying this perspective to Pavlovian conditioning, the
response of salivation induced by a ringing bell, or a conditioned
response or CR due to the eliciting stimulus or CS simply reflected a
learned expectancy or relationship that food follows the sound of the
bell, or S-S* expectancy. Skinnerian or operant conditioning was
understood similarly, as aggregated stimulus events or responses as
reflected by voluntary behaviors such as walking or talking also
occurred because of a cognitive relationship or expectancy to stimulus
outcomes, or a response event-stimulus event or R-S* expectancy.
With Bolles’ groundbreaking perspective, incentive motivation moved
from mechanistic metaphors to cognitive metaphors that ascribed
motivation to be a property of how we perceive our world in motion.
What remained unanswered was the not so little matter of its neurology,
or how rewards or incentive were grounded in actual observations of the
brain ‘in action’. That did not take long, as the 1990’s finally brought the
observational tools that allowed the ‘in-vivo’ observation of the actual
neural events that corresponded to incentive or reward, and with it a
radically new perspective on incentive that revealed that what really
turned on our motivations was not resolutions and certainties, but
problems and uncertainties, and with this a pending revolution as to
how we should see and approach self-understanding and the control of
ourselves and others.

A Unified Reinforcement Principle

Humans are born into a world of static: random sounds, sights,
sensations, and urges that can make newborns understandably
hysterical. Soon we learn to sort out what is important from what is
useless, unimportant, or is merely redundant. The problem is that
attention is a scarce resource, and ironically, a degree of inattentiveness
is necessary to keep us focused on the task at hand. Consider a not so
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random correlation in nature such as a traffic light. We learn from

experience that we must stop at a red light, or else get blindsided by
another car or perhaps get a traffic ticket. But what if a blue light occurs
above a red light with consistent regularity? Will an individual associate
the blue light with stopping? The answer surprisingly is no. The blue
light tells an individual nothing new about the importance of stopping,
and because it tells us nothing new it doesn’t merit our attention, and an
association is not learned. So when the red light fails, as it may, the blue
light will not warn you of oncoming traffic or the need to stop because
the relationship was never learned. This counter intuitive observation
reflects the concept of ‘blocking’. Discovered in 1968 by the psychologist
Leonard Kamin and replicated in numerous experiments with laboratory
animals,92 Kamin found that animals, and by extension humans, are not
sensitive to learning redundant correlations, and are sensitive instead to
novel correlations. This sensitivity or attentive arousal also scales with
the salience or meaning of a correlation, and also occurs to fix attention
to expected positive and novel events. In other words, learning is not
passive, and the simple correlation between stimulus and response is not
enough for learning to occur, something else is required. To the
behaviorists John Donahoe and David Palmer, that something was the
idea of ‘discrepancy’. In 1993, the duo published ‘Learning and Complex
Behavior’, one of the first texts that proposed a bio-behavioral approach
to learning that expanded upon Skinner’s radical behaviorism with a
new data language for behavior that was integrated with the observable
neurological facts of behavior, from neural-nets to neurotransmitters.
D&P proposed that reinforcement or incentive is uniformly based on
‘discrepancy’ principles, where from moment to moment an organism
encounters events that vary, ever slightly, from what is predicted, or an
act-outcome discrepancy. This ‘Unified Reinforcement Principle’
underscores all incentive or reward and can explain how all
reinforcement procedures work. As defined: “The proposed principle of
selection by reinforcement holds that whenever a behavioral discrepancy occurs,
an environmental-behavior relation is selected that consists-other things being
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equal- of all stimuli occurring immediately before the discrepancy and all those
responses occurring immediately before and after the same time of the elicited
response. Selection by reinforcement does not require the actual occurrence of
overt behavior, but merely the activity of the neural systems that produce it.
The principle of reinforcement makes no fundamental distinction between the
selection process in the classical and operant procedure. For that reason, it has
been called a unified principle of reinforcement…From the perspective of a
unified reinforcement principle, classical and operant conditioning are not
two different ‘kinds’ of learning, but two procedures that differ with respect to
the environmental and behavioral events that are reliably present when selection
occurs.”93 94
As Guerra and Silva noted, “Behavioral discrepancy appears to offer a
parsimonious principle that serves both classical and operant conditioning.
Among the wide range of responses and stimuli occurring in a time continuum,
the US (unconditioned stimulus) is not preceded either by stimuli or responses,
but it is always preceded by both. As a result, the US-produced discrepancy
selects its better correlated precedent events (i.e., environmental events in the
case of classical conditioning and behavioral events in the case of operant
conditioning). When stimuli reliably precede the US, classical conditioning is
in effect. When responses reliably precede the US, operant conditioning occurs.
In this latter case, the discriminative stimulus is also selected because of its
regular presence when discrepancy occurs.” 95
Donahoe and Palmer’s discrepancy theory of reinforcement added a
cognitive or relational attribute to behavior. Reinforcement was simply
the locus between an environmental present and its future transition. In
other words, what is learned or selected in reinforcement is an
“environment-behavior relationship, not a response alone.” This relationship
is a conceptual or emergent property of a constellation of molecular
relationships between past networks of stimuli and their potential future
states.
Described analogically, this is akin to looking at two successive frames
of a racehorse in motion. In one frame is the horse and all the stimuli,
from the background fence and structures to its rider to the lay of the
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ground, and in the next are the aggregate of changes to all of these
stimuli that the horse perceives. ‘Reinforcement’ is the moment-to-
moment change or transition from one aggregate of stimulus events or
environmental frame to another. If we change our focus from the horse
to the jockey, the new environmental frame also changes his perception
of branching possibilities of the future, namely the greater likelihood of
winning or losing the race and the branching outcomes from there.
Transitioning from one cognitive reality to another will garner attentive
arousal if it involves an unexpected or discrepant change from one
moment to another, and this ‘error correction’ from one reality to a new
one is mediated by the neuromodulator dopamine, a neurochemical
which increases the firing of arrays of neurons in the brain. Dopamine
modulates the ability of one neuron to activate another, or synaptic
efficiency. Per Donahoe and Palmer, dopamine can modulate the activity
produced by glutamate, which is the major excitatory transmitter at synapses in
the cerebral cortex, including those in the frontal lobes to which VTA neurons
project. The long-lasting effect of dopamine on glutaminergic activity provides
a mechanism for alternating the effectiveness, or synaptic efficacy, with which
one neuron activates another… We propose the following mechanism for
reinforcement at the neural level. If a presynaptic neuron activates a
postsynaptic neuron and dopamine is released into the synapse immediately
thereafter, then the synaptic efficacy between the pre- and postsynaptic neuron
will increase. Once this has occurred, glutamate from the presynaptic neuron
will more readily activate the post synaptic neuron whether or not dopamine is
present in the synapse.”96
The neuromodulator dopamine is produced in various neuronal
groupings in the brain such as the ventral tegmental area substantia
nigra, ventral tegmental area, and hypothalamus of the brain and is
projected to various areas of the brain governing cognition (pre-frontal
cortex), motor activities (basal ganglia), and sensations of arousal
(nucleus-accumbens). Dopamine is multi-functional and is responsible
for expediting locomotion, memory, attention, and for our purposes,
motivation. Dopamine is continually or ‘tonically’ produced in the brain,
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but can increase of decrease quickly or ‘phasically’ due to drug abuse,

allostatic processes (hunger, thirst), and cognition. For example,
addictive drugs can block the reuptake of dopamine or accelerate it
(cocaine or heroin), or increase after the deprivation of food, drink, or
sex, as in the upscaling of attentive arousal or motivational ‘drives’. It
can also phasically increase or decrease due to the conscious or non-
consciousness expectation or awareness, and scale up or down in degree
depending upon the salience or importance of novel events. For
example, the novelty of winning a token prize for a stage performance
would increase dopamine release, which would significantly scale
upwards if the branching implications of that performance were high,
such as the acclaim of your friends and relatives and a prospect of an
even larger role and venue in the future, or it could scale downwards if
your significant others disliked your performance as well the critical
community at large. In other words, you can get very excited or very
depressed after winning a prize, it just depends upon the ripples it makes
for prospects in the future.
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Skinnerian and Popperian Creatures

Prior to and even after Donahoe and Palmer’s new interpretation of
reinforcement, stimuli and responses continue to be perceived as discrete
events that changed their local relationships. Thus if one received a
reward for a response, just the response was selected, and was
successfully shaped by follow up rewards, as in trial-and-error learning.
This worked quite well for lower-level mammals who had a limited or
negligible capacity to conceptualize the implications of rewards, but
with this added mental capacity for higher level mammals, the weakness
of this paradigm became apparent.
Indeed, this distinction could be considered phylogenetic, as lower and
higher-level creatures became distinguishable by how they learned. The
philosopher Daniel Dennett classified these two types of learning, and
the hypothetical creatures that embodies them, as Skinnerian and
Popperian creatures.97 Skinnerian creatures learned responses through
trial and error, and conceptualizing and predicting different acts and
outcomes was beyond their capability. Popperian creatures however
(named after the philosopher of science Carl Popper, who argued that
for explanation to be sound, it must be testable or falsifiable), could
conceptualize ‘what-if’ scenarios before an event occurred, and were able
to select the best alternative before a choice was made. This ability to
conceptualize allowed creatures, or specifically homo-sapiens, the ability
to compare different past and future conceptual objects that were
tethered to a locus of positive novel change or reinforcement or reward.
Skinnerian reinforcement represented changes in molecular
relationships, or individual causes and effects, whereas Popperian
reinforcement represented a change in molar relationships or networks
of relationships occurring after a response.
In sum, in contrast to organisms that behave as Skinnerian creatures, for
Popperian creatures, what is learned are changes between past and
future networks of relationships, thus one’s perceived change in reality or
virtual reality can effect a change that globally changes a cognitive
network from one moment to another. Changes in these systems are
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mediated by dopaminergic systems that change synaptic connections for

global sets or nets of neurons, or neural nets, thus providing the neural
substrate for memory and projected or anticipated futures.

Skinnerian Creatures

Popperian Creatures
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Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivators

In folk and academic psychology an interpretation of motivation which
is prevalent to this day is that humans are Skinnerian creatures, and
narrow sets of behavior are reinforced by narrowly focused rewards. As
we have noted, for simple creatures this paradigm works quite well, but
for more complex creatures, behavior often deviates from the prediction
of what behavior an extrinsic incentive should alter, with the result of
less or more motivation, contrary motivation, or no motivation at all.
This issue is often missed when behavior is averaged across individuals,
and groups respond in ways where any deviance from the expected
outcome is masked by an inferred equivalence between individual and
average behavior. However, when individual behavior is observed, a
simple reward, whether anticipated virtually through moment-to-
moment progress on a fixed or variable task (e.g. a game), or physically
through the receipt of a monetary token or reward can have outcomes
that can be predicted from its cognitive implications. So how to explain
this similarity?
Skinnerian motivators assume that behavior rotates about discrete
events with little or no need or consideration of their cognitive
connotations or branching virtualized outcomes, whereas Popperian
motivators require these outcomes. In other words, Skinnerian
motivators are defined through their stimulus form or topography, such
as a discrete monetary reward, or other stimuli such as a food or a
trophy, whereas Popperian motivators are defined through the
expectancies these stimuli mediate that are generally dependent upon
contextual cues during and after a task. The Popperian model can
account for this because it expands the scope of reinforcement to include
all of the branching outcomes of moment-to-moment behavior that an
individual is broadly aware that are mediated by physical (monetary
rewards) and virtual events (expectation of praise for a job well done, or
variable or discrepant progress on a task, or gamification), whereas the
Skinnerian model does not. So how to keep the appearances and thus the
Skinnerian model? Following the scholastic wisdom in Galileo’s time
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you can simply add a few epicycles such as intrinsic drives, needs, and
motives that can interoperate and more often, conflict with extrinsic
Skinnerian motivators. This results in the postulation of two
motivational processes of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, both of
which are derived from inferred non-empirical motivational processes
ungrounded to a neural explanation of behavior. In contrast to this, bio-
behavioral explanations of reward dismiss any process level distinctions
between extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, or more to the point, hold that
all incentive or ‘approach’ motivation is virtually or cognitively realized,
and that all behavior is guided by ‘intrinsic’ events (i.e. act-outcome
discrepancies) that occur presently or as ‘extrinsic’ act-outcome
discrepancies or probabilities that represent projected future outcomes.
In other words, act-outcome discrepancies can occur in the moment and
subsequently or concurrently as extensible or projected virtual events,
with the former metaphorically described as ‘intrinsic’ and the latter as
‘extrinsic’. So a player in a football game may perceive the in the moment
discrepancy of successful play and the virtualized increased future
likelihood of winning the game. Moreover, bio-behavioral explanations
of incentive deny that syntactic level distinctions between types of
intrinsically motivated states (e.g. autonomy, mastery, and purpose)
reflect separate semantic or process level distinctions, just as walking,
jumping and running do not represent separate processes but different
ways processes may be displayed. In other words, all incentive
motivation emerges from simple and unitary neurophysiologic
processes reflecting base sensitivities to positive or negative discrepant
or novel outcomes rather than an abundance of complex inferred
motives or need or ‘drive’ states. As we shall see in the next chapter, the
abandonment of the Skinnerian model for its Popperian alternative
eliminates these inconsistencies, and provides a much simpler, testable,
and empirical explanation for behavior and for its prediction and control,
and it does this by adding an element to behavior characteristic of
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intrinsic motivators and missing in its Skinnerian counterpart, namely

‘feelings’, or positive and negative affect.7

7
Put in other words, for any overt or covert behavior we perform at any time
we perceive a changing series of discriminative stimuli that have branching
probabilities, a Bayesian network of possibilities, each with a weighting of
likelihood and implication. These stimuli may be intrinsic to the task, as in
playing a game, or extrinsic to the task, as in the uncertain and positive
implications of winning a game as symbolized by trophies or monetary rewards.
However, the metaphor of intrinsic/extrinsic rewards is an inaccurate
representation of motivation, as discrepancies are neither inside nor outside
an individual, but represent virtualized immediate and future outcomes to
moment-to-moment behavior that may be mediated by covert (sense of
accomplishment) or overt (monetary reward) events. These may be segregated
in time, but perceived as a united or holistic experience, but they are not
representative of different kinds of processes.
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Chapter 7
Incentive Motivation, With Affect

Once more, with feeling

Donahoe and Palmer’s perspective on learning and motivation
integrated biological (dopamine systems) and computational events
(neural net models) into a novel model of incentive motivation that was
grounded to neural processes and was testable, parsimonious, and could
be generalized to account for a wide range of behavior, from language
and problem solving to basic processes of perception and memory. Their
model has been independently validated conceptually and practically, as
noted by the burgeoning field of ‘artificial intelligence’ that is based on
neural-net models, and from corroborating evidence from researchers
such as Wolfram Schultz who posited similar neurologically based
models of reward.98
Unfortunately, these models have not found practical application to
human affairs because they are not easily conceptualized by humans, or
at least average ones. Their metaphors are adequate for an objective
understanding of motivation, but have not been mapped to a subjective
one, and this has prevented its generalization to practical human affairs.
In other words, we know what learning is, but how does learning feel?
Certainly learning would be an unlikely candidate for affect, as key
elements of learning such as perception, memory, and cognition are not
in themselves affective states. However, the attentional processes that
mediate these events as embodied by the activity of dopaminergic
systems do parallel affect, as dopamine release correlates not only with
neural processes but also how one feels.
The incorporation of affect into learning is important because a true
explanation requires it. We can understand an event from its qualitative
aspect, and on its flip side, its quantitative aspect. Thus to say that
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touching a hot pan hurts communicates to you to avoid touching it,

while saying that the heat activates nerve endings and pain centers in the
brain tells you why. Successfully navigating and explaining our world
requires both, as the ‘qualia’ of existence tells us what to do in specific
qualitative or normative incidents, namely hot pans or heat sources,
while the quantitative or abstract elements that can extend or generalize
to other related events.
Overall, we don’t use lower-level metaphors to describe higher levels but
only to constrain the causes we can infer. Thus you do not convey to a
child to refrain from touching a hot pan because it will excite nerve ends
and active brain centers, but rather that touching a hot pan hurts.
However, knowing how pain works from the molecular level can inform
you on what treatments for pain will work or not, and why they work.
These multi-metaphorical ways of approaching pain thus comprise its
explanation that is suitable for common folk and scientists alike.
The issue for biological processes is that on the whole, they are effective
without needing to be affective. Thus the daily processes that are
necessary for bodily regulation, from perspiration to digestion, occur
under the affective radar, and do not garner attention, however attention
is just the point. Pain, pleasure, and adapting to new experiences or
learning calls for attention, and this means attentive arousal which is
mediated by dopaminergic systems. Dopamine activity can not only be
seen, as neuroscientists well know, but felt, as they first didn’t know. So
in addition to its passive qualities as the neurochemical that effects
synaptic efficacy or mediates learning, it also mediates the attentive
processes required for learning, or motivation. So how exactly does
dopamine feel?

Dopamine does not cause pleasure, but interacts with opioid systems
that do.
Towards the end of the 20th century, the common view was that
dopamine release mediates attention but also pleasure. Beginning with
the work of the affective neuroscientist Kent Berridge,99 dopamine does
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not cause pleasure at all, and indeed, if dopamine neurons are destroyed
or ‘knocked out’ in laboratory mice, the animals still eat food unabatedly
as before, but do not display the motivation to approach food, which is
mediated by dopamine activity.
Whereas dopamine induces a feeling of attentive arousal, it does not
cause pleasure. That responsibility falls to opioid systems, which are
embodied by clusters of neurons or ‘nuclei’ that are adjacent to
dopamine neurons as ‘hot spots’ in the midbrain. No larger than the nub
of an eraser on a pencil, these hot spots are responsible for affective states
of arousal and pleasure, and interact in unique ways that are reflected
subjectively as unique affective states or feelings.
Although dopamine systems do not interfere with opioid systems, they
can mutually signal or activate each other. The pleasures of life, from
food100 to rest,101,102 are mediated by the activation of these opioid nuclei
in the brain, whereas a feeling of alertness or arousal (but not pleasure)
is mediated by dopaminergic nuclei that are activated by the experience
or anticipation of novel or unexpected events that have positive
outcomes, and scale with the importance or salience of those events.103
As noted, opioid and dopaminergic neurons are located in adjacent
locations in the midbrain, and opioids have an excitatory effect on
dopamine systems and vice versa.104 105,106,107,108,109 110
Thus, not only do
opioids increase dopamine levels; but opioid activity is enhanced due to
dopamine activation, as also attested by self-reports of greater food
palatability or pleasure under conditions of positive uncertainty 111, or
feelings of arousal and pleasure when pursuing novel goals (e.g.
creativity, sporting activity) while in a pleasurable relaxed state, or so
called ‘flow’ or peak experiences.

Dopamine increases the moment-to-moment value or decision utility

of behavior, and scales with the salience of the conceptual or
discriminative aspects of reward.
From time to time, life can result in grand bargains or Faustian ones,
where the immediate result of behavior can not only result in good
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things but branching possibilities of even better things, or alternatively

to give the devil his due, an ultimate likelihood that is much worse.
Rewards are cognitively extensible, and a simple token like a certificate,
trophy, or just a pat on the back can perceptually change the odds for
good things in the future, and light up one’s life emotionally and
figuratively far more than if such rewards had no or limited cognitive
issue at all. This extended conceptual sequence of events we will call a
‘salience network’. Salience networks account for changes in the
expected values of predicted events. These cumulative values can be
good, bad, or an admixture of both, but when we focus on the sunny side
of life’s possibilities, or the grander possibilities from living a life, we will
become more aroused and alert, and the behavior in the moment will
have greater salience, or ‘decision utility’. Indeed, this is mirrored in the
activity of dopaminergic systems, with dopamine release scaling in
degree with the import of the reinforcer, whether up, as in good times,
or down, as in bad. This has been noted experimentally, as “dopaminergic
activations increase monotonically with reward probability and reward
magnitude, such as liquid volume. However, the dopamine responses do not
distinguish between reward probability and magnitude as long as the expected
value is identical. Thus the activations appear to code the expected value of
predicted reward probability distributions.”112 “Phasic DA transmission is
proposed to signal the utility of goal-directed action by scaling in magnitude
according to reward value, such that larger or more probable rewards evoke
greater dopaminergic activity that is subsequently reflected in the cue-evoked
DA response.”113
Dopaminergic scaling is important to fix attention in conceptual
situations that demand it, from composing a symphony, playing a game
of chess, or just looking into the eyes of a very attractive date, where in
each of these situations the novel conceptual implications are very high,
from the prospect of an adoring audience to an adoring mate. And the
neural foundation for this behavior are somewhat clear. “Thus, if a reward
is larger than predicted, DA neurons are strongly excited (positive prediction
error…. One hypothesis about how dopamine supports reinforcement learning
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is that it adjusts the strength of synaptic connections between neurons. The most
straightforward version of this hypothesis is that dopamine controls synaptic
plasticity according to a modified Hebbian rule that can be roughly stated as
“neurons that fire together wire together, as long as they get a burst of
dopamine”. In other words, if cell A activates cell B, and cell B causes a
behavioral action which results in a reward, then dopamine would be released
and the A→B connection would be reinforced.”

Dopamine provides alerting signals for cues of high potential

importance, and primes attention for action.
Dopamine neurons have been hypothesized to occur as two types that
encode not just for novelty, but for its novel discriminative or conceptual
connotations. Thus, “one type of DA neurons encode motivational value,
excited by rewarding events and inhibited by aversive events. These neurons
support brain system for seeking goals, evaluating outcomes, and value
learning. A second type of DA neurons encode motivational salience, excited
by both rewarding and aversive events. These neurons support brain systems for
orienting, cognitive processing, and motivational drive. In addition to their
value and salience-coding activity, both types of DA neurons also transmit
an alerting signal, triggered by unexpected sensory cues of high potential
importance. Together, we hypothesize that these value, salience, and alerting
signals cooperate to coordinate downstream brain structures and control
motivated behavior.”
“This suggests that DA neurons not only motivate actions to gain rewards but
also motivate actions to make accurate predictions about those rewards, in order
to ensure that rewards can be properly anticipated and prepared for in advance.
…both rewarding and aversive situations require an increase in general
motivation to energize actions and to ensure that they are executed properly.
Indeed, DA neurons are critical in motivating effort to achieve high-value goals
and in translating knowledge of task demands into reliable motor
performance.”114
The function of dopamine neurons to alert one of imminent high value
rewards occurs separately from its function as a mediator of error
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correction, and is separately conceptualized as an aspect of a ‘priming’

response. The concept of priming represents a state of alert awareness, a
precognitive state of attentive arousal that orients an individual towards
an impending response leading to a goal. The level of arousal in turn is
dependent upon the salience of the reward, which can be due to stimulus
deprivation or the importance of the reward itself. For example, an
individual is primed to eat, or has a hunger ‘drive’ when deprived of
food,115 and a child in bed anticipating Christmas day is alert and primed
to respond quickly at the break of dawn.
Attaining rational goods means that one must be attentive or ‘primed
and ready’ in achieving as well as attaining them, thus reason must
always be married to affect, and any plan to make humans reasonable
must account for both. Moreover, affect can be concurrent with any
sensory modality, and its reflection in the activity of dopamine neurons
show activations ('excitations') following reward predicting visual,
auditory and somatosensory stimuli. These responses occur
irrespectively of the sensory modalities and spatial positions of the
stimuli, and irrespective of the effectors being arm, mouth or eye
movements.
The mirroring of incentive motivation or its subjective representation of
objective neural processes demonstrates that affect, and its contextual
representation as emotion is an emergent property of incentive
motivation, just as a sickly feeling is an emergent property of simply
rendered processes of disease. And just as an educated person in the
modern age does not disassociate symptoms of disease from simple
conceptualizations of processes of disease because of its explanatory
power in suggesting ways of preventing disease and excluding therapies
that do not, so too do adequate explanations of motivation allow us to
understand not only the causes of motivation in the moment, but in the
larger context of our daily behavior. However, although dopamine
systems are critical for incentive, they are less economical in allowing
incentive to run reasonable and true, and to correct or at least avoid this
possibility, one’s body must literally get involved.
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Fear not, A Matter of Stress

As rational creatures, decision making should be easy for us, and indeed
it usually is. We can make decisions with full or partial information, and
do so without concern or stress. For example, if we are at a restaurant we
can calmly choose one entrée from dozens, and in a library, one book
among thousands. A major reason for this is that the alternatives we do
not choose are not lost, but are merely deferred. We can always choose
another entrée when we are at the restaurant next, or another book on
our next trip to the library. However, if the alternatives to a choice are
not deferred but lost upon our choice, we may be very anxious indeed
when having to make the right choice. Thus having to choose a major in
college with no recourse to consider, or who goes on a lifeboat can be
major stressors to say the least.
When choosing between two highly valued non-recourse alternatives
high tension or anxiety occurs, and low value non-recourse choices
would result in a lower degree of tension. The latter is easily ignored,
unless it is sustained, in which the musculature soon tires and collapses,
with other muscles taking up the slack, and becoming a literal pain in the
neck. Called the ‘Cinderella Effect’ from the fairy tale character who as a
harried servant girl was first to wake and last to sleep, 116 117 118 119
the
continuous activation of postural motor units or muscles (also called
Cinderella fibers) because of this psycho-social ‘demand’ causes them to
eventually fail, and thus recruit other groups of muscles more peripheral
to the original group, resulting in pain and exhaustion. In addition, as
the name Cinderella suggests, these slow twitch fibers are slow to
deactivate, and will continue activated even during subsequent intervals
of rest.120 8

8
The correlation between choice and tension is a non-remarkable fact,
however its explanation is not so apparent, and depends upon the model of
motivation that one uses. The prevailing model, which coheres to discrepancy
theories of motivation, was originally proposed by the psychologists John
Dollard and Neal Miller in the 1950’s. Their Dollard-Miller theory of anxiety
 173

Still, if rational choices were the only means humans make decisions,
then humanity would be as cool in its decision making as Vulcans from
Star Trek. However, daily choices are also moderated by affective events
that are continuous aspects of our lives, and these can make not only for
fast decisions, but indeterminate ones, or dilemmas.
As we have noted, dopaminergic activity adds value or utility to
moment-to-moment behavior. This utility in the moment, or decision
utility, may be coherent or incoherent with long term rational goals or
expected utility. For example, the arousing prospect of accessing email,
eating a dessert, or watching TV provide ‘temptations’ that are
affectively but not logically valuable, and their rational alternative of
keeping to one’s work, diet, or household chores can result in continuous
choice-choice dilemmas, or cognitive perseveration, which results in
continuing tension or stress, an affective state that is wholly distinctive
from our response to actual threats to our wellbeing, or fear.121 This
definition of stress is represented by the ‘perseverative cognition
hypothesis’,122 that holds that cognitive perseveration is the main
constituent of stress.9

hypothesized that tension and anxiety were secondary or learnable ‘drives’

that occurred whenever one was faced with ‘choice-choice’ conflicts, and to
escape these continuous or perseverative conflicts, anxiety impelled faster
avoidance behavior, and was reinforced. For example, avoidance-avoidance
conflicts would represent a conflict between two choices we would rather
avoid, such as visiting the dentist or living with an aching tooth. Approach-
approach conflicts represent conflicts between two desirable options, such as
conflicts between whether to access social media or stay focused on work.
Finally, approach-avoidance conflicts represent conflicts between options that
have good and bad qualities, such as whether to order dessert after dinner. To
have dessert means to indulge in a tasty treat and consume a lot of calories, in
contrast to the alternative of rejecting the pleasure but avoiding resulting
weight gain.

99
Per Wikipedia, the 'perseverative cognition hypothesis' holds that stressful
events cannot affect people's health, unless they think repetitively or
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If muscular tension occurs because it produces results such as expediting

choice or avoidance of choice, or is ‘operant’ in nature, then it will cease
when its results are null.123 Indeed, this is the case from both experiments
with animals and with common experience, as tension ceases when all
hope is lost. But regardless of its origins or etiology, the relative activity
or non-activity of the musculature is a constant in daily life and has a
constant affective presence. That relaxation is also a source of pleasure
provides yet another reason for the avoidance of difficult choices, and as
it follows, a larger beacon of incentive.

Pleasure
During the middle of the last century, airplanes flying over a non-
descript countryside or the expanses of an ocean, knowing which way to
head and to turn needed some obvious calculation. The simplest and
most foolproof way was to simply follow a radio homing beacon, and as
the signal of the beacon increased, you knew you were on the right track,
and if it faded, you knew that you were off course. For human beings
who also have to navigate using difficult and uncertain rules, the
principle is the same, and an affective beacon makes finding your way

continuously (that is, 'perseverate cognitively') about these stressful events.

Stressful events themselves are often too short, as are the physiological
responses to them. Therefore, the physiological responses during these
stressors are unlikely to cause bodily harm. More importantly, many stressful
events are merely worried about, or feared in the future, while they often do
not happen or do not have the feared consequences. Nevertheless, the body
reacts with prolonged physiological responses to continuous thoughts
(perseverative cognition) about these stressors. Therefore, it is the
perseverative cognition, and not the stressors that can eventually lead to
disease. In scientific terms, it is said that perseverative cognition is a mediator
of the detrimental effects of stress on one's health. Since its publication
scientific evidence for this hypothesis has been accumulating.
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simpler and near automatic. This is important, because if we were only

attracted to seeking novelty, we would literally starve to death. This
beacon of incentive is ‘pleasure’, or the desirable affective state that
relieves stress, hunger, thirst, and even lust. Pleasures are magnets of
incentive, and increase the priming effect or ‘drive’ after we are deprived
of a necessary element of survival. Pleasure changes our internalized
models of the world, and it does so through the magnet of moment-to-
moment changes in simple neurologic systems that are reflected in the
luminosity of affect. With animals, these models are simple, with reward
normally one or a few steps ahead of its nose, as a mouse does not reflect
upon where the second or third piece of cheese comes from. Since sub-
cortical systems have not changed during evolution to the degree that
cortical systems have evolved, these processes can be extrapolated (as
well as observed) in humans as well. The work of the contemporary
affective neuroscientist Kent Berridge is particularly revealing of these
processes, and in particular, the interactions of dopamine and opioid
systems, which he has termed the processes of ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’.
Akin to the priming response, ‘wanting’ is mediated by robust brain
systems, including dopamine neuron projections, whereas 'liking' is
mediated by a isolated brain system of small hedonic hotspots or opioid
neurons in the midbrain. These networks normally interact, but are
potentially dissociable.124 For example, the anticipation or dopaminergic
activity that scales as one approaches a pleasurable outcome such as food
or drink is naturally higher when one is hungry or thirsty, and
culminates when one eats or drinks. Opioid and dopamine systems may
also interact or stimulate each other, as the neurons or nuclei for both
systems abut each other. For example, sampling a tasty treat will arouse
one’s attention, and to expect that a treat will taste better, or a placebo
effect, will actually make it so.
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Wanting and Liking Circuitry

‘Wanting’ adds a motivating element (affect) to the reinforcing element

(consolidating neural connections) of dopaminergic activity, and
interacting with opioid systems provides the guidance not just for
seeking, but also ‘liking’ or ‘satisficing’, providing for the needs for
sustenance, reproduction, and more that are signaled by the pleasures of
the world. But they also tell us what not to attend to, and this can be an
indirect source of motivation as well.

Habits
From a logical point of view, decisions are the result of conscious or non-
conscious calculations, but this is at root an irrational premise, as the
calculus of decision making, if followed rationally, would be as complex
as an actual mathematical calculus, as we would have to consider every
alternative that was equally useful. Even in our evolved state, we have
neither the wits nor intelligence to follow this computational scheme. To
minimize the need for constant figuring, nature has figured out a way
that at once simplifies decision making and yet to many of us, confounds
it. Because we can’t keep track of all meaningful correlations, we non-
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consciously dispense of the redundant ones. This is not done by rational

choice, but is a built-in feature for mammals as well as humans, for
without it we would be overwhelmed by the static of infinite
relationships.
For almost all of the day-to-day behaviors that give us sustenance and
keep us on the straight and narrow, from respiration, walking and
talking, to just sitting up straight, we are responding to and are guided
by events that register barely in our consciousness. We also have the
ability to be aware of and to pursue countless behavioral alternatives,
from driving to the store to contemplating the next day at work, that we
decide to do because of their rational value, or declarative reasoning.
However, these choices are not just rational but are affective too, and are
non-consciously perceived when our attention is given to daily choices,
and specifically if the choice has highly positive novel consequences due
deprivation (hunger) or high cognitive salience (a monetary reward).
This affective precursor and modulator of attention is mediated by
dopamine systems and is called ‘priming’ or ‘wanting’, as its folk
equivalent of ‘looking forward to’ an event provides extra guidance or
impetus for behavior due to the increase in the value of the moment to
moment ‘decision utility’ that affect provides to focus our attention on a
goal.
However, priming effects can be dissociated from the rational calculus
of cause and effect, causing us to be aware of the rationality of alternative
choices, but attend regardless to the tried and true. This represents, as
we have discussed earlier, the concept of ‘blocking’. Returning to our
earlier example, if one associated a red light with stopping at a traffic
intersection and notices also a blue light that suddenly turns on
concurrently with the red, one would continue to attend to the red light,
with the blue light, which is presenting merely redundant information,
being ignored. Not only learning about the blue light’s relationship
would be impaired, but attending to the blue light will also be inhibited.
The inhibition of priming effects for otherwise redundant act-outcome
relationships is equivalent to ‘habit’. Habits are not motivating forces, but
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represent act-outcome expectancies that may have logical salience

because of their affective outcomes, but not affective salience for the
responses that lead to those outcomes. For example, eating sushi and
fried chicken for breakfast has an affective outcome or ‘liking’, as it tastes
the same regardless of when we consume them. However, the affective
responses that lead to them, or ‘wanting’, are inhibited in favor of our
wanting foods we normally associate with breakfast, like bacon and
eggs.
Habits demonstrate that not only is wanting dissociable from liking, but
can be also enhanced or inhibited by experience or learning. So we may
be aware of many things we should like, but don’t want, which is a
function entirely of learning. Eliminating wanting or priming effects is
generally a function of following the correlations of life, as we tend to do
and be primed to do what we have always done, even if there are other
alternatives worth consideration. However, these correlations can also
be consciously manipulated to indirectly motivate behavior by removing
its affective impediments. For example, the continuous distraction of
‘choice-choice’ alternatives between the affective choice of accessing
one’s email versus the rational choice of staying focused on work can be
eliminated by modify one’s ‘wanting’ to access email. By continuously
restricting access to email except for times after work, then the priming
effect of attentive arousal will fade, or extinguish. Thus by building a
habit of avoiding distractions and their attendant effects of stress, we are
able to pursue our primary goals.
So in sum, ‘blocking’ means that you never learn to be primed to a
redundant relationship, while ‘extinction’ means you unlearn it. With
the addition of habit we see that act-outcome behavior can be selected,
non-selected, and de-selected, and we behave because of the continuous
interweaving of affect and reason, and without affect, behavior is inert,
and without reason, behavior is blind. But how can this be measured and
reduced to economical explanation and practical and testable principles?
As it turns out, from two sides of a coin, the first being addressed more
than one hundred years ago.
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The Tycho Brahe of Psychology

The affective axes of pleasure and arousal are mediated by neural (opioid
and dopamine neurons) and neuro-physiological (tension and
relaxation) systems, and are paralleled and governed by information we
perceive both consciously and non-consciously. In the late nineteenth
century, before the future time these systems and the information that
maps to them could be physiologically accounted for, they could be
subjectively accounted for, and this latter accounting for how these
systems felt like proved to be as reliable, given the properly maintained
procedures, as the objective measures of contemporary neuroscience.
And indeed, more than a hundred years ago, this measurement was
carried out by a psychologist as exacting and thorough as those obtained
by a certain astronomer in Denmark, unaided by a telescope, squinting
at a star.
Looking at a dimension or two of a multi-dimensional object may not
explain what that object is, but it can at the least give you a reliable
measure of some of its contours, while awaiting better measures that a
hopeful future could provide. That was Tycho Brahe’s predicament.
Indeed, the value and power of reliable, precise, and unbiased
observation is second only to the acuity of observation, and from our
brief account of the history of the astronomy of the solar system, it was
Brahe whose insistence on the integrity of data has a well-earned place
in the pantheon of science, and whose findings were a stepping stone to
the later discoveries permitted by the telescope and other tools that
revealed the cosmos entire.
In the late 19th century, the physical and biological worlds were
progressively revealing their secrets, but the psychological realm was
still impervious to fine grain observation, but not to the reliable reporting
of basic phenomenological or affective states or ‘feelings’. It was here that
Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, was to make
his mark, and with observations that it will be argued in the succeeding
part of this book were validated by actual observations of the brain and
body in ‘action’. His revolutionary contribution to psychology, at once
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neglected and disputed, was that thought and behavior were embodied,
and always were mirrored in subjective indices of sensation and affect
that could be objectively ascertained. This two-sided coin of experience
was acknowledged by Wundt, but only the subjective side of the coin
could reveal itself to precise observation, and that is what he pursued.
“According to Wundt, physics studies the objects of the external world: while
this investigation is necessarily mediated by experience, physics is still not the
study of experience itself. Psychology, in contrast, is the study of conscious
experiences as experience. It must be approached through internal observation,
through introspection. While all individuals have such experiences, not all are
necessarily qualified as expert witnesses to the nature of their experience. Thus
Wundt embraced the method of introspection--a method whereby one attends
carefully to one’s own sensations and reports them as objectively as possible.
Such objectivity here means that one describes the sensations felt, rather than
the stimulus giving rise to them; and that one reports thoughts (or images)
without reference to their meaning ore context of presentation.” 125
“Wundt came to think of experience as composed of simple basic elements-raw
sensory content devoid of any meaning, and all conscious thoughts were
accordingly assumed to be combinations of these sensations which can be
analyzed in terms of quality, mode, duration, intensity and the like….Wundt’s
psychology emerges as a kind of mental chemistry, focused primarily on the
discovery of the pure elements of experience, through whose combination
complexes of mental activity come to be formed”126
“The main substantive axiom of postulates that human emotions result from the
fusion of a characteristic 'mixture' of six basic forms of feeling: Pleasure,
displeasure, excitement, tranquility, tension, and relaxation. A second axiom
holds that the basic feeling types are organized into three bipolar dimensions,
and the third axiom claims that the basic feelings experienced toward complex
objects are a fusion of the corresponding basic feelings directed at the
components of the complex objects.”127
Wundt’s theory was not a theory of emotion because it was merely a
taxonomy for reliably reported phenomenological states or ‘feelings’,
and as such made no testable predictions, and it could not be a theory of
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emotion because Wundt, like his predecessor Brahe, had not the
observational tools to see the essence of creation. So, like Tycho Brahe’s
star chart, Wundt provided instead a precise measurement of the ‘qualia’
of experience without determining the material constituents of
experience, and was as ignorant of the neuroscience of experience as
Tycho’s was of the physics of a star.
Like Brahe, Wundt certainly knew that behavior, like the stars and
planets, did move. So, as Wundt observed, “Feeling passes over into
impulse, impulse into voluntary action, and voluntary action has reference to
objects which are given to us as ideas.” However, though possessing
objective data of how feelings are like, like Tycho Brahe, Wundt could
not provide an adequate explanation as how feelings translate into
impulse and then to voluntary action and future motivation.
Wundt was interested in the continuous elements of affect and their
individual variances, and did not consider intermittent affective states
that were functions of equally intermittent and infrequent
circumstances, such as hunger, fear, anger, lust, etc. Wundt’s subjects
revealed three subjective measures of affect that are analogous to the
three primary colors of red, green, and blue, all the spectra of emotion
can be seen to emerge. Wundt found from his subjective measures of
pleasure/pain, arousal/depression, and tension/relaxation.128 The third
measure of affect, or tension/relaxation, also represented a different
qualitative aspect of pleasure and pain, as tension is painful and
relaxation is pleasurable. The permutations of these two qualitative
aspects of pleasure and pain and the additional aspect of arousal and
depression could be mapped to a circular gradient, and provide a new
perspective on emotion that as we shall see not only simplified the
concept but provides operational distinctions that can be subject to test.
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Emotion
I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all
-song by Joni Mitchell

How do you define a sunny day? It depends. It’s all in the gradient,
perhaps like a wheel. A weather wheel, like the one below, is a taxonomy
of the types of weather one can experience, with one type of weather
morphing into another type as one progresses along its circumference.
The wheel does not tell you what the weather is composed of, nor does
it tell you what causes it. However, we know of course that snow is not
made of different stuff than rain, and that clouds aren’t illusions if I
recall. We also know the atmospheric conditions that cause weather, and
what in turn causes atmospheric turbulence or calm. A weather wheel is
not a dynamic model because you do not account for the variables that
cause weather nor for the variables that are weather. All you know from
the wheel is a metaphoric description as how weather looks like and
feels.
The daily weather and how it looks and feels is an emergent feature of the
lawfulness of nature, in this case the atmospheric changes due to solar
radiation and its effect on wind patterns, evaporation, cloud formation,
precipitation, and more. In other words, weather is simply a reflection of
how dynamic physical processes look and feel.
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Similarly, like weather, we will define feelings, and their contextual

interpretations or emotion, as emergent affective properties of the
dynamics of incentive motivation. Like the type of weather in the
weather wheel, feelings and emotions can also be mapped to a circular
scheme, or an affective ‘circumplex’, and similarly, how affect is
emergent from the neural processes of incentive motivation is not
immediately apparent but can be empirically derived.

An Affective Circumplex
When we look at the many different gradients of how people ‘feel’, and
given a cognitive or situational concept, the emotions they experience, a
similar affective wheel can also be derived. This affective ‘circumplex’
can map any affective state as a permutation of the various degrees of
sensory states ranging from depressing and painful events to arousing
and pleasurable events. This Barrett-Russell model of affect129 maps
affect to the combinatorial result of two gradients of affect,
pleasant/unpleasantness and high/low activation or arousal. As
proposed by the authors, this model can easily correspond to gradations
of attentive arousal that are mapped to the activity of dopamine systems.
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The model also by default includes autonomic arousal that is mediated

by the relative activity of the covert musculature, or from tension to
relaxation. Neuromuscular activation, or tension or ‘stress’ is also
affective in nature, as tension if sustained is painful, and relaxation if
sustained is pleasurable.

The admixture of tension/relaxation and arousal/depression can be

mapped to information, but is the relationship empirically sound? For
that answer we must return to Wundt’s empirical data, which was
assembled through acute observation and with an attendant description
that was coherent with the Barrett-Russell model but presaged it by more
than one hundred years. But by adding a defining perspective of the
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neural systems that embody the subjective reports of Wundt’s subjects,

both Wundt’s findings and the affective circumplex can be defined
through its somatic and neural components that can in turn be mapped
to information.

A Behavioral Circumplex
The Russell-Barrett model graphically restated Wundt’s proposal by
mapping gradients of arousal (activation/de-activation) and hedonic
(pain/pleasure) states. But as descriptive models, both had no depth,10
and did not refer to the neuro-physiological correlates of these affective
states, nor did they detail the abstract patterns of information that
elicited them.130 Informed by a neuro-physiologically grounded theory
of incentive motivation, we will attempt to do just that, and provide not
just a descriptive but a predictive account of emotions that meets the
criteria of explanation, a rigorous syntax and semantics to its ability to
provide testable predictions.
The cognitive representations of our day-to-day activities primarily
involve decision making between multiple exclusive alternatives under
varying degrees of uncertainty. These ‘core appraisals’ represent moment
to moment changes in the abstract (uncertainty) and functional
properties (utility) of environmental contingencies that are consciously
or non-consciously perceived. Parallel somatic (tension and autonomic
arousal), pleasurable (opioid release due to relaxation) and activating or
‘energizing’ (enhanced activity of dopamine neurons) events strongly
correlate with specific permutations of these core appraisals, and are
‘painful’ or ‘pleasurable’ in nature. These changes alter the importance
or salience of a momentary response option and as an additive function
create emergent emotional states.

10 It must be remarked that Russell and Barrett did suggest candidates for the
neuro-physiologic components of emotion, such as the activation of midbrain
dopamine systems, however its components were not mapped systematically
in their graphical model nor was their model altered to reflect them.
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The cognitive variables of contrast and discrepancy can be observed to

respectively correlate with tension and activation or alertness (as defined
by its neurological correspondence with the increased activity of mid-
brain dopamine systems).131 In addition, the degree of contrast,
discrepancy, and the predicted utility of moment to moment responding
in combination correlate with the level of tension and activation, and in
their various permutations correspond with subjective emotional states.

As defined:
Contrast reflects the comparative value of two alternative means-end
expectancies or response contingencies.
Discrepancy reflects moment to moment unexpected variances in the
immediate predicted outcome of a behavior.
Predicted Utility reflects the value of a moment-to-moment response as
determined by long term hedonic (e.g. food, sex, etc.) or rational value
(e.g. monetary reward).
Incentive salience reflects the relative importance of moment to moment
responding under a response contingency due to the utility of a response
and to affective responses elicited by concurrently perceived
discrepancy.

If there is a contrast between two alternative response contingencies of

equal utility under certainty (i.e., little or no discrepancy in moment-to-
moment act-outcome relationships), tension will occur, but the level of
tension will vary with the predicted utility of a moment-to-moment
response. Thus, tension will be less for low-utility choices than high. As
these contingencies diverge in value, we make rational decisions to
choose one of the alternatives and progressively less tension will occur.
Thus, the choice between two conflicting low value alternatives (e.g.
what dessert to order in a restaurant) will result in lower tension than a
choice between two conflicting high value alternatives (e.g. what
medical procedure to choose to treat a life-threatening condition). In
addition, less tension will occur when more information is available that
leads to one choice becoming more logically compelling.
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The increase in dopaminergic activity due to moment-to-moment

discrepancy adds another variable that increases not only the incentive
salience of moment to moment responding, but also alertness (i.e.,
sensorimotor activation) and affective tone (i.e., a good or bad feeling).
Dopamine induced activation also scales monotonically with the
qualitative or informative aspects of discrepancy. 132 For example, tasks
that entail moment to moment positive discrepancy (e.g. creative
behavior, sporting activities, surfing the web, etc.) under circumstances
wherein the incentive salience of alternative responses is relatively low
will correlate with feelings of alertness/activation or attentive arousal and
low or non-existent tension (or low degree of discomfort or a pleasant
feeling). Tasks that entail a moment-to-moment positive discrepancy
wherein the incentive salience of alternative responses is relatively high
will correlate with feelings of arousal and high and/or constant tension
(or high discomfort or pain). These feelings will also increase as the
utility of a response increases, or in other words, we become more alert
as the ’stakes’ increase, and less alert as they decrease. As the incentive
salience of alternative responses increases to match the increasing
salience of a primary response, the level of tension and corresponding
autonomic activation will increase as well and result in a state of anxiety.
Correspondingly, if the salience of a response increases as the salience of
an alternative response decreases, tension will fall and activation will
increase, resulting in a state of elation or ecstasy due to the combined
activity of opioid (due to relaxation) and dopamine systems (due to act-
outcome discrepancy).
For example, moment to moment positive discrepancy in high value
sporting or creative events (e.g., a ‘flow’ response)133 is marked by a
feeling of energy, or ‘elation’ and corresponding low tension induced
autonomic arousal or ‘coolness under pressure’ and accompanying
pleasure when the salience of contrasting response options is low.
However, as the salience of these options increase in value, tension
becomes progressively more likely to occur both in persistence and
intensity until activation and tension are continual and high, or in other
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words, we become anxious or stressed. In addition, as the salience of

both primary and alternative response options decreases, activation
decreases along with muscular tension, and we feel pleasurably relaxed.
Finally, a predictable response option that is highly salient due primarily
to its high predicted utility and contrasts with low value alternatives will
often be reported as a boring or depressing experience if activation is not
high enough (as embodied by the under stimulation of the dopamine
system) to energize one to “want‟ to perform an action that is ultimately
valuable (e.g. working under a piece work schedule of reward such as in
an assembly line).
To illustrate how affect dynamically changes over time as a function of
information and discrepancy, consider the hypothetical example of a
worker in a home office. Waking up in the morning and accessing email,
the daily news, social network postings, etc. correlates with a feeling of
pleasantness (1). However, as the morning progresses, this behavior
begins to contrast with other equally salient response options (her work),
correlating with sustained tension (2). If these ‘distractive’ choices
continue, the musculature will soon fatigue and be replaced by other
muscular groups, creating muscular pain and a feeling of exhaustion at
the end of the day. If the worker begins to cold call clients with little or
no response, then she will quickly become bored (3), and may also
become depressed when she recognizes that her lack of activation
forestalls her obtaining her long-term goals. Taking a time out from her
duties by sitting quietly and barring distractive thoughts will result in
relaxation (4). If she is completing a project to meet a deadline “just in
time‟, then she will feel pleasantly alert (5). If she falls behind her task
and/or is distracted by other pressing matters and thus perceives
alternative irreconcilable choices or dilemmas, she will feel anxious (6).
A circumplex model of affect adds utility to behavior that can conform
or not conform to the expected utility of a expected outcome. Take a step
forward and you get closer to a goal, but if bored the step is slower, more
hesitant, or may not occur at all.
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High Salience (high

discrepancy) response
option

(6)
Anxiety elation

(5)

(2) (1)

High Salience (low discrepancy) Low Salience Response

Response Option Option

(4)

boredom relaxation

(3)

Low Salience response

option

Behavioral Circumplex Model of Emotion

A behavioral circumplex model for emotion maps neural and somatic

events and their level of activation to patterns of information, and
demonstrates how affect and its contextual reflection as emotion is
emergent from basic processes of incentive motivation. Because affect is
embodied in all incentive motivation, the various permutations of
affective states covary with abstract patterns of information as denoted
by simple act-outcome expectancies. In this manner, emotion is not an
additive or disruptive process to incentive motivation, but is an integral part of
incentive motivation. The ramifications for this regarding psychology and
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all of its allied disciplines from philosophy to theology we will discuss

next. But first, a little digression on the importance of method.

Let consilience be your guide

The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the
attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation
and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but
artifacts of scholarship.- E.O. Wilson

To get one’s head around a problem, as well as one’s arms, problems and
their solutions are best compartmentalized. The real problem comes
when their explanations are compartmentalized, and this is when we
encounter the problem of eclecticism, where a specific issue, event, or
object is explained, but its supporting or supervening physical systems
are not, and are relegated to sheer conjecture or inference that varies with
whoever is addressing the problem, or are just ignored altogether. This
is, as we shall note, not an issue for the physical and biological sciences,
but is a debilitating one for the social sciences.
Eclecticism, or the fragmentation of knowledge, is the opposite of
consilience, or the unity of knowledge. Coined by the naturalist E.O.
Wilson, consilience is the convergence of knowledge from separate
procedural approaches that each confirm a process independently, but
also when integrated can explain that process systematically. The former
makes adequate predictions, whereas the latter makes adequate
explanations, and can broadly extend its predictive power, and often in
unexpected ways.
For example, consider a physical machine like an automobile. It is
composed of major interactive mechanical systems such as an engine,
transmission, electrical system, and suspension. Each of these systems in
turn can be decomposed into subsystems such as pistons, alternators,
interactive touch screens, and tires. A mechanic can recalibrate a
dashboard display, but also know that this subsystem is dependent
upon a ready source of power provided by a running engine, alternator,
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and charged battery. In other words, he has full understanding of a

subsystem, but also general knowledge of how the systems that support
it work. However, if the mechanic knew how to recalibrate a electronic
dashboard, but had no knowledge of how engines, alternators, and
batteries work, then he would rely upon incorrect inferences that would
make his work unreliable, particularly if he was calibrating a dashboard
that was unworkable in the first place because the battery was dead and
he had no idea how it worked or how to charge it.
When we move from physical or mechanical systems to organic systems
like humans, this problem is amplified manyfold. We have discussed
how eclectic interpretations of human behavior can explain an issue in
the particular, but tether it to mere inferences in the general. So we can
note consistent behavioral regularities due to an incentive such as
money, but tether it to differing non-empirical theoretical principles
from extrinsic motivation to need gratification to simple greed, or
perhaps nothing at all. This can also be an issue for larger behavioral
subsystems that we have attempted to integrate in this book. For
example, incentive motivation as explained by Donahoe and Palmer
addressed cortical elements of reinforcement, habit, perception, problem
solving, and memory, but did not address the sub-cortical components
of behavior that are integrated with cortical systems and are responsible
for the affective states that give salience or importance to behavior.
Similarly, Kent Berridge’s research on affective motivational systems
reflected in ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ ignores linkages to cortical
reinforcement processes. In turn, both of these cortical and mid-brain
centric subsystems are ‘disembodied’, and are not integrated with inputs
from the autonomic nervous system that influence both, such a neuro-
muscular activity. This lack of integration of the major subsystems in the
brain and body does not impact the specific predictions that are germane
to understanding basic processes of affect, learning, and kinesthetics, but
impair the extended predictive power of these subsystems in predicting
emergent behavioral processes such as incentive motivation and its
affective reflection in human happiness and fulfillment. This is an issue
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imperfectly addressed in this book, but is critical if psychology is to

advance as a science.
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Chapter 8
Motivation, Tried and True
The Usual Prospects
Although a biologically informed explanation of incentive motivation, at
least for animals, is uniform and consistent, its value as explanation is
dependent upon its fruitfulness, or the practical procedures that not only
validate it, but that can also be incorporated into our ordinary lives. In
other words, to win an argument you must apply or test that argument.
That is, a hypothesis can only be validated if its predictions are testable,
and better still if that test is of practical value. This is the case for all the
best theories in the biological and physical sciences, which not only
suggest testable procedures, but also procedures that are important to
master the biological and physical world as well as continually validate
the theory itself. Sometimes the procedures are entirely new, but more
often good theories help adjust the procedures we already have, thus
making them more consistent, efficient, and useful. For example,
following rule of thumb or heuristic rules in the aiming of a cannon can
get the cannonball generally where you want it to go, but applying
Newtonian principles through ballistics gets the cannonball precisely
where you want it to go. And as we shall see, we generally know how to
generally motivate ourselves to get to where we want to go, and it is not
so much the precision but the passion that counts.
As we noted, the psychological principles that govern our lives are
derived from the robust correlations of everyday life, and as folk
psychology not only inform our lives but inform the theories
psychologists construct to explain our lives. Nonetheless, to explain
motivation through folk psychology or through motivational theories
that are equally uninformed by the neuroscience of motivation is
ultimately as valuable as chicken soup, equally valuable to the aching
body and aching soul, yet missing the explanation that can truly reveal
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the source of our emotional aches and their prevention and cure. Still,
common sense has a logic of its own, and self-guidance or self-control
can be distilled to simple and straightforward principles that guide a life
according to reason, which is as we shall see, are not reason enough.

Effective Self-control
Contingency Mapping (Perceiving contingencies)
Perceiving acts and outcomes or more formally, schedules of
reinforcement or reward can be very clear, as in knowing how many
miles to drive to get to the store or when the next eclipse will be. They
can also be very unclear, as knowing what store to go to for the best
product or bargain, or where is the best place to catch a fish. The facts of
existence are not debatable, as we know the sun shines, the moon rises,
and the earth turns. Just walking outside is a reliable source about the
world, and we don’t need to rely upon others to determine if it is a
cloudy day. However, for other personal relationships, we are not so
sure, and the contingencies of existence are dependent upon reliable
sources that we in fact choose. These sources may be deemed reliable
because they have been vouched for by others or from our own personal
experience, or because of a good advertising campaign that vouches for
them. We may listen to them or act upon their advice, or be ‘inspired’ by
them because they describe a discriminative outcome of our behavior
that is rewarding, from a place in a winner’s circle to a place in heaven.
Of course, reality always intervenes, or in the case of religious
contingencies, non-reality or death, and we either change our course or
double down on bad advice as a matter of course. But oftentimes, to fix
our predictions for our own behavior, we have to fix the consequences,
and here we have contracts that are formal or informal.

Contingency Contracting (Arranging contingencies)

Enrolling in a course, starting a job, or just doing your taxes in time
represent contingencies between behavior or outcomes. You ‘contract’
with another person or entity, and with good consequences if you
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behave and bad consequences if you don’t. Like new years resolutions,
but with an enforceable penalty box if your behavior strays, contingency
contracts are necessary not just for personal motivation, but survival.
Social, professional, personal, and even religious obligations channel our
behavioral tendencies by making sure that the results of behavior are
tended to. Contingency contracts are the fabric of all human institutions,
from the familial and political to the religious and the economic, but even
when we make choices that are enforced by agreed upon consequences,
the quality of our behavior: its rate, intensity, and constancy of direction
is still not assured. Here we have to look for another reason that is not
besides ourselves, but in ourselves.

The Ten Percent Solution

Machines, whether their logic is analog, like an engine, or digital, like a
computer, always follow instructions, and they do what they are told
with a speed, effect, and duration which is predictable and true, and only
stutter and stop when they run out of electricity or gas. The expectation
of behavior, if framed by rational rules, obligations, and contingencies,
should be as reliable and constant, but it is not. So when we think we
should be moving, we are crawling, and when we should be inspired,
we are indifferent or depressed. Indeed, the question of self-control is
not a matter of generating a desire to behave, but a passion to do so. We
are never working hard enough, are inspired enough, or are attentive
enough to the things we must do to succeed or simply survive in life. The
logic does not match the expected behavior, and like a computer that
shuts down or malfunctions when the power is intermittent or off, our
own behavior shuts down or goes off the rails when what empowers us
is turned down or off. But we are not digital but mortal engines, and the
sustenance of our motivations is made of different stuff, which calculates
differently and is motivated differently, and rather poorly at that.
An old and untrue truism is that we only use 10% of our brains, as all of
our brain is used or is active all the time, the question being is whether it
is engaged all the time. A more fitting aphorism would be that we only
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use our brains productively 10% of the time. Our realization that our
motivation falls way short of what we are capable of attaining is the true
problem with motivation, as we put the logical pedal down on our desire
but end up puttering forwarsd intermittently, disinterested and easily
distracted. In other words, the secret to motivation is not reinforcing
behavior but cultivating the passion for not just accomplishment, but to
scale the uncertain heights of accomplishment. This entails revising what
we think the essence of motivation is. We tend to think of motivation as
an impelling force metaphorically derived that must always be fixed,
altered, remedied, fortified, of allowed to take its course, but an
argument may be made that that it’s not the outcome or how straight and
narrow its course, but how it winds, or how it twists and turns. To this
effect, we must scale the heights of motivation by scaling affect, and this
is done by changing events in the moment and how to project them into
the future.

Affective Self-control
Affective Timing (Increasing short term incentive salience)
One of the most exciting facts of existence is that we love to view the
exciting fantasies of existence. And surprisingly, our fantasies are not
just to see our heroes succeed, but to revel in the fact they are succeeding
at the last moment, in this case just in time to save the damsel in distress,
or defuse the bomb with but a second to spare. And we often extend this
same excitement to the more prosaic facts of existence, as catching the
bus just in time can command the same rapt attention as a movie hero
disarming a bomb in the nick of time.
Although we cannot adjust the components of the contingencies of
existence, we can adjust their timing, and make sure that getting from A
to B can get us going by being touch and go, are in other words, by being
positively uncertain. This is difficult to manage in our daily lives as our
acts and outcomes are fairly predictable if we are in our control in the
moment, until they are nearly out of our control, often because we decide
so. It is then that our success becomes less predictable, a novel turn of
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events that increases focus and thus arousal. So to be focused and alert,
we simply procrastinate, and make life more exciting. Procrastination is
increasing moment to moment response discrepancy and positive
arousal through response delay, when attaining a goal remains likely but
increasingly uncertain. Procrastination is misunderstood as being an
impediment to motivation when it is in fact a key to being motivated, as
logical ends are subordinated to affective ends, and sometimes nearly
falling off a precipice to one’s death is preferable to the more lingering
death of boredom. Overall, procrastination increases the short-term
affective importance or salience of behavior, which diminishes once
behavior become predictable again, until the next day when we have to
rush to catch the bus with but a minute to spare.
Finally, besides procrastination, short term salience can also be increased
by engaging in behaviors that have variability in present or moment to
moment outcomes. Unless we have a job of copying phone book
numbers or any similar routine predictable tasks for a living, enough
variety occurs to spice up our lives and make life bearable. In addition,
highly variable schedules or reinforcement or reward can cause high and
rapid moment to moment discrepancy, and ‘gamifying’ a task means to
make moment to moment performance uncertain in its immediate
outcome, and is exemplified in games and in gambling when we have
active control over outcomes, or behavior with passive control, such as
watching TV or reading novels. However, discrepancy or novelty laden
behaviors, although reinforcing, can have negative future entailments,
and as ‘wasting time’ can be a source of temporary arousal but future
malaise.

Affective Priming (Increasing long term Incentive Salience)

To work for an apple, your motivation is assured if you have a hunger
for that apple. That can be due for food deprivation, or simply novelty if
it marks a refreshing change of pace. In other words, you have an
affective want for an apple that leads you forward through moment-to-
moment attentive arousal that gives affective salience or importance to
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your approach to it. A second way of increasing your ‘wanting’ for an

apple is if the apple is a golden one, and if you were a mythical fellow
named Paris, this gift from the Gods would be highly desirable, allowing
you to, if given to the right goddess as first prize in a beauty contest,
bestow upon you either wisdom, power, or a gal named Helen. We savor
the prospect of golden apples all the time with the ambition that is fixed
by the discriminative aspects of our behavior, whether it is taking a
college course, practicing for a game, or courting a desirable mate. As we
shall see in the next chapter, increasing branching positive
discriminative outcomes can elevate mere interest to passion, and
increase also not just the speed that a task may be accomplished, but the
excellence of that accomplishment.

Affective Bootstrapping (Mapping Wanting to Liking)

Desire and pleasure are strange bedfellows, and as certain types of
bedfellows suggest, can each be quite stimulative of the other. Consider
biting into an apple. Eating the apple is pleasurable, but the pleasure
itself stimulates our attention and interest. As embodied in the reciprocal
activation of dopamine and opioid systems, paying attention to what
you are enjoying increases the pleasure.11 But the reverse is also true and
if we are performing some engrossing behavior that stimulates
dopamine systems apart from pleasure, such as watching a football game
or an exciting movie, food or drink that is consumed will taste markedly
better.134 Similarly, if we are depressed, dopamine release will be
inhibited, and so will our pleasures. Thus we can explain why we eat
popcorn at the movies but not at funerals. This dopamine-opioid synergy
occurs regardless of the source of activity of either of these
neurochemicals. For example, engaging in touch and go or otherwise

11
This observation was humorously underscored by the comedian Dick Van
Dyke, who in an episode of his sitcom was eating a cake while talking to his
wife. Finally recognizing that he was not attending to his dessert. He asked her.
“This is good, what is it?” Upon learning what he was eating, he exclaimed,
“Why didn’t you tell me what I was eating? I love this cake!”
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engrossing activities while in a relaxed state that also in inherently

pleasurable also results an enhanced state of pleasurable arousal, which
scales as the importance of a task increases, and is reported as a state of
ecstasy or ‘flow’ states by artists and athletes who engage in such
activities while being in a relaxed state. This also can be demonstrated
procedurally, as documented below.12 The synergy between opioid and

12
Procedure: Consistent and periodic alternation between a resting protocol
(e.g. mindfulness) and the pursuit of meaningful behavior will increase
motivation and positive affect (arousal and pleasure), and by making
meaningful ideation more emotionally salient, will crowd out thoughts leading
to anxiety and depression. This can also be denoted semantically by the
conjunction of an indifference to but not avoidance of negative ideation
(through the inhibition of discursive thought or ‘mind wandering’) in
mindfulness with an awareness or ‘commitment’ to meaningful behavior and
the values it represents, thus corresponding to ‘acceptance and commitment’
in psychotherapeutic procedure.
Explanation: Resting elicits opioid activity, or feels pleasurable, and meaningful
behavior, as defined as behavior that has branching novel and positive
outcomes (writing that great novel or just making the bed) elicits dopamine
activity which causes arousal. The awareness of subsequent meaningful
behavior while engaging in relaxation protocols such as mindfulness elicits a
‘priming’ response, namely dopamine release that increases opioid activity,
and vice versa, making meaningful behavior seem self-reinforcing or ‘autotelic’.
with cognition less likely to transition to perseverative thought (worry, regret,
distraction). Although mindfulness reduces discursive thought or mind
wandering that can lead to negative ideation; it does not inhibit concurrent
non-conscious awareness or anticipation of behavior or events subsequent to
meditation that can in turn shape or ‘prime’ affective responses during a
meditative session. A priming response, like the salivary response that
precedes food or the sexual arousal that precedes intimacy, is a preparatory
response that often occurs non-consciously, and changes the affective value or
‘feeling’ in the moment. Similarly, relaxing due to ‘being in the moment’ is
pleasurable, but if we were told to expect ‘bad’ news or ‘good’ news in the near
future, just the awareness of future events is enough to depress or elevate our
feelings, but not altering in the slightest our ‘mindful’ or relaxed state. It follows
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dopamine systems can increase the incentive salience or value of a

behavior to be greater than considered alone, and result in the appraisal
that a performance is reinforcing in itself, or it ‘autotelic’. In this sense,
motivation is a ‘free lunch’ and our pleasures, if sustained, can increase
our diligence on a task.

Habit (Decreasing Incentive Salience)

Whereas increasing the positive branching entailments of behavior
increases the salience or importance of behavior in the moment,
decreasing or eliminating those entailments does the opposite,
particularly for incentives that are affectively enticing but are logically
harmful. For example, by consistently refusing to eat snacks between
meals, access social media at work, or refrain from alcohol, drugs, or
other harmful behaviors, we remain aware of their availability, but are
not affectively primed to pursue them. Likewise, good habits such as
exercising and doing household chores at regular intervals entail the
extinction of ‘blocking’ of priming responses for alternative behavior,
such as ignoring the health club and local chores in favor of watching
TV.
Habits are often assumed to be motivating agents for behavior. Thus one
makes the bed every morning because one always has, and this suffices

that if mindfulness is paired with the awareness of subsequent positive or

meaningful behavior, then rest in mindfulness will have a greater affective tone
or ‘feel better’ than if such a prospect was absent. This is perhaps why
‘savoring’, ‘loving kindness’ meditation, and ‘flow’ experiences represent
highly pleasurable and arousing experiences, as they make future positive
ideation contingent to obvious or subtle pleasures (from relaxation, eating,
drinking) and contrast with a lower level of pleasure during typical states of rest
that generally precede a return to meaningless discursive thinking. It also
explains the efficacy of popular psychotherapeutic interventions such as
acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT, that conjoins the awareness and
pursuit of meaningful behavior with mindful or meditative states.
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to provide motivation, even though making the bed is no more logically

enticing as before. But this is an illusion, as habits do not substitute for
motivation, but subtract from or block contrary incentives that can
interfere with primary ones. One can have the habit of going to school,
but if the incentive is not there to learn, than the behavior falls away
regardless of the regularity of its occurrence in the past. Good habits are
unnecessary if you can’t engage in the behavior you wish to control, as
raiding the refrigerator is not tempting if there is no refrigerator to be
found. But for those of us who can’t or won’t chuck the icebox, resisting
temptation is but a temporary exercise or a matter of extinction before a
habit is established. But what is extinguished? Certainly the knowledge
that the icebox contains food is not forgotten, nor is the ability to walk to
the icebox to grab a treat. Rather, it is the ‘temptation’ to go to the ice box
that is missing. Habit eliminates affective ‘primes’ for behavior through
their redundancy, as in blocking, or through the fact that a prime loses
its discriminative properties when it is not followed, or is extinguished.
Habits are ubiquitous in life, and metaphorically, they clear the static
from a picture rather than change the picture itself. So we have habitual
routes to get to work, habitual chairs to sit on, and habitual foods to eat,
even though equally effective and attractive options are available. As
such, they indirectly increase motivation without increasing the direct
incentive to behave.
As we shall see however, incentive motivation is more than learning
what is important and learning what is not. It depends as well on a
complementary point of view that if informed by incorrect theories of
human nature or human incentives, can make all the best laid plans for
individual incentive go to naught.
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Chapter 9
The Meanings of Life
Turning on a Dime
We can learn to read, but not to write books, learn to read music, but not
to compose music, learn to obey, but not to lead people. Whether it be
cleaning house, cooking well, learning a trade or skill, and all of the
prosaic and commonplace acts of life, we do just enough, and more often
not enough. In other words, we do not obsess unless we find ourselves
in a life of excess, or addictions like gambling, food, drink, or drugs that
compel us because they are stimulating and little more. Life is too often
bereft of passion, but as we will note, this is easily remedied with a bit of
wisdom, and shows that even the most sluggish of us can turn their
behavior on a dime.
Consider the simple act of working for a dime. The work could be long
or short, variable or fixed, and the discrepancy from moment to moment
would be high if the work involved pulling a slot machine lever, and low
if it involved copying phone book numbers. Needless to say, there is not
much you would do for a dime, and nothing to look forward to if you
earn it, unless a simple dime can be a lever that moves worlds. If the
dime increases your likelihood of earning two dimes on a later time,
perhaps gifted to you by someone, perhaps the result of your next
performance, and from there the likelihood of a cascade of dimes
increases slightly, perhaps off in the future, but perceptible nonetheless.
Your awareness of the perceptible changes that can cascade into the
future because of your behavior, some in the near term, some far away
will increase the incentive salience or affective tone of each behavior you
make, one thin dime at a time. Your behavior is ‘reinforced’ through an
awareness of the conceptual changes in your future income, and this
network of salient positive change and compounding affective tone or
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feeling we will call a ‘salience network’, or in folk psychology ‘hopes and

dreams’. But how are salience networks practically realized?

Salience Networks
“Hold the line! Stay with me! If you find yourself alone, riding in the green
fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium
[Heaven], and you’re already dead! Brothers, what we do in life… echoes in
eternity.” –Roman General Maximus motivating the cavalry in the movie
‘Gladiator’
Salient events, whether they are marked by extrinsic markers (a trophy)
or intrinsic markers (making progress in a task) have extensible effects, or
have novel positive connotations that are ever branching and are
continuously renewed upon reflection. These events also have
dependencies, or other classes of events that need to be accomplished or
secured for them to happen. These dependencies have salience or
importance that is cumulative that is signaled by cumulative positive
affect, and even a few echoes of behavior can have long lasting meaning,
and feeling. We are aware of these changes as we accumulate the slim
markers of progress, like an athlete making a base hit in a game or a
musician affixing a note on a score recalculates the future that increase
the likelihood, ever so slightly, of making the majors or having a major
hit on Broadway. So how can we take such an abstract concept and
demonstrate how salient networks can generate obsession, grandiosity,
and a bit of madness? Perhaps we can recount a good day in the life of
the most grandiose madman of all.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s Big Day

“Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.” ~
Napoleon Bonaparte
It is the morning of December 2, 1805. And Napoleon Bonaparte roused
himself from a brief slumber. After a good breakfast under a warm tent
attended ready guard, followed by a dictated letter to his beloved wife
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in Paris. He consults his staff in his command tent, issues orders to his
scattered commands and their commanding general, reviews the troops,
checks the weather (cold and foggy with a chance of rain), mounts his
horse, and from vantage on a hill top and from the dispatches of his
scouts, recognizes an enemy on the move. In this case it was the
combined armies of the Austrian and Russian empires, who lured into a
place of battle of his own choosing, were summarily destroyed near the
little town of Austerlitz in modern day Austria.

Self-Actualizing at Austerlitz

A grand day for many but not for most involved, and certainly the best
day for one in particular, Napoleon Bonaparte, now master of Europe.
One may say that the culmination of his victory was a moment of self-
actualization, of Napoleon being all he could be. However, to be driven
to obsession to succeed, to use every waking hour, including those stolen
for sleep, to scheme and plan requires unswerving focus and attention.
Napoleon was not so much guided by a will to power, narcissistic
personality, need for self-actualization, or even insecurity about his
height as much as the intoxicating and addicting allure of the prospect
of an unfolding and highly impactful skein of incentive. The affective
aspects of incentive, in other words, can go off the scales, and be
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indistinguishable from addiction. Its results however are more than

simply conquest, but a vaulting excellence in military tactics and
strategy, as well as governance, diplomacy, and economic and social
reform. In other words, even simple incentives can branch out into
countless possibilities, and feed upon themselves in an infinite chain. But
is this indeed something we can replicate, and not only catch lightening
in a bottle, but generate it as an empowering source for all?

Shaping Shakespeare
We often regard the geniuses of the past as miracles of heredity, and
products of their genes and less of their times. They are also rarities, and
entire epochs are often bylines for their existence, as what would the
Renaissance be without Michelangelo, Raphael, of DaVinci? Still, if we
regard the highpoints of human culture and accomplishment, they are
often confined to limited acreages and scant generations, as Periclean
Greece, Da Vinci’s Italy, and Shakespeare’s England did not encompass
nations as much as city states, each with populations indifferently
educated, superstitious, and poor. By any modern metric, all were failed
states, except for one lack of failure that was a redeeming attribute that
makes and redeems genius, incentive. Cultures can be vibrant, even in
their agonies, and the incentive to produce often has a capstone in the
incentive to create, and vault a society’s accomplishments and values for
all to see and hear.
As a mind experiment, this idea can be put to the test, though history
and not experiment validates it best. Consider this future, perhaps all too
real if genius replace dinosaurs as an object of replication. Due to the
miracle of cloning, a teacher has in her class the likes of Shakespeare,
Michelangelo, and Mozart. How does one shape the behavior of such a
charge to return them to the form of genius? A standard education has a
way, of sorts. Just let them sample their craft, and from the intrinsic
pleasure of writing, sculpting, and composing, ambition will be
sustained and talent will rise to the top, add a little extrinsic motivation,
judiciously applied by a teacher and an attentive parent, and voila, you
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will unlock genius and set it on its way. Except nothing will happen, and
the three will more likely be plumbers helpers than paint a fresco for the
ceiling of a cathedral, compose a motet for it, or set a drama in it. In other
words, trifling motivation results in trifling accomplishment, no better
perhaps than no accomplishment at all.
If you want a bird of paradise to sing, you must recreate its own unique
paradise, as its motivation is not so much psychological as ecological.
And what was the psychological ecology of our trio of geniuses? It’s easy
to reimagine, for it is the stuff of history. Take Shakespeare and give him
an education in Latin, a dull and indifferent curricula, but a chance to act
in school plays, and later set up his own playhouse in town where
audiences clamored to be entertained, and where he could get a cut of
the proceeds, and write his own plays that were shaped to appeal to
audiences both crass and refined, poor and aristocratic. Similarly,
Michelangelo was apprenticed to an accomplished sculptor, and
received the patronage from the Medici family governing Florence, as
well as various nobility and the Pope. Mozart in turn was educated and
encouraged by his musician father, and from childhood was quick to
have his music demanded by aristocrats, clergy, kings, and common folk
alike. For any of these artists to command similar opportunities and
patronage, their talent would have to be incubated by similar salience
networks that strongly favored talent from genesis to maturity.
The salience networks that cultivated our three geniuses were generous
and widely shared in their perquisites, as dozens of other playwrights
competed for the audience’s ear during Shakespeare’s time, and the
Renaissance patronized many other artists besides Michelangelo, and
needless to say, even Mozart had to compete against a coterie of
musicians who each composed for the ear of aristocratic patrons and a
discerning and demanding audience.
Highly motivated individuals virtualize not individual but multiple
sources of positive discrepancy that are scalable in present and future
importance. Discrepancy may be signaled by variances in the novelty of
creation, or by variances signaled by an extrinsic reward. The timeliness,
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scale, and salience of variances are critical, as an apathetic and

inaccessible audience, from the familial to the civic, crushes incentive,
and makes accomplishment paltry and insignificant.
But can such incentive networks become reproduceable in practice? The
answer is yes, very commonly, and with ease. Consider the rather
nonsense behavior of hitting balls with sticks, catching and throwing
balls, and running around diamond shaped paths on a field to get home
just in time. That’s baseball for you, and the various behaviors that make
baseball can be assembled into the game we know and love, but the
passion for baseball for school children is reinforced by the attention and
approval of class and teammates, family members, an audience in the
stands, and your standing in the community and with talent scouts who
may eye you for scholarships in the Ivy league, or better, the big leagues.
The positive results of baseball are an extensible prospect, from the game
itself to the gamifying changes in the regard of family, friends, the
prospects for the future.
Salience networks are enabled when incentives can be easily or freely
created and arranged, and are the hallmark of free societies where
initiative is placed for the most part in individual hands. However,
salience networks are critically dependent upon essential interpretations
of what human nature is like, and if this appraisal is off by just a little,
then the motivation for individuals and even entire societies can come
crashing down.

Broken Networks
Human nature and the expression of human nature is dependent upon
incentive. This point is unquestioned; however the issue is how sensitive
individual initiative is to incentive, or even whether incentives are
necessary for accomplishment and satisfaction or happiness. From the
Marxist, socialist and even many prevailing psychological perspectives,
incentives are found in the behavior itself such as inner drives or needs
or through non-individualized ends such as the collective good, and
outside or extrinsic rewards are of marginal value, and may even harm
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‘intrinsic’ motivation. This view holds that motivation is only marginally

controlled by incentives, and motivation would remain the same and
even flower without them. This conforms to the common view in social
policy and economics that allocating goods provides incentive to use
those goods to achieve, and just having the financial means stimulates
the means to an end. Thus income inequality and social injustice is
remedied by redistributing wealth, therefore making all parties satisfied,
equal, and incented to contribute equally within a just society.
This belief in liberal or progressive politics that embrace such an inferred
aspect of human incentive has no explanatory backing, but it does have
a common-sense ring to it, and to those masses of people who need more
to not just get by, but to get going. Hence top-down mandates, supported
by an enthusiastic populace or an equally enthused autocratic elite, make
decisions that are global mandates to fit society to the Procrustean bed
of highly simplified metaphors of motivation. As socialism, this can
affect different institutions in society such as schools and health care, or
as totalitarianism effect everyone.
This brings us to the question of what good does a ‘good’ do. A good,
whether it is a roof over one’s head, a reliable source of food, or just a
blank check, provides opportunity, as one would expect that goods
present one with the opportunity to pursue any goal, learn any skill, and
become the idyl of their dreams. But just opening a path to a goal does
not necessarily incent one to take it. Indeed, a hard fact of existence is
that provisioning goods does not provision incentive, but rather that incentive
provisions goods. Incentives are not bestowed as much as they are
arranged, and are not so much physical as virtual.
Indeed, would giving a luxurious bounty to a Michelangelo,
Shakespeare, or Mozart before they accomplished anything have
encouraged them to succeed, while impoverishing the nobility, elites,
and even middle classes that would have encouraged them? As a more
personal example, would distributing the goods of the entrepreneur who
hires you for his business incent you and your coworkers to be more
productive employees, or perhaps destroy the incentive networks that
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underscores his entrepreneurial spirit and his employees motivation to

succeed?
We can, in a perfect world, have redress for every wrong, and every
person may get their share or be docked a share, or in the musical chairs
of redistribution, whether in preference (affirmative action) or goods
(reparations) and have not a chair or share to stand on. This does not
make for salience networks, but shatters them, as by being continually
made all equal, we have no incentive to be better, or unequal.

The Soul of a Conservative

It may be stated that liberals don’t know how motivation works, but
think they know why, and that conservatives don’t know why
motivation works, but think they know how. Neither perspective is
perfect, but the former fails in the main, but the latter fails only in the
margins. Whereas the former is satisfied in its truth, the latter continually
adjusts it, as motivation to a conservative is like quicksilver, and seems
never where you want it to be.
A true explanation of incentive, derived from how our minds, or our
brains actually work, is foundational to pin down the shadow play of
motivation and make it work for us, while dissolving the mythologies
that have shackled and destroyed the human spirit. If the end purpose
of life and intelligent life is not in end results but in the process that gets
us to end results, then the human quest for meaning, or the uncertain
positive implications of cognition, is what we hope for, and where with
explanation, our happiness and destiny will be.
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Chapter 10
Social Science Disciplined
Shadows in a Cave
In the Greek philosopher Plato’s allegory of the cave, the ever-renewing
conflict between the acceptance of appearances and the sometimes-
brutal truth of reality is made plain in an immortal illusion that is an
allusion to the scientific endeavor.
‘We are invited to imagine a group of people sitting in an underground cave,
facing the walls. They are chained up and they cannot move their heads. Behind
them, a fire is forever burning, and its flames cast shadows onto the cave walls.
Between the fire and the cave walls, there is a road, and people walk along this
road, carrying various objects: models of animals made of stone and wood,
human statuettes, and other things. The people who walk along the road, and
the objects they carry, cast shadows on the cave wall. he people who are chained
in the cave and facing the wall can only see the shadows of the people (and the
objects they carry): never the actual people and objects walking past behind
them. To the people chained up in the cave, these shadows appear to be reality,
because they don’t know any better. Reality, to these people chained in the cave,
is only ever a copy of a copy: the shadows of the original forms which themselves
remain beyond our view. But someone comes and unchains the people in the
cave. Now they’re free. Let’s say that one of them is set free and encouraged to
look towards the fire behind him and his fellow cave-dwellers. He can now see
that the things he took for reality until now were merely shadows on the wall.
But this knowledge isn’t, at first, a good thing. The revelation is almost
overwhelming. The light of the fire hurts his eyes, and when he is dragged up
the slope that leads out of the cave, and he sees the sun outside, and is
overwhelmed by its light.
In time, however, he comes to accept that the sun is the true source of light in
the world, the cause of the seasons and the annual cycle of things. And he would
come to feel sorry for those who remain behind in the cave and are content to
believe that the shadows on the cave wall are reality. Indeed, the people who
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remain behind in the cave believe he wasted his time in going outside and simply
ruined his eyes for nothing. But the man who has been outside knows there is no
going back to his old beliefs: his perception of the world has changed forever…’135
Scientific inquiry to Plato was simply walking outside and seeing the
light. In other words, science starts and ends with an adequate
perspective of reality, which in myth was simply walking under the sun.
With reality, you can use its elements to factor predictions which can
affirm or dis-confirm that what you are seeing is true. A proper purview
of reality, whether it be in the stuff of the universe or the stuff which
makes for life, allows us to sees its many permutations, which in practical
guise allow us to construct spaceships and vaccines, and from there
make testable predictions about the world.
Folk science deals with appearances, or the shadows common folk see
projected on the cave walls, and the working hypotheses they make from
them that may prove generally accurate, but all too often, specifically
wrong. In contrast, science deals with reality, and in its history the
successive approximations to reality that with advancing
instrumentalities allow scientists to see, measure, and control our
worlds.
If you cannot see reality, you can infer your own, a game that can be
played by commoners, elites, and academics alike. Still, without a basis
in reality all sciences are still at root ‘folk’ sciences, and rely on the
correlations of shadows. This was certainly the case in medieval times,
when all inquiry followed folk ideals, as the biological and physical
sciences were derived from nature’s shadows. Presently, the discovery
of the realities behind nature’s veil has convinced even common folk to
abandon the inferred realities of the past, as we know the realities that
drive the common facts of life, from the flight of rockets to the source of
the common cold. However, for incentive motivation, there is no reality,
and folk ideologies and psychologies remain prevalent, with the
influence of academic psychology minimal to non-existent. So has
psychology and its offshoots in the social sciences collapsed? Certainly
its illusion of influence has. Appearances can take many guises, but
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reality stands alone, as imposing and real as life and death. Yet humans
continue to use the general correlations of existence as the specifics
remain muddled in apprehension and uncertain in prospect. Consider as
an analogy of a cook without any metrics of heat, measure, or proportion.
An omelet requiring some eggs for a few minutes at a medium heat will
get you an omelet of sorts, but not a perfect one. Similarly, the
redistribution of the assets of a person or class of people is justified by
different measures of motivation and its predicted course, to have one
failing to strive with his wealth gone, or remain inspired as a pauper to
create for the common good to conform to the totalitarian ideal.
We know the general facts of motivation, it is the specifics that are
lacking, but not for a want of vision, and like Galileo’s lament to his
friend Kepler four hundred years ago bemoaning the reluctance of his
peers to look through his telescope, to know the specifics of reality grants
you the ability to move worlds and glimpse the hand of God.
If one would only look.
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Postscript
When worlds collide: when
behaviorism and humanism become
one
Sometimes to get an idea right you just have to extend it a little, like a
rubber band. Small improvements can make for grand revolutions, and
by changing the shape of how something can turn, can turn minds as
well. That was Copernicus’ problem and for his reputation, a happy fate,
though he did not live to see how his idea of a heliocentric or sun
centered solar system needed to be a bit elastic in concept, both
figuratively and literally. As the reader may recall from an earlier
chapter, the Copernican model of the solar system had the planets circle
the sun in perfect circles, an imperfect fit one may add because the
resulting mechanics just didn’t work. So Copernicus gave the planets
Ptolemaic epicycles that had them do loop the loops in their courses to
make his celestial clockwork achieve predictive accuracy, like a runner
doubling back every now and then to arrive at a perfect four-minute
mile, give or take a second.
Using more accurate data of the observed courses of the planets, the
astronomer Johannes Kepler saw a better fit, and extended the
Copernican perfect circles to perfect ellipses. The data fit the model
perfectly, and were confirmed not only practically but in reality by
Galileo and his telescope.
Now consider another bright idea that needed a bit of extension to make
sense, and to fit the data better. A common-sense notion that seemed
confirmed in experiment and experience was that achieving a goal ‘fixed’
behavior to that goal, or reinforced it. This concept of reinforcement was
developed by Edward Thorndike in the 1920’s on experiments with cats,
and with B.F. Skinner with trials using pigeons and rats.
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Reinforcement was discrete, molecular, and one did not have to look
beyond the fact of reinforcement and its correlation with the change in
rate, intensity, and shape of behavior. Though in this case feelings or
affective states were left out of the equation because the neural responses
that embodied them could not at the time be mapped to informative
contingencies. The Skinnerian model has proven to be incorrect, as
modern bio-behavioral models of reinforcement add a cognitive or
relational element to reinforcement, as reinforcement is now viewed as a
change in an environment-behavior relationship rather than a response
alone. Reinforcement occurs virtually and continually, just as an
individual marks his progress on a road trip from continual and varying
feedback while he drives, and not by extrinsic road markers alone. These
environment-behavior relationships are also extensible, and represent an
awareness of branching novel alternatives that change from moment to
moment. Additionally, branching possibilities shape behavior, as one
may change present behavior in anticipation of the likelihood of all
present and future positive regard, like Shakespeare writing his plays
with the favor of kings and queens, peasants and the well off, and
intelligentsia and commoners all served in their just portion. Finally,
positive affect scales with the awareness of novel and positive extensible
effects, and can account for intrinsic motivation and need states.
For example, the schema for behavior for a ‘methodological’ behaviorist
is simple, and behavior chains are reinforced by discrete events or
reinforcers. Thus a salesperson’s behavior is reinforced by a sales
commission. In contrast, using a discrepancy or bio-behavioral theory of
reward, this ‘radical’ behaviorist perspective details the continually
changing cognitive aspects of the salesperson’s behavior that map to
changing present and future expectancies. Thus, as a salesperson
progresses to a successful sale, the present and future discriminative
aspects of his or her behavior change too. This represents all of the
positive novel events following the sale, from the receipt of a cash bonus
and the congratulations of a sales manager to an awareness of bills to be
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paid for food and rent to further novel positive effects as a promotion, a
better relationship with a loved one, and an enduring reputation and
secure retirement. Moreover, the importance or salience of these
cumulative positive effects induces proportional positive affect as
reflected by the greater activity of mid-brain dopamine systems that
signal attention and arousal. Thus a salesperson will with greater
enthusiasm and focus attend to his or her work when the positive
extensible effects are high.
Bio-behavioral models of reinforcement are cognitive models, and adopt
molar or ‘holistic’ schemas that emerge from a host of molecular ‘act-
outcome’ event probabilities, with positive affect (how one feels)
emerging and dependent upon extensible effects (the changing present
and future one perceives). This at first glance may not seem too different
from ‘humanistic’ perspectives on motivation, which also look to molar
or holistic models as explanations for motivation, though they are not
informed by neurophysiology, and lack explanatory depth.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ is most
characteristic of this viewpoint, as behavioral tendencies or ‘needs’ are
detachable rather than extensible conceptual objects. Conceptualized as a
pyramid, with essential behavior at the bottom and less essential
behavior at the top, Maslow’s needs were like stages in a rocket, with
lower-level needs detaching from attention to a newer purview
dominated by a higher need until that is met and is detached in turn.
Thus “At once other (and “higher”) needs emerge and these, rather than
physiological hungers, dominate the attention of the individual. And when these
in turn are satisfied, again new (and still “higher”) needs emerge and so on. This
is what we mean by saying that the basic human needs are organized into a
hierarchy of relative prepotency.”136
Whereas in Maslow’s hierarchy ‘needs’ or expectancies fade in
awareness as they are met, a bio-behavioral perspective argues that we
are always aware of them, and whether you are mastering a day at the
office or a day mastering the world, you are equally aware of your need
for a roof over your head and your next meal as well as a prospective
 216

audience or your earned place in heaven, and affect is an emergent

property of all of them in concert.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow attached reinforcing properties to behavioral events or

metaphorical physiological and psychology deprivation or need states,
but it is the abstract entailments of behavior that reinforce, and these are
the common motivational denominators of all behavior. So where does
this leave us with behavioristic and humanistic perspectives? Mainly the
importance for positive affect of the extensible cognitive implications of
existence or ‘meaning’. Life to be truly lived must be truly felt, and
meaning is not much discovered as constructed, and is a virtual good
that can be available to all. Controlling behavior means to control not just
its form but its color, and to advance the dimensions that make life not
just a matter of existence, but well lived. But is society hospitable for such
a future, and can it be inclined to create it?
 217

Virtuous Worlds
In 1948 the psychologist B.F. Skinner published his Utopian novel
‘Walden Two’, his version of a perfect world. His ideal community was
one in which incentives were apportioned well to provide a just and
equitable society. His society was a perfect anthill, with content and
mindless workers possessing every virtue except for passion. Here was
a contented society without cathedrals, symphonies, literature, and
drama, a society that was alive but not lively. It was, in other words,
boring. Given the fact that survival is tough enough for all of us in the
first place, this Skinnerian society was just enough to get by, and it
worked. It is also the de facto model of modern society, and with
incentive freely and rationally apportioned it is the epitome of a well-
designed capitalist or free enterprise model that makes for survival, but
also, and for most people, an enduring dullness.
But passion can be found, of sorts. Like goldfish peering from a bowl at
an outside world they can never know, we look through portals such as
TV, sporting events, video games, and social media, and identify with
our heroes rather than strive to become like them. But this does not have
to be. Humans want their purposeful addictions, with mutual empathy
and sympathy engineered into everything we do. But we must
understand ourselves first, and that entails understanding the biological
source of our motivations. Before we could control our world and ensure
our lives, our physical and biological world had to be explained.
Similarly, when incentive is explained, we can ensure our happy and
fulfilled future, a prospect that as with all good things, pops out of the
simple equations of existence.
 218

Annotated Bibliography
i
Wilson, E. O. (1998) Consilience: The unity of knowledge. New York: Knopf.
ii
Weiner, N. (1961) Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the
Animal and the Machine. MIT Press
iii
Giegerenzer, G. (2008) “Why Heuristics Work.” Perspectives in
Psychological Science, 3(1), 20-29
iv
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
v
Kuhn, Thomas (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ 2nd Ed.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press
vi
“Kuhn denied that the choice of one paradigm in favor of another can be
attributed to a selection process favoring paradigms that get closer to the ‘truth’.
But he goes beyond Popper and insists that they are not even likely to be selected
according to any kind of progressive principle whatsoever. To defend himself
against the charge of relativism (or what I would call obscurantism), Kuhn did
suggest in the second edition of ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ a series
of criteria by which one could distinguish ‘an earlier from a more recent theory
time after time (pp. 205-206). These include accuracy of prediction, more
esoteric (less everyday) subject matter, and number of problems solved. But these
criteria apply to theories within paradigms, not to the paradigms themselves.
When paradigms replace each other, different puzzles are solved. Hence one can
never say where a paradigm, as distinguished from a theory, fits in he overall
history of science. Once can never say whether science has really ‘progressed’ or
not.” Harris, Marvin (1979) Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science
of Culture. Random House, New York (pp.20-21)
vii
Not just any kind of fraud either, according to a new book titled "The Crime
of Claudius Ptolemy." The book's author is Robert R. Newton of the Applied
Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, who says flatly: "Ptolemy is
not the greatest astronomer of antiquity, but he is something still more unusual:
He is the most successful fraud in the history of science."
“If Newton is right, few of Ptolemy's observations were his own and few that
were his own he either made up or made incorrectly. To hear Newton tell it,
 219

Ptolemy operated on a timeworn technique used by countless intellectual cheats.

He worked backward to prove the results he wanted to get…..”
"He wanted to be a great astronomer but he wasn't good enough to be one so he
made up his data," Newton said of Ptolemy. "He's fooled people for almost 1,800
years."
“Why did Ptolemy's fraud last for 1,800 years? Newton says it was because
there were no competent astronomers around to point out the fraud in the 100
years after Ptolemy lived. Why not later, then?”
"The next time there were competent astronomers were the Arabs of the 9th
century," Newton says. "I think it didn't occur to them to check it."
https://www.jhuapl.edu/Content/techdigest/pdf/APL-V16-N02/APL-16-
02-Newton.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/11/15/was-
ptolemy-an-intellectual-cheat/c0451056-7ed9-407b-b359-5a6580cf47d0/
8
https://www.famous-trials.com/galileotrial/1029-galileolettertokepler
9
But later in 1632, Galileo was summoned before the Roman Inquisition
to account for how he had disobeyed the church’s mandate that he not
defend Copernican ideas. The Inquisition was an institution that was
designed to safeguard the teachings of the Catholic Church and to
punish heretics. It became more powerful in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, in part to stand against the Protestant
Reformation. As the Catholic Church felt more embattled, it became
more resistant to any kind of argument that seemed to disagree with
church doctrine. In 1633, the church forced Galileo to reject what he had
written and instead declare that the earth did not move, and therefore
did not revolve around the sun. His Dialogue was placed on the Catholic
Church’s Index of Prohibited Books.
Despite this decision, Galileo was able to continue teaching, and his
works were published throughout Europe. As time went on, the Catholic
Church did little outside of Italy and Spain to discourage Copernican
ideas; and by the end of the century, Jesuit astronomers were basing their
calculations on the Copernican model.
 220

Nonetheless, removing Galileo’s work from the Index took much longer.
In 1820, Canon Settele, professor of astronomy in Rome, wrote a book in
which he took Copernican ideas as foundational. Church authorities
refused to let him publish his work unless he argued that the Copernican
model was just a theory and not fact. Settele appealed to Pope Pius VII,
who then looked to the Congregation of the Holy Office to decide. When
that institution agreed that the Copernican system was foundational, on
September 11, 1822, the Holy Inquisition declared that the “printing and
publication of works treating of the motion of the earth and the stability
of the sun, in accordance with the general opinion of modern
astronomers, is permitted at Rome.”
https://blog.gale.com/catholic-church-reverses-ban-on-galileos-
writings/#:~:text=Two%20hundred%20years%20ago%20this,its%20Inde
x%20of%20Prohibited%20Books.
10
Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, data wed to theory.
https://chandra.harvard.edu/edu/formal/icecore/The_Astronomers_Tyc
ho_Brahe_and_Johannes_Kepler.pdf
11
“In two weeks during the 1596 season a Londoner could have seen eleven
performances of ten different plays at one playhouse, and on no day would he
have had to see a repeat performance of the day before…Playwriting had quickly
become a growth industry and a profession. Of the twelve hundred plays offered
in London theaters in the half century after 1590, some nine hundred were the
work of about fifty professional playwrights.”
Boorstin, D. (1992) The Creators. New York: Random House
12
https://dutchreview.com/culture/history/bkr-netherlands-artists/
13
file:///C:/Users/Art/Downloads/journal.pone.0263410.pdf
14
https://idthefuture.com/622/
https://johndfenton.com/Documents/Tipler03-PeerReview.pdf
15
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-
6736(15)60696-1/fulltext
16
Rawat S, Meena S. Publish or perish: Where are we heading? (2014)
Journal of Research Medical Science.19(2):87-92.
17
https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/27725/elife-27725-v1.pdf
 221

18
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-
social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/
19
The study explored publishing patterns throughout the 2010s in more
than 1,500 academic departments at 280 American research universities
across twelve social sciences disciplines. Book publications decreased
34% and 54% over the study period, while journal article publications
increased by as much as 64%
“Long-form scholarly publishing provides the place and space to explore a topic
in detail, analyzing subjects with greater contextualization than shorter-
form journal articles typically allow.”
There are several potential ramifications of the decrease in book
publications for social sciences as a whole and individual social science
disciplines. The U.S. market for scholarly monographs has been
shrinking for several years. Book publishers used to see successful print
runs and sales of 2,000 copies of new books. Now, annual sales of 200
copies of a new book is considered successful by some publishers [32].
Some book publishers have responded to this decline in revenues by
increasing book prices as much as three-or four-fold [32]. The declines in
book publications may provide some relief for acquisition librarians
stretching their already depleted fund
Journal articles are the de facto “currency” of research in many physical,
mathematical, biological, biomedical, and engineering fields
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/half-academic-studies-
are-never-read-more-three-people-180950222/
https://phys.org/news/2022-02-volume-social-sciences-journal-
articles.html
https://www.vox.com/2015/11/30/9820192/universities-uncited-
research
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/half-academic-
studies-are-never-read-more-three-people-180950222/
Costs of publish or perish comes at the expense of teaching, and is
expensive in itself.
 222

https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2018/07/12/33000-
academic-journal-articles-that-almost-no-one-reads/?sh=236fd87b5756
Savage, William E. et al, (2022) More journal articles and fewer books:
Publication practices in the social sciences in the 2010's, PLOS ONE.
In the 1930s and 1940s, 20 per cent of articles in the prestigious The
American Political Science Review focused on policy recommendations.
At the last count, the share was down to a meagre 0.3 per cent.
If a paper is cited, this does not imply it has actually been read.
According to one estimate, only 20 per cent of papers cited have actually
been read. We estimate that an average paper in a peer-reviewed journal
is read completely by no more than 10 people. No wonder. Most journals
are difficult to access and prohibitively expensive for anyone outside of
academia. Also constraints as how to work scientifically within a
discipline.
Different levels of analysis are not interlocking, but walled off.
20
Video how to calculate the path of a cannonball
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krzC92hZ8pA
21
Harris, Marvin (1979) Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of
Culture. Random House, New York
22
Also statistics mis-used or incorrectly interpreted or applied, with 18%
of journal articles by one study being inaccurate.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-011-0089-5
Bakker, M., Wicherts, J.M. (2011) The (mis)reporting of statistical results
in psychology journals. Behav Res 43, 666–678
23
Sakaluk, J. K., Williams, A. J., Kilshaw, R. E., & Rhyner, K. T. (2019).
Evaluating the evidential value of empirically supported psychological
treatments (ESTs): A meta-scientific review. Journal of Abnormal
Psychology, 128(6), 500–509
24
https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/27725/elife-27725-v1.pdf
readability in science
25
Cullinan, V., & Vitale, A. (2009). The contribution of Relational Frame
Theory to the development of interventions for impairments of language
 223

and cognition. The Journal of Speech and Language Pathology – Applied

Behavior Analysis, 4, 132-145
26
https://contextualscience.org/theoretical_roots
27
https://contextualscience.org/about_act
28
Burgos, J. (2003) Laudable goals, interesting experiments, unintelligible
theorizing, a critical review of relational frame theory Behavior and
Philosophy, 31, 19-45.
29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem
30
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem
31
The plasticity of well-being: A training-based framework for the
cultivation of human flourishing Cortland J. Dahla,1 , Christine D.
Wilson-Mendenhalla , and Richard J. Davidsona,b,c,d,1 Edited by
Michael I. Posner, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, and approved
October 29, 2020 (received for review August 19, 2020
32
Luborsky, L; Singer, B; Luborsky, L (1975), "Is it true that 'everyone has
won and all must have prizes?'", Archives of General Psychiatry, 32 (8): 995–
1008
33
Ulrich M, Keller J, Grön G. (2016) Neural signatures of experimentally
induced flow experiences identified in a typical fMRI block design with
BOLD imaging. Social Cognition and Affective Neuroscience.
Mar;11(3):496-507
34
Soares, S, Atallah, B.V.,and Patton, J.J (2016) Midbrain dopamine
neurons control judgment of time, SCIENCE Vol 354, Issue 631
pp. 1273-1277
35
Abuhamdeh S. (2020) Investigating the "Flow" Experience: Key
Conceptual and Operational Issues. Frontiers in Psychology, Feb
13;11:158.
36
Fernandez-Duque D, Evans J, Christian C, Hodges SD. (2015)
Superfluous neuroscience information makes explanations of
psychological phenomena more appealing. Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience.May;27(5):926-44.
37
Barber, T. E. (1969) Hypnosis, A Scientific Approach, Van Nostrand,
New York
 224

38
Holmes, D. S. (1984) Meditation and somatic arousal reduction. A
review of the experimental evidence. American Psychologist, 39(1), 1-10
39
Marr, A. J. (2006) Relaxation and Muscular Tension: A Bio-
behavioristic Explanation, International Journal of Stress Management,
13(2), 131-153
40
Benson, H., & Friedman, R. (1985). A rebuttal to the conclusions of
David S. Holmes's article: "Meditation and somatic arousal
reduction." American Psychologist, 40(6), 725–728.
41
Shapiro, D. H. (1985). Clinical use of meditation as a self-regulation
strategy: Comments on Holmes's conclusions and implications. American
Psychologist, 40(6), 719–722
42
Suler, J. R. (1985). Meditation and somatic arousal: A comment on
Holmes's review. American Psychologist, 40(6), 717.
43
West, M. A. (1985). Meditation and somatic arousal
reduction. American Psychologist, 40(6), 717–719
44
Tang YY, Leve LD. (2016) A translational neuroscience perspective on
mindfulness meditation as a prevention strategy. Translational
Behavioral Medicine. Mar;6(1):63-72.
45
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-the-most-
important-idea-in-behavioral-decision-making-is-a-fallacy/
46
https://www.verywellmind.com/ego-depletion-
4175496#:~:text=You%20eat%20a%20healthy%20breakfast,during%20yo
ur%20mid%2Dafternoon%20break.&text=Because%20you%20have%20
expended%20so,ego%20depletion%20by%20dinner%20time.
47
Baumeister, Roy F. (2002). "Ego Depletion and Self-Control Failure: An
Energy Model of the Self's Executive Function". Self and Identity. 1 (2):
129–136.
48
The related idea and fad of ‘dopamine fasting’
49
Conforming to this view, Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology
at the University of Toronto and the principal investigator at the Toronto
Laboratory for Social Neuroscience, believes willpower is not a finite
resource but instead acts like an emotion. Just as we don’t “run out” of
joy or anger, willpower ebbs and flows based on what’s happening to us
 225

and how we feel. “Viewing willpower through this lens has profound
implications. For one, if mental energy is more like an emotion than fuel in a
tank, we can manage and use it as such and learn to ride out bad feelings.
Similarly, when we need to perform a difficult task, it’s more productive and
healthful to believe a lack of motivation is temporary than to tell ourselves we’re
spent and need a break (and ice cream).”
50

https://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/03
/ego_depletion_an_influential_theory_in_psychology_may_have_just_
been_debunked.html
51
The well-known and accepted ‘over-justification’ effect presumes that
extrinsic rewards can diminish intrinsic motivation, a notion that is
absurd theoretically and has been demonstrated as false empirically.
Since there are no separate intrinsic and extrinsic motivational processes,
positive expectancies from different internal (variability of work
schedule) and extrinsic (positive expectancies from money or praise)
generally complement each other, as is well demonstrated from personal
experience where to be well rewarded for doing the things you love is
generally regarded as the epitome of motivation and not a motivational
conflict. Still, as per our discussion of perverse incentives, a monetary
reward may be mis-construed by the receiving individual to incent an
aspect of behavior that was not the intention of the individual who gave
it. The resulting perversity of behavior does not mean the diminution of
the normal rewarding attributes of a behavior, but rather a contrary
behavior that is merely at odds with the ‘intrinsically’ reinforced
performance.
Cameron, Judy and Pierce. W. David (1996) The Debate about Rewards
and Intrinsic Motivation: Protests and Accusations Do Not Alter the
Results Author(s): Judy Cameron and W. David Pierce Source: Review
of Educational Research, Vol. 66, No. 1, pp. 39-51
52
Recently, the literature of intrinsic motivation has added the
neurobiology of dopaminergic systems to the equation. Characteristic of
this research is the Domenico & Ryan article linked below. The article is
 226

very difficult to understand because it conflates different levels of

analysis, from the molecular (dopamine systems) to the molar
(psychological needs), with reliance on obscurely defined brain
networks to imperfectly integrate them. Most significantly, ‘extrinsic
motivation’ is not defined, a critical omission since intrinsic motivation
denotes a contrasting set of neurologic processes than those engaged by
extrinsic motivators. But by not defining extrinsic rewards, this begs
rather than resolves the argument. Indeed, extrinsic motivators are
discriminative stimuli that denote extensible or future projected
expectancies that are elicited by expectancies perceived in the moment
and have cumulative motivational import. For example, the perception
of moment-to-moment novel progress during a game also changes the
future or ‘extrinsic’ implications of that behavior, such as a material
prize, popular regard, etc., which mediate future expectancies in turn.
Finally, the fact that intrinsic and extrinsic motivators have no reality in
present neuro-biological models of incentive motivation and no mention
at all in the history of learning theory from Pavlov onward calls into
question whether separate extrinsic and intrinsic motivational states
actually exist, or are merely artifacts of folk conceptualizations of how
motivation works.
Overall, despite the inclusion of neurologic factors, intrinsic motivation
remains part of a multi-variate theory of incentive motivation that is not
systematically described and is resistant to falsification, while
motivational theory deriving from animal studies has moved in the
opposite direction, towards a uni-variate theory which posits fewer and
more precisely described dependent and interdependent variables.
Above all uni-variate theories are easily testable in terms of the
neurological processes involved and the actual behavior (eating,
drinking, addiction, etc.) those processes entail.
In addition, as quoted from the article below, the fact that intrinsic
motivation is integrated with psychological ‘needs’, is activated by
obscurely defined ‘challenges’ and ‘inconsistencies’, and entails dynamic
switching between equally obscure ‘salience’, ‘central executive’ and
 227

‘default mode networks’ renders the entire argument into merely syntax
(words) with an uncertain or muddled semantics (meaning), or in other
words, psychobabble, with little prospect for clear refutation and test.
“Intrinsic motivation depends on ambient supports for basic psychological
needs, especially those for competence (feeling effective) and autonomy (feeling
volitional).”
“Intrinsically motivated curiosity, exploration and mastery behaviors,
however, pertain to specific types of novel stimuli, namely, those that present
optimal challenges or optimal inconsistencies with one’s extant knowledge and
that accordingly energize tendencies to approach.”
“intrinsically motivated states entail dynamic switching between the salience,
central executive and default mode networks.”
A final observation is that Domenico and Ryan simply ignore the fact a
radical behaviorism does admit affect, and that affect is also elicited and
controlled by how reinforcement contingencies are structured, such as
variable ratio or ‘gambling’ schedules where every move has surprising
results. Indeed, extrinsic incentives such as money also result in the
activation of dopamine systems and are therefore affective, as Knutson
observed in the article linked below. Present models of reinforcement
also use dopaminergic systems as key to incentive, but make no
distinction between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ processes save for the fact
that extrinsic motivators map to future or extrinsic or perceptual events
that are in public view, as compared to the present and private nature of
intrinsic incentives. In this sense, since all behavior is guided by our
conscious and nonconscious perceptions in the moment and cognitive
projections of the future, all motivation is sourced to extrinsic events and
realized by intrinsic processes. Therefore, the concept of a distinctive
intrinsic reward is meaningless, as it is inextricably bound to extrinsic
events. Also, nativistic tendencies, such as a ‘seeking’ response are not
denied in contemporary learning theory. Thus, the dismissive statement
by the authors must be discarded as untrue, as the affective results of
discrepancy or novelty is an intrinsic quality of response contingencies,
and is not separate from them. “...observations of spontaneous exploratory
 228

and play behaviors defied some behaviorist views that intentional behaviors are
invariably controlled by reinforcement contingencies within the environment.”
Domenico S. I. & Ryan Richard M. (2017) The Emerging Neuroscience of
Intrinsic Motivation: A New Frontier in Self-Determination Research.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 11, 145
Knutson, B., & Greer, S. M. (2008). Anticipatory affect: neural correlates
and consequences for choice. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society
of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 363(1511), 3771–3786.
53
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/opinion/sunday/behavioral-
economics.html
54
https://myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcpy.1047
55
Gal, David and Rucker, Derek (2017) The Loss of Loss Aversion: Will
It Loom Larger Than Its Gain? Journal of Consumer Psychology
56
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10810730701615198
57
Iyengar, S. (2011) The Art of Choosing. New York: Twelve
58
Schwartz, B. (2004) The Paradox of Choice, Why More is Less. Harper
Perennial, New York
59
Iyengar, Sheena S.; Lepper, Mark R. (2000) When choice is
demotivating: can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995-1006.
60
Iyengar, S. & Lepper, M. (2000). When choice is demotivating: Can one
desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 76, 995-100
61
Huberman, G., Iyengar, S.., & Jiang, W. (2007) Defined Contribution
Pension plans: determinants of participation and contribution
rates. Journal of Financial Services Research, 31 (1), 1-32
62
Scheibehenne, Benjamin, Rainer Greifeneder, and Peter M. Todd
(2010), “Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A Meta-Analytic Review
of Choice Overload,” Journal of Consumer Research, 37 (3), 409–25.
63
Chernev, A, Bockenholt, U., Goodman, J. (2010) Commentary on
Scheibehenne, Greifeneder,& Todd. Choice Overload: Is There Anything
to it? Journal of Consumer Research (37), 426-428
 229

64
Kral et al. (2022) Absence of structural brain changes from
mindfulness-based stress reduction: Two combined randomized
controlled trials, Science Advances, 8, 20, 1-10
65
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-pop-psychology-5195653
66
https://www.newtraderu.com/2023/05/02/the-cure-to-laziness-this-
could-change-your-life/
67
Leiber, Justin (2006) Instinctive Incest Avoidance: A Paradigm Case for
Evolutionary Psychology Evaporates, The Theory of Social Behavior, (36)4
December 2006 Pages 369-388
68
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
69
Inzlicht, M., Werner, K, Briskin, Roberts, B. (2021) Integrating
models of self-regulation Annual Review of Psychology 72:1, 319-345
70
This book proposes that the idiosyncrasies of behavior can be derived
from first principles, namely an understanding from human
neuroscience as to how incentive motivation works. Without this we are
forced to rely on separate correlations between external observations and
external events, with behavior acting in eccentric patterns like the planets
in the night sky. In his critique of behavioral economics (or the study of
how economic choices are determined by human psychology), the
economist Jason Collins used just this analogy to describe how a lack of
a deep and foundational understanding of how the world works can
make the solar system seem positively deviant.
https://evonomics.com/please-not-another-bias-the-problem-with-
behavioral-economics/
71
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-the-most-important-
idea-in-behavioral-decision-making-is-a-fallacy/
72
Put citation here
73
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/dan-ariely-
honesty-study-retraction
74
Thaler, Richard, and Cass Sunstein (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions
About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Penguin Books.
75
No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias
Maximilian Maier, July 19, 2022 119 (31) 1-2
 230

76
https://eml.berkeley.edu/~sdellavi/wp/NudgeToScale2020-05-09.pdf
77
https://aeon.co/essays/bring-back-science-and-philosophy-as-natural-
philosophy
78
https://positivepsychology.com/humanistic-psychology/
79
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1901/jeab.2004.82-225
80
Tipler, Frank (1994) The Physics of Immortality, Anchor, N.Y.
81
Bostrom, Nick (2014) Superintelligence, Paths, Dangers, Strategies,
Oxford: UK
82
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied
Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, Basic Books, NY
83
Montag, C., & Davis, K. (2018). Affective Neuroscience Theory and
Personality: An Update. Personality Neuroscience, 1, 1-10
84
First, the skeletal muscles contract and the hypothalamus, a small neural
center in the brain, reacts. The hypothalamus, among other organs, influences
the autonomic nervous system, which involves involuntarily activities of bodily
organs. It also mediates activity in the pituitary gland, which releases hormones
into the bloodstream. Under stress, as the muscles tense, breathing becomes
faster and deeper. The heartbeat quickens. Some blood vessels constrict, raising
the blood pressure and almost closing the vessels right under the skin. The throat
muscles and those in the nostril force these passages wide open. The stomach and
intestines temporarily halt digestion. Perspiration increases, and secretion of
mucous and saliva decreases. The pupils of the eye dilate involuntarily. At the
same time the adrenal glands release two hormones, epinephrine and
norepinephrine, which effect circulation, elevating heartbeat and blood pressure.
These hormones signal the spleen to release more red blood corpuscles. They
enable the blood to clot more quickly, and encourage the bone marrow to produce
more white corpuscles. They also increase the amount of fat and sugar in the
blood. While these events are occurring, the pituitary gland secretes two more
hormones, abbreviated TSH and ACTH, TSH and ACTH increase the rate at
which the body produces energy and which reinforce the signals sent to the
adrenal glands through the autonomic nervous system. ACTH also causes the
adrenals to release about 30 other stress related hormones43. -Source:
International Stress Management Association (www.isma-usa.org)
 231

85
Although Panksepp did not derive a theory of incentive motivation
from his own work and extensive neuroscientific knowledge, he did
acknowledge its possibility and promise. “In his book Affective
Neuroscience, Panksepp described how efficient learning may be conceptually
achieved through the generation of subjectively experienced neuro-emotional
states that provide simple internalized codes of biological value that correspond
to major life priorities.” (Wikipedia)
Panksepp was also among the first to conclude that basic motivational
principles or incentives emerge from simple bio-behavioral processes of
ancient origin.
“It may be hard for us to accept that human strivings are ultimately driven by
the welling up of ancient neurochemicals in primitive parts of the brain. This
view does not easily fit into our concept of ourselves as moral and spiritual
beings. Although the details of human hopes are surely beyond the imagination
of other creatures, the evidence now clearly indicates that certain intrinsic
aspirations of all mammalian minds, those of mice as well as men, are driven by
the same ancient neuro-chemistries. These chemistries lead our companion
creatures to set out energetically to investigate and explore their worlds, to seek
available resources and make sense of the contingencies of their environments.
These same systems give us the impulse to become actively engaged with the
world and to extract meaning from our various circumstances.”
Panksepp, Jaak (1999) Affective Neuroscience. New York: Oxford, p.41
86
Adenzato, M., Garbarini, F. (2012). Embodied Cognition. In: Seel,
N.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning. Springer, Boston
87
https://archive.philosophersmag.com/embodied-mind-embodied-
meaning-embodied-thought/
88
Joseph, P.G. & Levkowitz, H.. (2016). Second generation cognitive
science promises true Heideggerian artificial intelligence. Mind and
Matter 14. 167-201
89
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh, the embodied
minds and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books
90
Our philosophical stance in this book coheres with the linguists George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s concept of embodied realism, that incorporate
 232

sensorimotor aspects of experience and recognizes affect as integral to

cognition and not a separate entity apart from reason.
“From a biological perspective, it is eminently plausible that reason has grown
out of the sensory and motor systems and that it still uses those systems or
structures developed from them. This explains why we have the kinds of concepts
we have and why our concepts have the properties they have. It explains why
our spatial-relations concepts should be topological and orientational, and it
explains why our system for structuring and reasoning about events of all kinds
should have the structure of a motor control system.”
“…Philosophically, the embodiment of reason via the sensorimotor system is of
great importance. It is a crucial part of the explanation of why it is possible for
our concepts to fit so well with the way we function in the world. They fit so
well because they have evolved from our sensorimotor systems, which have in
turn evolved to allow us to function in our physical environment. It is the
embodiment of mind that leads us to a philosophy of embodied realism. Our
concepts cannot be a direct reflection of external mind-free reality because our
sensorimotor systems play a crucial role in shaping them. On the other hand, it
is the involvement of the sensorimotor system in the conceptual system that
keeps the conceptual system very much in touch with the world.”
Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark (1990) Philosophy in the Flesh: The
embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books
91
Bolles, R. C. (1972). Reinforcement, expectancy, and
learning. Psychological Review, 79(5), 394–409
92
Kamin, L.J. (1969). Predictability, surprise, attention, and conditioning.
In B. A. Campbell and R. M. Church (Eds.) Punishment and Aversive
Behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts (Pages 279-296).
93
“From the perspective of a unified reinforcement principle, classical and
operant conditioning are not two different ‘kinds’ of learning, but two
procedures that differ with respect to the environmental and behavioral events
that are reliably present when selection occurs”
Donahoe, John W., Palmer, David C. and Burgos, Jose E. (1997) The S-R
issue: Its status in behavior analysis and in Donahoe and Palmer's
 233

Learning and Complex Behavior. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of

Behavior, 67, 193-211.
94
Donahoe, John W., Palmer, David C. and Burgos, Jose E. (1993) A
Selectionist approach to reinforcement. Journal of the Experimental
Analysis of Behavior, (60), 17-40
95
Guerra, L. and Silva, M. 2010 Learning processes and the neural
analysis of conditioning Psychology & Neuroscience, 2010, 3, 2, 195 - 208
96
Donahoe, J. and Palmer, D. (1994) Learning and Complex Behavior.
NY, Allyn and Bacon
97
Dennett, D. (1996) Kinds of Minds, Towards and Understanding of
Consciousness, NY, Basic Books
98
Wolfram Schultz, Wiliam R Stauffer, Armin Lak,The phasic dopamine signal
maturing: from reward via behavioural activation to formal economic utility,
Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Volume 43, 2017, Pages 139-148
99
Berridge KC, Robinson TE. (2016) Liking, wanting, and the incentive-
sensitization theory of addiction. Am Psychol. 2016 Nov;71(8):670-679.
100
Volkow, N. D., Wang, G.L, & Baler, R.D. (2011) Reward, dopamine
and the control of food intake: implications for obesity, Trends in
Cognitive Sciences, 15(1), 37-46
101
McCubbin, J. A., Wilson, J. F., Bruehl, S., Ibarra, P., Carlson, C. R.,
Norton, J. A., & Colclough, G. W. (1996). Relaxation training and opioid
inhibition of blood pressure response to stress. Journal of Consulting and
Clinical Psychology, 64(3), 593-601.
102
Turner, J. W. & Fine, T.H. (1990) Restricted Environmental Stimulation.
Theoretical and Empirical Developments in Flotation REST, Springer
103
Bromberg-Martin, E. S., Matsumoto, M., & Hikosaka, O. (2010).
Dopamine in motivational control: rewarding, aversive, and
alerting. Neuron, 68(5), 815–834.
104
Calipari, E. S., & Ferris, M. J. (2013). Amphetamine mechanisms and
actions at the dopamine terminal revisited. The Journal of neuroscience :
the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 33(21), 8923–8925
105
Stewart, J. (1984) Reinstatement of heroin and cocaine self-
administration behavior in the rat by intracerebral application of
 234

morphine in the ventral tegmental area. Pharmacology Biochemical

Behavior, 20, 917-923
106
Matthews, R.T. & German, D.C. (1984) Electrophysiological evidence
for excitation of rat VTA dopamine neurons by morphine. Neuroscience,
11, 617-625
107
Cook, C.D., Rodefer, J.S., and Picker, M.J. (1999) Selective attenuation
of the antinociceptive effects of mu opioids by the putative dopamine D3
agonist 7-OH-DPAT. Psychopharmacology, 144: 239-247.
108
Colasanti, A., Searle, G., et al. (2012) Endogenous opioid release in the
human brain induced by acute amphetamine administration. Journal of
Biopsychology, 72, 371-377
109
Stefano, G. (1982) Comparative aspects of opioid-dopamine
interaction. Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology, 2(3), 167-178
110
Brennan, K., Roberts, D., Anisman, H. et al. (2001) Individual
differences in sucrose consumption in the rat: motivational and
neurochemical correlates of hedonia. Psychopharmacology 157, 269–276
111
It is well known that dopamine can enhance opioid activity in animals,
but a similar finding has proven elusive for humans by virtue of the fact
that direct observation of dopaminergic and opioid interactions in
human beings is practically and ethically difficult. However, this does
not preclude self-reports of individuals who can put in rank preference
identical pleasurable stimuli (sucrose solutions), yet have greater
pleasure attributed to similar stimuli when concurrently associated with
dissimilar positive reward uncertainty for non-sensate stimuli. In other
words, sensory experiences like eating popcorn are heightened when we
are watching an exciting movie and dulled if we were watching paint
dry, thus explaining the favor we give to taking our pleasures
concurrently with behavior that has high reward uncertainty.
If normative (i.e. what should happen) rather than abstract (i.e. how it
should happen) expectancies are replaced in this equation, then we have
a placebo effect. In essence, a placebo effect is a specific interpretation of
opioid-dopamine interactions that attributes analgesic, pleasurable and
other positive affect to conscious or non-conscious expectancies of pain
relief or enhanced pleasure. This has been experimentally contested by
 235

Amanzioa and colleagues (link below), but also does not make sense
empirically, as precursor or concurrent expectancies of novel outcomes
may be related to the goal (expectation that the meal will be delicious) or
unrelated to the goal (watching an exciting movie while eating a meal)
and still have the same effect. This leads to the conclusion that not
normative but abstract act-outcome expectancies or discrepancies that
induce dopamine activity can modulate ongoing opioid activity due to
food, drink, sex, rest or other stimuli.
Amanzioa, M , Polloa, A , Maggib, G, & Benedettia, F. (2001) Response
variability to analgesics: a role for non-specific activation of
endogenous opioids, Pain, 90, 201-215
Rauwolf, P., Millard, S. K., Wong, N., Witt, A., Davies, T. J., Cahill, A.
M., Madden, G. J., Parkinson, J. A., & Rogers, R. D. (2021). “Just not
knowing” can make life sweeter (and saltier): Reward uncertainty alters
the sensory experience and consumption of palatable food and
drinks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(10), 2015–2035.
112
Schultz, W. (2010) Dopamine signals for reward value and risk: basic
and recent data. Behavioral and Brain Functions 6, 24
113
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdfExtended/S2211-1247(19)30385-7
114
McClure, S., Daw, N. and Montague,R (2003) A computational substrate
for incentive salience, Trends in Neurosciences, 26, 8, 423-428,
115
This conception of drive as merely an artifact of an organism’s
sensitization to a stimulus event (food, drink) is also independently
confirmed in Donahoe and Palmer’s contemporaneous definition of
reward which is based the neurologically grounded principles of neural
networks. “In our formulation, deprivation may affect behavior in several
ways. For one, by depriving an organism of contact with a stimulus, that
stimulus typically becomes a more vigorous elicitor of behavior. As such, the
stimulus is able to function as a more effective reinforcer because its presentation
evokes a larger behavioral discrepancy. Further, discriminative and occasion
setting functions of deprivation, and motivating operations in general, may be
readily implemented in neural networks. A discriminative function is enabled
to the extent that the motivating operation differentially activates a range of
 236

units within a network, a motivating function is enabled to the extent that the
motivating operation non-differentially activates a range of units within the
network. In either case, the activation levels of units within the network are
changed, thereby changing which connections are eligible for modification by the
reinforcer. Through both means, the motivating operation may have a pervasive
effect on behavior and on neural networks intended to simulate behavior.”
Donahoe, J.W., Palmer, D.C., and Burgos, J. (1997) The Unit of Selection.
What do reinforcers reinforce? Journal of the Experimental Analysis of
Behavior, 67, 259-273
116
Lundberg, U. (1999) Stress Responses in Low-Status Jobs and Their
Relationship to Health Risks: Musculoskeletal Disorders. Annals of the
New York Academy of Sciences, 896, 162-172.
117
Hagg, G. (1991) Static Workloads and occupational myalgia- a new
explanation model. In P. A. Anderson, D. J. Hobart, and J. V. Danhoff
(Eds.). Electromyographical Kinesiology (pp. 141-144). Elsevier Science
Publishers, P. V.
118
Wursted, M., Eken, T., & Westgaard, R. (1996) Activity of single motor
units in attention demanding tasks: firing pattern in the human trapezius
muscle. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 72, 323-329
119
Wursted, M., Bjorklund, R., & Westgaard, R. (1991) Shoulder muscle
tension induced by two VDU-based tasks of different complexity.
Ergonomics, 23, 1033-1046
120
Lundberg, U., Forsman, M., Zachau, G., Eklo F., M., Palmerud, G.,
Melin, B., & Kadefors, R. (2002). Effects of experimentally induced
mental and physical stress on trapezius motor unit recruitment. Work &
Stress, 16, 166-170
121
Although tension or anxiety is a learned or conditioned response, it
can also be an element of an unconditioned response to actual danger, or
the ‘flight or fight’ response. The flight/fight fleeing system (FFFS) is
activated by situations that entail imminent threat. In the popular
literature of stress, the FFFS is commonly invoked for autonomic arousal
occurring across all threatening and non-threatening situations.
However, for distant threats (e.g. a spider approaching from a great
 237

distance away as compared to a spider an inch from your nose), or for

non-threatening choice/choice conflicts (e.g., distractive conflicts), the
FFFS is not activated. Thus, covert neuro-muscular activity in these
situations cannot be attributed to instinctive flight/fight neural
mechanisms, but to cortical activity, therefore implicating learning
processes.
Berkman, E. T., Leiberman, M.D., & Gable, S.L. (2009) BIS, BAS, and
response conflict: Testing predictions of the revised reinforcement
sensitivity theory. Personality and Individual Differences, 46(5-6), 586-591
122
Brosschot JF, Pieper S, Thayer JF. (2005) Expanding stress theory:
prolonged activation and perseverative cognition.
Psychoneuroendocrinology. Nov;30(10):1043-9.
123
Marr, A. J. (2006) Relaxation and Muscular Tension: A Bio-
behavioristic Explanation, International Journal of Stress Management,
13(2), 131-153
124
Bromberg-Martin ES, Matsumoto M, Hikosaka O. (2010) Dopamine in
motivational control: rewarding, aversive, and alerting. Neuron. Dec
9;68(5):815-34.
125
https://artsofthought.com/2022/11/06/wilhelm-wundt-introspection/
126 Gardner, Howard (1985) The Mind’s New Science A History of the
Cognitive Revolution, NY Basic Books
127
Wundt's three-dimensional theory of emotion Rainer Reisenzein In W.
Balzer, J. D. Sneed & C. U. Moulines (eds.), (2000) Structuralist Knowledge
Representation: Paradigmatic Examples (Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of
the Sciences and the Humanities, 75, 219-250). Rodopi. pp. 75--219
128
https://how-emotions-are-
made.com/notes/Wilhelm_Wundt%27s_conception_of_affect
129
Posner J, Russell JA, Peterson BS. (2005)The circumplex model of
affect: an integrative approach to affective neuroscience, cognitive
development, and psychopathology. Developmental Psychopathology.
Summer;17(3):715-34
130
Besides the obvious issues with how the Barrett, Feldman and Russell
model neglects to explain how emotions map to actual neuro-biological
 238

events or its inadequate semantics, the model also incorrectly assumes

that emotions are primarily conscious and are derived from normative
or linguistic interpretations and not the abstract cognitions shared alike
by animals and humans. Indeed, as Berridge argued, “In Feldman-
Barrett’s view emotion requires the complex cognitive appraisals, language-
based reasoning and sociocultural construal’s of situations and meaning that
only humans possess. This position continues a long tradition of earlier
cognitive appraisal theories that reinterpreted emotions as essentially just
another type of cognition, turning emotions essentially into cultural-linguistic
representations of semantic meaning. Cognitivist academics focus on reasoning
and language, and place such a high premium on rationality that they are
inclined to see all psychological processes through a purely cognitive lens.”
Berridge, K.C. Evolving concepts of emotion and motivation. Frontiers in
Psychology, 9, 1647, 1-20, 2018.
131
Berridge, K. (2007) The debate over dopamine’s role in reward: the
case for incentive salience. Psychopharmacology, 191, 391-431
132
Fiorillo, C., Tobler, P, & Schultz, W. (2003) Discrete coding of reward
probability and uncertainty by dopamine neurons. Science, 299:1898-
1902
133
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow, the psychology of optimal experience.
New York: Harper Collins.
134
Rauwolf, P., Millard, S. K., Wong, N., Witt, A., Davies, T. J., Cahill, A.
M., Madden, G. J., Parkinson, J. A., & Rogers, R. D. (2021). “Just not
knowing” can make life sweeter (and saltier): Reward uncertainty alters
the sensory experience and consumption of palatable food and
drinks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(10), 2015–2035.
135
https://interestingliterature.com/2023/03/plato-allegory-of-the-cave-
summary-analysis/
136
(Maslow, 1943, p. 375) .
https://simplypsychology.org/maslow.html#Critical-evaluation
 239

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