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Re Joe’s 3/8/ comments:
What’s the downside of the locution “dissociated state” as special state of consciousness? My dissertation work and some studies I did afterward identified trance phenomena as states of diminished Final-Order Appraisals (FOAs), where, characteristically, people did not identify anomalies as anomalies –– a state of affairs that corresponded to a disrupted episodic memory. People could recall content, all of which was treated as matter-of-fact, but demonstrated deficits in the accurate recall of the sequence of the actions they reported, along with a very poor estimation of the duration things took. We concluded that sequence and duration are fundamental aspect of reality testing, i.e., the ability or disposition to make a FOA. (Content, Sequence, and Duration as ordinary parameters of a behavioral episode.)
I’m still not clear about the problem of employing “consciousness”. I realize we have other locutions that have no, subtle, or significantly different conceptual commitments, but I am not at all clear if something fundamental to the Person Concept is violated by employing consciousness as an ordinary meaning of how we understand Cognizant Action. Is “Cognizance” any different?
By the way, I’m troubled by saying thoughts are behaviors devoid of “Performance”. But perhaps I misunderstand. I perform my thoughts all sorts of ways including whether I reveal them to you or not.
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Now we’re having some fun.
Two thoughts:
1) Psychology as a subject matter has not done well negating consciousness. A very brief history: The early and radical behaviorists wanted a strictly positivistic approach based on manipulating and measuring Performance as the only relevant parameter for establishing a “scientific psychology”. They were reacting to the psychodynamic and existential understanding of the behavior of persons as involving intentional actions predicated on the state of a person’s consciousness of themselves, their actions, and their world. Those radical behaviorists have now morphed into cognitive behaviorists.
2) Descriptive Psychology’s Person Concept has, as paradigmatic, a person’s Deliberate and Cognizant Action. No one is happy with the word construction: “Consciousness Action”. Here’s my question. Can Cognizant Action be understood as an act without conscious awareness of the distinctions a person is acting on? If you want to drop the word “conscious”, fine, but then you’ll likely fall back on “awareness” and “altered states of awareness”. I’m not sure what is gained by a resistance to consciousness as a useful concept. But maybe I’m just not woke.
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Jacob, perhaps you could be more specific about Bessel’s book and/or what grabs your interest that you think a DP perspective might illuminate?
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To go back to the point I raised above with Joe. What are we to make of acting while deficit in the power or disposition to make FOAs (see Plotkin and Schwartz, 1982). What are we to make of trance, dissociation, non lucid dreams, etc? Are they not conscious states? I believe it makes more sense to recognize them as non-paradigmatic states of consciousness, that is, altered states of consciousness (ASCs). I think Joe’s Individual, Status, World formulation points to the paradigm and should allow for non paradigmatic states. In the case of trance, dissociation, non lucid dreams, and so on, the deficit is in having an available context of a whole connected world where anomalies have a special case such that they can be noted as such.
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Joe, I’d like to hear more of what you think about “something that is a connected whole (as articulated in What Actually Happens) and includes the person.” since you seem to require this for a person to be “conscious”. How would this relate to an person who is in a dissociated state, aware but unable or unwilling to make Final-Order Appraisals? That is, a person who temporarily is unable or unwilling to place the OPESAs they are attending to in the context of the reality testing possibilities of noting sequence and duration and/or the recognition of anomalies as anomalies?
