(Originally posted November 14, 2023)
Here’s the trouble with how we think about measuring abstract psychological things that go beyond the physical processes of nervous system functioning — none of these psychological things are uniform, let alone unified into actual unitary constructs. Much of the time, we treat them as unified “things” for the purpose of actually getting research done. “Happiness” is a thing that we want to measure or influence in some mechanistic way. “Social connections” are things that we want to measure or influence in some mechanistic way. Whatever the construct might be that we’re studying, we have to treat it as a “thing” and operationalize it such a way that we can quantify it through some form of data generation mechanism. We leave it to the hardcore specialists in each of the domains to worry about the details about what the different “pieces” of something like happiness might be. Life is too short to worry about the little nuances that might change our fundamental interpretation of what we mean by “happiness” — we’re trying to operate at a functional, human level, right?
Zooming out to the human level, Robert Kurzban uses a “smartphone apps” metaphor to describe human psychology. To paraphrase, he describes the human mind as a smartphone that is running lots of apps concurrently. Some of them may interact, but really, there is no top-level “governor” that ensures that they are logically unified in a purposeful way, all of them behaving in a fashion to accomplish a unitary goal. The human mind is just a collection of… apps, each performing different operations and functions to accomplish different goals.
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