A Human Psychology

Through weaving together a wide variety of material, this paper outlines the intertwining of two states of temporal consciousness. On one hand, modern consciousness operates almost exclusively in linear time characterized by the following adjectives: unidirectional, structured, static, external, dominating, objective, logical, quantified, mathematical, and masculine. On the other hand, indigenous oral-based cultures seem to operate in a more ancient form of consciousness which I will refer to as "dreamtime" and characterize as: omnipresent, fluid, internal, co-creative, subjective, intuitive, paradoxical, qualitative, musical, and feminine. I use the term "dreamtime" to draw attention to the unique temporal experience of dreaming consciousness as well as to that of the Australian Aboriginal mythic tradition.

Human Studies, 2002

Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2010

Human experience reflects the interplay of multiple influences operating on various time scales to promote constantly evolving patterns of thought, emotion, and action. Although the complexity and dynamism of personal and social phenomena have long been recognized, they are difficult to investigate using traditional research methods. This article provides an overview of dynamical social psychology, an approach adapted from dynamical systems theory that is designed to capture the complementary tendencies of stability and dynamism at different levels of social reality, from private thoughts to intergroup relations. Utilizing time-series analyses and computer simulations, this perspective documents the emergence of global properties from the interaction of basic elements in mental and social systems and investigates the time-dependent relation between external influences and a system's internally generated dynamics. The dynamical approach enables social psychology to advance as a precise science while preserving the basic insights that launched the field over a century ago.

Abstract The disciples of Psychology and Sociology and the social sciences more generally, are and have been for some time, in a state of flux, especially with regard to research methods. The tension, in the view if many, is between the approaches to research in terms of positivist verses naturalist [1,2]. This tension has to a considerable degree remains unsolved and has been exacerbated by the postmodernist’s discourse as exemplified in the works of Foucault [3] and Lyotard [4] (see Rosenberg, 2003 for an overview of this discourse). This short commentary cannot address all of these issues. Instead, it will [5] provide an introduction to the history of 19th century and early 20th century social sciences focusing on key differences and similarities in research methods and their philosophic underpinning [6]. This will be followed by a short statement regarding the nature of mid 20th century evolution of the social sciences, touching on both the philosophical and practical aspects of research [7]. This essay will end with an overview of some psychology research conducted within the parameters of the Human sciences. Keywords: Jerome Bruner; John Dewy; GH Mead; Shawn Rosenberg; Michael Westerman; Peter Wench; Cultural psychology; Social psychology; Psychological anthropology; Meaning; Narrative, Mind, Culture

Abstract: The theory of self-organization of complex systems studies laws of sustainable coevolutionary development of structures having different speeds of development as well as laws of assembling of a complex evolutionary whole from parts when some elements of “memory” (the biological memory, i.e. DNA, the memory of culture, i.e. the cultural and historical traditions, etc.) must be included. The theory reveals general rules of nonlinear synthesis of complex evolutionary structures. The most important and paradoxical consequences of the holistic view, including an approach to solving the riddle of human personality, are as follows: 1) the explanation why and under what conditions a part (a human) can be more complex than a whole (society); 2) in order to reconstruct society it is necessary to change an individual but not by cutting off the supposed undesirable past, since a human being as a microcosm is the synthesis of all previous stages of evolution, and as a result of repression of, it would seem, the wild past one can extinguish a “divine spark” in his soul; 3) in the physical sense, singularity denotes a moment of instability, phase transition; one can talk about the human singularity of co-evolutionary processes, since in such a moment of instability individual actions of a human can play a key role in determining a channel of further development as well as in appearance of a new pattern of collective behavior in society; 4) as the models of nonlinear dynamics, elaborated at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, show, there is a possibility of a direct influence of the future and even a touch of an infinitely remote future in certain evolutionary regimes and under rigorously definite conditions, more over, it turns out that such a possibility exists only for a human (admittedly, through a specific state of being inherent to him—the sleep without dreams) but not for the human society. Keywords: co-evolution, human being, nonlinearity, self-organization, tempo-worlds

PsycCritiques, 2016

Joseph Henrich’s "The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter"—written for a broad audience with wide-ranging accounts of our dependency on our cultural milieu—will be an eye-opener​ for those who presume that humans are simply another biological species whose survival and propagation derive just from our genetic endowment, coupled with phenotypic development. However, those who have experienced “culture shock . . . a loss of self” due to the absence, in a different culture, of the support we obtain in our own culture through “the participation of others in our lives, and upon our own participation in the lives of others” (Wagner, 1972, p. 7), have already confronted the theme of this book: We are, preeminently, a species whose way of living, acting, behaving, and the like is framed by the cultural and social environment into which we were born and raised. Thus, the theme of this book: that from birth to death we are engaged in what it means to be a social being living in a cultural world, acting in accordance with the content of the enculturation each of us inevitably undergoes, in all of its modalities, simply by being alive. What changed, however, in the evolutionary pathway going from the nonhuman primates to our species was not simply the introduction of a new form of trait transmission but a fundamental transformation from behavior-driven social systems dependent upon face-to-face interaction as the means to work out social relations between individuals to the formation of relation-based systems of social organization (Read, 2012). This fundamentally changed the organizing properties of human social systems from their prior, primate, form of bottom-up systems with emergence of the source of properties occurring above the individual level, to top-down, culturally formulated systems of social organization that shifted the evolutionaryfocus from trait change at the individual level to change in systems of organization (Lane, Maxfield, Read, & van der Leeuw, 2009).

We live at a time of multiple revolutions in science, particularly in medical science and technology. Profound innovations are emerging that will not just change the problems we address or the ways we respond to problems, but which may transform the sorts of creatures that we are. Our species may be changed for better or worse by what is in prospect. The nature of the human species is therefore at stake. " The Past, Present and Future of Human Nature " might seem all encompassing, but it leaves almost everything out. For most of the time that living creatures have existed there have been no humans and thus no human nature. We are a recent and probably transient phenomenon; we are well advised to keep that humbling fact in mind. Still, as a member of this recent but disarmingly clever species, I have an interest in understanding what our nature is, what it might become, and how that might depend on the choices we make. It is distinctively human to engage in self-conscious reflection on our own nature. Doing so has gone on for all of recorded human history and must have been going on longer than that. Wonder is among the most salient distinguishing characteristics of humans: we are the self-reflective creature. Our intellectual history centers prominently on efforts to understand our own behavior and motivations, our relationship to nature, and our place in the universe or, on some views, beyond. We have devoted much thought to exploring whether we are by nature altruistic or selfish, warlike or peace-loving, monogamous or polygamous, shaped more by genetics or by experience and environment, driven by deterministic causes or free to make autonomous choices. We have sought answers to understand the human condition, and to know whether we are the result of purposive design or the chance product of natural processes. We have long wondered about the relationship among our minds, our brains, and the baffling phenomena of consciousness, personal identity, and self-awareness. These issues were historically addressed primarily by philosophers and theologians; now, they are also vigorously pursued by others such as sociobiologists, cognitive neuroscientists, computational linguists, and physicists. We have sought to discern what about ourselves is inherent in our nature and what is socially constructed. We find ourselves unendingly fascinating. On the traditional Judeo-Christian view, humans were the apex of God's intentional creation; distinct from the rest of the world, they exerted dominion over nature. Other views, such as those of some Native American cultures, saw humans as being at one with nature, properly seeking harmony with the larger whole. Science, even in its earliest iterations, is the human effort to understand what nature

Was sind und wie existieren Personen? (What are Persons and how Do They Exist?), ed. by J. Noller, Münster: Mentis., 2019

What are persons and how do they exist? The predominant answer to this question in Western metaphysics is that persons, human and others, are, and exist as, substances, i.e., ontologically independent, well-demarcated things defined by an immutable (usually mental) essence. Change, on this view, is not essential for a person's identity; it is in fact more likely to be detrimental to it. In this chapter I want to suggest an alternative view of human persons which is motivated by an appreciation of their biological nature. Organisms, human and non-human, are dynamical systems that for their existence and persistence depend on an ongoing interaction with the environment in which they are embedded. Taking seriously this most fundamental human condition leads to recognising human persons as processes, i.e., as entities for the identity of which change is essential. It also implies a holistic view of the human mind.

This chapter argues that the recognition of our historical nature provides for a resolution of debates concerning the relative validity of representational, social constructivist and neurophenomenological models of mind. I propose a unified model of human being whose manifold aspects remain entirely open to investigation, even while the model is intended to deal at once with the uniqueness – that is to say, the historical actuality – of what it is to be human and with critical issues at the interface of psychology and anthropology and, in so doing, prove to be a rigorous, explanatory, robust model of what it is to be human.