COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHIATRY:

is it possible to have a science of individuality?

Henrique Schützer Del Nero

ABSTRACT:

Cognitive Science contains as part of its revolutionary side effects the possibility of thinking on a scientific well founded model for psychiatry. Besides the first glance that enables one to see how neural networks can elucidate the statistical process that governs drug administration in mental illness, there is a more astonishing question that deserves careful fundamental analysis: is it possible to identify a general principle that is able to recognize stress factors as triggering effects of mental and behavioral disorders? This opens the old debate about the relation between meaning and reference and the nature of intentions and consciousness. As far as a provocative speculation can go we suggest that the idea of control, and the process by which one is conscious and dreams, can be a clue to this debates. Psychotherapy has a lot to expect from these issues and Cognitive Science can be seen as the background inspiration for a new model of behavioral science, mainly for the abilities that are not part of the main investigations nowadays: higher mental functions and their deviances.

I. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry and the problem of the mental

One of the main problems Cognitive Science has been facing is to reveal why meanings emerge in a cognitive or in a information processing device. It is not only a problem of semantics. It is to build a semantics that at the same time enables to understand propositional attitudes, free will and individual responses. It is too generical to say that environmental effects play a role in triggering mental disturbances as it is to say that "dietary" deficits do also.

We are not denying that all these causes play a role in mental illness. We are only trying to put the following questions forth. The way one looks at the world, his or her own story can be a subject of a scientific treatment that allows laws to be built in order to have a genuine predictable science of the normal and of the pathological?

Let us examine for a moment the question of how scientific a theory is. If we are seeking empirical data, psychoanalysis may well be defended as empirical and many shrinks will state that they have seen a thousand people dreaming in a Oedipian way. If we are seeking generality or universality we shall have to deal with human diversity. Nobody has the same background and one's life is a unique example of the correlation of events and values. Then one must propose that science is tailored only to allow predictability and a class of ways to undermine false theories and forecastings. The theory of dynamical systems undermines this suppositions without having to allude to quantum indeterminacy. Even the "classical phenomena" present for a certain parameter values this kind of unpredictable behavior . This has been called "deterministic chaos and bifurcation values".

This is why Cognitive Science looks for general rules that can press generality unto the realm of constraint. In other words we seek laws that govern diversity. If it is difficult even to manage the problem of a changing environment, regarding scenes and brightness, how can one expect to build a science based upon the role a mother plays in her child's development without being too generical and henceforth empty? If, for example, a patient suffers from an acute depression one can candidly state that he or she had a stressful event in the last six months, but how an event can be considered a "stressful event" without being labeled as such with such a general label that will render this new way of looking at things simply a reedition of the old tenets of psychoanalytic theory? Compatibilism and emergence are two ways of preventing the acute debate about the way semantics is recorded and transduced into the Central Nervous System.Even the problem of consciousness, control and freewill scaffold strange ideas as that one a writer once proposed talking about Freud'position: he was a determinist but not a materialist. How is it possible to be a scientist without being at the same time a materialist? Or if this shocks the reader let us put it in other words; how can a science of individual events become possible, and predictability in terms of treatment (prognosis), become possible if we accept from the beginning that there is genuine emergence in complex phenomena that does not allow reducibility of the mental to the physical?

Trying to answer these questions we will have to deal with the following ideas. First we shall see that we have to have a hypothesis on how the mental emerges in the cognitive realm? Second we'll have to see how decisions are to be understood in a psychic device and the role ethics and responsibility play in human cognition? Third: why can dreams, consciousness and psychoses be related to control and to ramdoness to allow one to understand the sources of a genuine science of individuality?

Launching these ideas will be the first part of a project that describes a machine that has a deterministic character in terms of form and a undeterministic character in terms of content. The old debate between form and content will be actualized in terms of differential equations and of non-linear dynamics. If this can bee seen as insanity it is exactly this subject that is in the core of our speculations. Psychiatry needs an urgent revision of its paradigms and mathematics furnishes us a good tool to understand the relation between variability of content and invariability of form. In other words we can expect that a science of human psychology will have a kind of invariant form that is due to our common biological story and a kind of variability that is due to our contextual story. Values from this point of view are contingent and have to put unto the constraint realm of a scientific psychology.

II. Decision under risk and the emergence of higher mental functions

Consciousness is the heart of mental functions. It has been omitted as an ineffable concept. I think however, that without facing the problem of consciousness one will not fully understand the problem of cognitive capabilities.

In a second way, the problem of consciousness raises another kind of subjects: the question of volitional control, the nature of the will, the moral and responsible aspect of individuality and of the self. All these problems are closed related to psychiatric disorders. Every pathology can be seen as a control disorder:

a) of affective variables: affective disorders (including depression, manic-depressive disease, anxiety, panic disorder, etc)

b) of judgment: psychoses (including all sort of schizophrenic types, mainly the productive ones - hebephrenic and paranoid, delusional syndromes, dissociative, etc)

c) of self-image: anorexia, self-reference delusion, insecure personality, etc

d) of reality: all the hallucinoid states, including drug addiction, alcohol, psychoses, etc.

e) of ethical properness: psychopath personalities, mainly amoral ones.

f) of motor control: mainly impulsive disorders (Gilles de la Tourette, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc)

g) of limits: extravagant behavior, perversions, etc.

h) of reason: low IQ states (be they due to innate, acquired or aged factors such as demential syndromes).

i) of roles: hysteroid disorders

j) of rhythms: sleep disorders, bulimia, etc

The list above is neither intended to be complete nor orthodoxical. We are not worried about taxonomies and of schools. This work would deserve a careful analysis on several different ways to classify mental illness.

The suggestion above is that control is a key word in all mental disturbances in a way that can be defended face the opponents.

But what this has to do with consciousness and decision? Briefly, our position is that the Central Nervous System is organized in a layered and hierarchical way. Lower levels are responsible for automatic and quick performances and higher levels to novelties, "to be learned" and, therefore, to slow performances. As soon as a skill is new, if it is not pre-programmed in the system, a kind of a priori response, it has to be learned and this recruits higher levels. The network adjust its "weights" and when it reaches relaxation to the new skill it doesn't deserve high level activity any more; it becomes automatic. Until this point nothing new has been said.

Let us think a little bit about a system that has to deal with indeterminacy. Or in other words the system has to decide among a series of alternatives that are almost equally plausible. This is not a problem one will say. Either the system analyzes one of the two choices or it guesses. But the problem is far more complicated. Imagine that the system has to be responsible for its own decisions and that it has to be considered free of constraint while deciding. This is the core aspect of legal and of social dispositions. That's why we assume the more responsible one has to act the upper functions have to recruited. Responsibility is also a matter of learning.

But what about decision-making? Decision-making is not only relaxation into a stable configuration, is it? If one accepts the thesis that there is a certain degree of constraint and of determinism that governs all physical acts, how can one sustain the notion of freedom of constraints? Either we have constraints that allow psychological science to be possible, undermining social and ethical freedom or we have indeterminacy and genuine emergence, allowing freedom to be a semantical equivalent of indeterminism, but psychology will remain totally compartmentalized, i.e. there will be a layer for the physical and a layer for the semantical interpretation of the higher mental and responsible forms of conduct and behavior.

Decision under risk is not only a matter of algorithm implementation, e.g. one that analyses the descendent gradient between two hypothesis. It is mainly a matter of implementing a certain kind of evaluation at the physical level but having at the conscious level the idea of choice and of freedom. "I am valuating all the hypothesis and I can assume the responsibility for choosing the worst". What kind of algorithm will explain this tendency to choose wrongly and moreover to know that one is responsible for whatever he, or she, has chosen?

As matter of assumption let us assume that the mental is the upper level that allows the system to deal with novelty. Moral agency is a novelty and it varies according to the systems environment. Adequacy and control of behavioral variables is a matter of being able to evaluate the allowances of one's environment. In a juridical fashion this has been known as the "law of the land" a typical anglo-saxon disposition. But if this resolves the problem of levels and of learning it does not resolve the complicated issue of determinacy and of freedom. If stress means something for a person it doesn't follow that it will mean the same for the fellow. How can one escape from the generality of using stress as loss. Many psychiatric articles and books affirm that before a depressive episode the person has suffered a loss during the last six months. Is it the loss of a cat, of a job or of self-assurance? What is it to be a loss? And what kind of novelty semantics introduce in the physical realm of the Central Nervous System that enables each of us to be a center of meaning determination?

Briefly: consciousness is the privileged place where the system pushes the physical variables to a new interpretation, that one that is furnished by the culture and by the language. There freedom is supposed to exist and therefore problems of decision and of stability remain modified into new semantical interpretations. Consciousness is a kind of mixed screen: there is a phenomenological play running on and an ethical and control playing at the same time. The only physical and not acquired predicate of consciousness is this phenomenal experience. The volitional aspect of controlling mental variables is an aggregate that is due to environmental parameters. Dreams and Dynamical systems can enlighten these suppositions.

III. The relation between dreams and consciousness

The discussion about the problem of consciousness is a very disgusting one. We assume that there are two main marks in consciousness: control and the phenomenal screen (where sensations like identity, role-player, etc takes place) . During dreams only the phenomenal experience is maintained, despite its lack of intensity, and control is lost. To be more precise voluntary control is loosen because nobody can state that the is not a kind of internal agency playing a sort of "control" over this part of sleep (REM sleep). If there is control over the occurrence of periods of REM sleep why doesn't have control over "dream contents". What one lacks is not exactly "control" but only voluntary control. Based upon this hypothesis one may state that control is not identical to volunteerism. There are both controls: voluntary and autonomous. If during the dreams we have the phenomenal experience, one that has endorsed many skeptical arguments against the truths worthy of perceptions, and has a kind of automatic control what is lack is only voluntary control. But volunteerism is the main mark of consciousness. During dreams the state of the CNS is very closer to the state during awakeness except for the fact that the afferences that carry external stimuli are off. Hence one can suggest that voluntary control is a predicate that is nursed by environment. In other words what is supposed to be the mark of an internal agency is in fact a mark of the continuous feeding by sensorial parameters. The will is outside of the system and it is not a predicate that functions without the supervinience of the senses.

Dreams on the other hand are considered closer to psychoses. One may experience the bizarreness of psychotic states without any problem. This links the nature and content of deviant states to a restoring function of the organism: REM sleep. Either one considers dreams as attractors reshapers (allowing the elimination of undesirable attractors) or as memory reinforcers or even as plan rehearsals, it is forcively to accept that mental illness as far as dreams have a sort of relation to their bizarreness are not strange modes but a lack of control over modes that are possible and even for a certain period , i.e. dreams, physiological. This is why control, and particularly the sub-type called voluntary is so important in a correct description of the blocks of pathological deviance.

IV. Stability and Dynamical Systems

The theory of dynamical systems (TDS) furnishes us a good metaphorical tool to understand a lot of dichotomies that are common in psychiatry.

First of all, one has to accept the substantive role of mathematics in knowledge. Mathematics is not only a tool to handle empirical data. Sometimes it gives us a formal background of inspiration to a series of perplexities. Neural networks are very interesting models of cognitive phenomena. Its mathematical descriptions, be they in the physicist's style of statistical mechanics, be they in the mathematical style of dynamical systems, allow us to understand phenomena like global and local solutions, non-linear behaviors, etc. We are not affirming that as a practical tool the TDS will furnish us many help. But its conceptual roots are very charming to hypothesize about the ideas put above.

Imagine that the CNS has a class of differential equations that describe its behavior. As far as we concluded that there are no deep differences between dream and consciousness, except for the type of control we can state that:

1. The class of differential equations that describe the conscious states are the same that describe the dream states.

2. The difference between consciousness, dream and psychotic states is that, in consciousness one has voluntary control, in dreams automatic control, and psychoses a kind of autonomous deviant control that apes volition and it is closer to the automatic one.

3. Deterministic chaos is a source of conceptual inspirations because it allows at the same time determinism and "randomness" to exist. For a certain class of parameters, i.e. ordinary parameters value, one holds structural stability, and for another class, i.e. bifurcation parameters value, one gets bifurcations, pre-condition to the virtual occurrence of chaotic behavior. What impresses about the theory is the pacific coexistence between determinism and variability. In other words, one has invariance of the form of the equation that describes the system but for a certain class of parameters predictability is lost at the level of solutions in the state space. This is what we call variability or even unpredictability of content. Briefly, form is the equation that describes a system, content is the class of states this system assumes in the phase space.

4. The problem of stability is a complicated one. One must not confuse local stability (or Liapunov's stability) and structural stability ( a topological aspect of the system). A system may have different points of stability and of instability in the Liapunov's sense and have at the same time structural stability as a global topological mark. What characterizes the structural aspect is the behavior of the solutions the system has. If the flux of solutions tend to the same point stability from the structural point of view is characterized.

5. As a matter of supposition let us think about the relation between consciousness, dreams and psychoses. If the same equation, or class of equations, describes the CNS behavior, during dreams the bizarreness of content may be due to solutions that are under bifurcation values. Control during dreams, not voluntary but automatic, doesn't prevent this kind of behavior to occur because it is a source of reorientation of attractors that have been tailored during awakeness (be the process erasing or reinforcing in terms of robustness these attractors). Voluntary control is a kind of control that detects bifurcation values preventing them to occur. This is what gives the conscious experience the mark of reasonability and coherence. Psychoses are in this sort a kind of self-organization in the voluntary control mechanism. Suppose something like a chaotic attractor.

6. We are not going to deal in detail with all these ideas. The only thing that interests us for this moment is to make a relation between form and content through the inspiration of the theory of dynamical systems.

Some conclusions appear from the above said:

1. Voluntary control is a kind of control that operates under a strict observation of robustness. Reasonability is therefore a way of preventing bifurcations to deviate into chaotic behavior. Volunteerism in spite of looking like an inner capacity is something that depends on external parameters. During the dreams and psychoses this kind of voluntary control loses its capacity leading to transient or to permanent states of organization. If freewill is a strange predicate in terms of a physical vocabulary, maybe it is the companion of this extra predicate- responsibility- that characterizes consciousness and self as decision-making devices.

2. Psychic states are solutions of a class of differential equations that govern our CNS. If there are mechanisms that inspect formal aspects of the system, consciousness is a kind of device that inspects an already interpreted equation, or an already solved equation. Consciousness looks only to states in the state space. The class of semantical blocks that are substituted in the variables of the equations is a class of materials that come from the environment. This is why culture, context and language play such an important role in building our "conscious experience". We don't have access to the invariant form that comes from the physical substrate, we have only from the conscious point of view to the class of solutions the system assumes in the phase space and the domain in which this interpretation is done is the set of contextual, cultural and linguistic layers.

3. Reasonability is a narrative that comes from the concatenation between robustness at the control level of consciousness (from the formal point of view) and from the plausibility and syntactical structures that comes from the level of contents that are substituted at the solutions level. One may expect henceforth, that the syntactical and semantical rules that govern language and thought are equivalents of regions of stability at the formal level. This may be true but one cannot warrant that since the system is sensitive to the initial conditions, all the points of stability one system has will be the same in another presumed identical system.

V. The individual and the collective character of the mental semantics

One may question about the syntactical, semantical and pragmatical nature of dream narratives. The rules of language significance and of conscious usage are they maintained during dreams? Are they also preserved during psychoses? It is well known fact that during manic episodes the subject presents a kind of association that treats words as phonological icons and the preservation of discourse structure is abolished, being substituted by a "iconic-phonological" associative run. Schizophrenia shows other semantical disturbances. The individual tends to build neologisms and even talk with new solipsistic meanings. The lack of shared reference and the concreteness of the discourse are marks of this disorder, or at least of certain types of it.

Dreams preserve plain narratives but are frequently contamined by a sort of non-sensical association of scenes. The alternative to the old way of interpreting symbolic data by hermeneutical analysis and by suppositions like repression, displacement, and other freudian concepts can be replaced by a more general set of principles.

If the mental represents an ascendant hierarchy towards a decision-making device that enables the individual to feel responsibility instead of indeterminacy. If there is a transmutation from the form that governs the CNS to the contents that are the states of consciousness than we may hypothesize that :

1. There is relation between words and objects, be they real or virtual

2. There is a private access to internal states

3. Language and culture reshape the idiosyncratic aspects of one's contingent experience, pushing the individual to collective rules.

4. Stability is a result of reinforcement and punishment from the environment. This is why we can establish a less associationistic discourse and a more abstract and universal one. Associations are more primitive phenomena that are fed only by contingent parameters. If there were no environmental adjusting control, or what is called "voluntary control", each of us would tend to stabilize in different patterns. Culture and socialization are ways of globalization of the possible solutions each of us can reach for a certain class of equations. Insofar as we tend to behave almost equally during the robust voluntary control period, i.e. during awakeness, we still have a "memory" of the routes the system adopted, or the integer of our solutions curve. The less "voluntary control" is apt to correct the shape of our attractors the more we tend to local and "personal" solutions. This is why psychoses and dreams reveal intimacies of our owns in spite of being so embellished by bizarreness. Stress, in this sense, can be for the conscious real a category that has nothing to do with the real stresses one suffers, just because consciousness instead of being the privileged place of individuality is the bridge that maintains the individual in a socialized and "universal" point. From the content point of view it is the conscious discourse that is the place of "universality" and of nomicity. But, remember from the form point of view it the myriad of solutions the equations have that gives us our common shared universal character. This is why it is so difficult to understand the intimacy of a discourse that as content is bizarre and as form is the purest expression of the automatic activity of the CNS.

VI. Conclusion

Consciousness, dreams and psychoses reveal a common character that allow to conclude that mental disorders are a kind of control pathology. Neural networks and its dynamical descriptions, added by a mixed interpreting semantics, furnish good metaphors that enlighten new ways to see mental illness.

REFERENCES

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