As I pointed out in a recent post, the diametric mode of cognition has been strikingly endorsed by brain imaging, which has shown that, rather than having one, all-purpose system of cognition, we actually have two, parallel ones: one for what I would call mentalistic, and the other for mechanistic cognition. Furthermore, the neuroscientific findings also confirmed that the two networks of neurons are “anti-correlated” to use the researchers' terms: in other words, antithetical and mutually inhibitory—just as the diametric model proposes (left).
When people hear about such discoveries, they often react negatively, assuming that, because dualistic cognition is demonstrably hard-wired into the brain, it is deterministic, leaving us no freedom to think creatively or freely—and certainly not to switch content from one to the other.
But this fails to take account of the fact that, from the beginning, the diametric model portrayed mentalistic and mechanistic as modes of cognition. People speak of a mode of travel or mode of address meaning a particular way of getting from one place to another or of addressing someone. And of course, mode also means a style of dress or fashion—hence modish meaning fashionable or in vogue.
In technology modes can make all the difference to the way in which control systems function. For example, an aircraft's flight control system set in landing mode will interpret inputs from the pilot differently from one set in cruise mode: landing mode will lead the system to expect flight down to the ground, whereas cruise mode will dictate avoidance of the ground at all costs, and confusion between the two can be—and has been—fatal.
Cognitive modes function in much the same way: they provide the context and setting in which things take on meaning and, as in aviation, confusion can be disastrous. Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union epitomizes the point: agronomy and biology in state-sanctioned mentalizing mode caused murder, mayhem and mass-starvation on a staggering scale. Yet at much the same time in the West, the green revolution was doing the exact opposite and bringing unprecedented crop yields and agronomic advances to many millions in the Third World thanks to thinking in the right, mechanistic mode.
In the past, modal changes in cognition have been brought about by paradigm shifts. As I explained in a previous post, paradigms are mentalistic to the extent that they are top-down, organizing concepts that define a science and set its agenda of research and validation. The Copernican revolution in astronomy demonstrably did this when, in the words of Copernicus’s successor, Kepler, it brought about “the unexpected transfer of the whole of astronomy from fictitious circles to natural causes.”
By the time of Copernicus the traditional Aristotelian, Earth-centered solar system had itself become enclosed within the wider religious beliefs of the Middle Ages thanks to authorities such as St Thomas Aquinas, who conferred scriptural authority upon it. Once Copernicus had broken the mold, astronomy became increasingly mechanistic thanks to the efforts of later authorities, such as Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. Indeed, by the time of the latter, people were routinely thinking of the solar system in mechanistic terms: as a clockwork universe, admittedly designed and wound-up by God, but nevertheless as running on inexorably according to Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation. Finally, Darwin extended the mechanistic mode of thinking about nature into biology with his discovery of evolution by natural selection, and in doing so dispensed with the last vestiges of divine involvement.
What these examples show is that, even though mentalizing and mechanizing cognition may be hard-wired in the brain, exactly what those systems work on is partly mentalistically determined: in other words, by historical, social, and personal factors that cause people to change the context—or mode—in which they think about particular issues. Furthermore, if we have been able to change our mode of thinking in relation to cosmology and biology from mentalistic to mechanistic as most of us demonstrably have done, there is no reason in principle why we cannot do the same in relation to psychology, psychiatry, and the social sciences.
Of course, behaviorism tried to do this by banishing everything mental from psychology, but now we know that mentalizing is as valid a part of brain mechanics as is mechanistic cognition, thanks to having an entire network of neurons devoted to it. Psychoanalysis did the opposite, and hyper-mentalized the brain and behavior thanks to its catch-all/explain-all concept of the unconscious mind.
The diametric model, however, does full justice to both the mechanisms of the brain and the mentalizing of the mind, and suggests a third, definitive solution. This is to adopt the imprinted brain theory and its diametric model of cognition as paradigms by way of which we can voluntarily switch between contrasting modes of cognition, doing full justice to both. Such thinking may not be exactly modish today, but the fact that Freud dressed up his ideas à la mode mècanistique—in other words, in quasi-scientific/clinical style—suggests that the paradigm shift from mentalistic to mechanistic mode in Western thinking is inevitable, irreversible, and irresistible in the long run.
Illustration reproduced with kind permission from “More than a feeling: Counterintuitive effects of compassion on moral judgment,” by Anthony I. Jack, Philip Robbins, Jared P. Friedman & Chris D. Meyers in Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Mind, Continuum Press. Editor: Justin Sytsma, in press.