In a previous post, I argued that concepts and concerns, such as free will and determinism, can be complex in the same sense in which numbers can be: in other words, in combining a real with an imaginary part. As I pointed out, this enables you to represent such numbers on a two-dimensional, complex plane (left). But clearly, if the analogy between complex numbers and mental complexes I described in the previous post is at all real, you should be able to produce a comparable diagram visualizing what you might call the complex cognitive plane (below).
Here the horizontal axis of the real numbers corresponds to mechanistic cognition, with hyper-mechanistic equating to increasing positive values and hypo-mechanistic to negative ones. Similarly, mentalism corresponds to the imaginary, y-axis of the complex plane, with negative values being incrementally hypo-mentalistic and positive ones increasingly hyper-mentalistic.
Looked at this way, four main domains emerge: at the bottom right, a hyper-mechanistic, hypo-mentalistic one corresponding to autism, science and technology. For reasons explained in an earlier post, the eye of HAL from 2001 provides an icon for the cognitive configuration of a mechanistic mind, while the leading behaviourist, B. F. Skinner, supplies the equivalent in terms of a psychological paradigm that banished mentalism from its explanatory vocabulary and focussed entirely on behaviour.
The top left corner, hyper-mentalistic + hypo-mechanistic, corresponds to psychosis, religion and superstition, represented by the icon of the all-seeing eye of God from the Great Seal of the USA. Here Freud represents the corresponding, if less extreme, cognitive configuration of psychoanalysis: hyper-mentalizing in its belief in the power of the unconscious mind, and hypo-mechanistic to the extent that psychoanalysis went with dogmatic belief in nurture rather than nature—most notoriously where the "refrigerator mother" theory of autism was concerned.
In the top right corner, Newton represents genius understood as corresponding to both hyper-mechanistic cognition (his maths and physics) and hyper-mentalism (in the form of his obsession with alchemy and biblical prophesy and numerology, as I explain in The Imprinted Brain). The final quadrant: hypo-mechanistic/hypo-mentalistic, would have to correspond to mental retardation.
In a previous post I suggested that the diametric model’s insights into IQ might produce two, rather than one, measures: a mentalistic score and a mechanistic one, which if expressed as positive in one case and negative in the other would sum to zero if scores were ideally equal and opposite. But now we can see an even better way of expressing mentalistic and mechanistic IQ scores: as a complex number expressed in the form (100 + 100i) where the first, real figure is mechanistic IQ and the second, imaginary one, is mentalistic IQ (and i represents the square root of minus one, as explained in the previous post). At the very least, the symbolism would be apt: a cognitive complex represented by a complex number! Indeed, such a measure of IQ would be something of an intelligence test in itself—and would certainly counter the simplistic snobbery which the current one-number-fits-all measure encourages.
What of the central zone? The area around the origin of both cognitive dimensions would correspond to a configuration representing normality understood as balanced cognition, not extending much beyond low values and certainly not into either the hyper-mechanistic or hyper-mentalistic extreme. By comparison with behaviourism and psychoanalysis, this corresponds to the cognitive configuration of the diametric model of the mind peculiar to the imprinted brain theory—a point I made in relation to the current crisis in psychiatry in another previous post.
Of course, all this might seem somewhat crazy to contemporary readers, but there are two concluding points I would like to make. The first is to repeat the fact that the diametric model of cognition has now been independently verified by brain imaging studies as a reality of brain architecture, as I have pointed out in several recent posts. Second, I can tell my readers that a stunning—and to me, totally unexpected—confirmation of the imprinted brains theory’s central predictions based on a huge data set will be published one week from now, on September 17th. Watch this space!
(With thanks to Randy Jirtle.)