The article I am reposting here interests me, not because of its criticism of a branch of psychology, rather because of the content within the argument relating to how meaning is reached, and information about plasticity of the mind. The article quotes from a text by neuroscientist Brad M Peters of St Mary’s University which is reviewed favourably. ‘Collective community of mind” is a phrase that I will no doubt return to.
“Now let us turn to the human mind. Evolutionary psychologists want to say that meaning and information are objectively pre-programmed by our inherited biology. However, it would appear that we extract much of our information, and the meaning it contains, from a sociocultural cloud of symbolic representations that belong to a shared human subjectivity, or something Raymond Tallis refers to as the community of minds. Our subjective mental states are thus socioculturally structured and shaped through our reliance on an agreed-upon language and agreed-upon sets of subjective human meanings. The brain is only one part of the picture: it facilitates the mechanistic activities of the mind, but it does not solely cause them. Human meanings, which belong to the collective community of minds, will thus often transcend the underlying mechanisms that represent them.” (2017)
Extract here: http://modernpsychologist.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Peters-Evolutionary-Psychology-Critique-2013.pdf