Introduction:
Psychiatry and the Biocognitive Model of Mind

“Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.”

—Niels Bohr

The purpose of this book is to start to fill in the details of the model of mind outlined in my previous monographs [1,2,3]. For want of a better term, I named it the ‘biocognitive model of mind,’ unaware that somebody else had a prior claim to the word [4]. Fortunately, that hasn’t been a problem as we are of similar philosophical inclinations, and two heads are surely better than one.

This model says that the mind is an informational space generated by the brain by means of principles and processes that, these days, are universally applied throughout industry, commerce, at home and at play—in fact, everything we do these days seems to depend on these principles. There is nothing new about any of them as they have been transforming society throughout my lifetime, and before. However, there is no guarantee that what works in a laboratory or in a laptop or mobile phone has anything to do with the human mind. While it may even be the case that the principles behind a desktop computer apply perfectly to animal “minds,” we can’t ever assume that they apply to human mental function, which seems to reach so much further in its scope.

It’s possible that this particular debate may never be resolved because, if the brain does function like an ordinary computer, it’s not clear that we can ever know the codes by which it operates. At this stage, I don’t think that’s a problem. All I am doing is setting out the case for a new model of mind based on the notion that the mind emerges from the brain in its normal function as a switching device of almost incomprehensible complexity and power.

The first consequence of this is that we have to take the mind seriously and stop trying to devise theories of mind or behavior that start with the idea that we can never know anything about it, or that science can’t deal with it, or that it is inherently antiscientific, or all the other arguments that have been raised against this type of project. The mind exists, it is a reality, it arises from the brain by principles that are neither mysterious nor magical, and it then acts upon the universe by non-magical means to produce changes that we choose by an act of willpower [5]. In essence, this project is about giving a formal, rational basis to most of what ordinary people have always understood of minds—the Folk Psychology concept of mind, to use Wilhelm Wundt’s apt term.

Of course, this puts the project on the other side of the fence from all serious theories of mind or psychology developed in the twentieth century. They all started with the notion that the idea of mind was too silly or too abstruse or irrational or whatever for scientists to talk about, even in their sleep. The American psychologist, John B. Watson, who played a major part in initiating the behaviorist movement, said in about 1916 that he wanted his students to be as ignorant of questions of mind as engineering students. He achieved that particular goal but I don’t think the world, or several generations of psychologists, were any the better for it—or that they will thank him. The philosopher Daniel Dennett is scathing about the concept of a dualist mind and never misses an opportunity to hammer mentalist theories as magical gibberish and “green slime” nonsense. He is aware that his own theory, functionalism, is counter-intuitive but that doesn’t worry him as he believes the correct theory of mind has to be counter-intuitive as we have tried all the intuitive ones an