Chapter 1: What is the Human Personality?
Definition of the Human Personality: The personality reflects the choices a human being is making and the evaluative processes behind those choices, every moment from birth to death. Her evaluative processes are how she is able to cognitively put information together via her unique ability to coordinate her behaviors with her sensory and nervous systems. Her sensory and nervous systems are calibrated to work precisely for her cognitive capacities. She is a fully functional, integrated, biological organism designed to make sense of information in her environment in ways that can makes sense to her.
Within the context of a human's biology, interpreting information, predicting what to do next, and making choices, or decisions, for what to do next, is the only dynamic the human being engages in actively. All other human functions are automatic or instinctive. Therefore, the main requirement of each human is to be able to interpret, predict, and decide reliably, comfortably, and effectively. Since it is the only action dynamic a human engages in, any personality or mental health disorders reflect a problem with a human's ability to effectively interpret information and make predictions.
Our human personality is simply a reflection of our decisions. That is all it is. It is a reflection of the decisions we make moment to moment, day to day, month to month, year to year, etc.
Our decisions are not a function of underlying psychological qualities or conditions that mysteriously haunt our sinews. There are no such things as psychological qualities; there are no precise or empirically verified or verifiable definitions of them, either. As opposed to mystical psychological qualities, our decisions are a function of a very clear chain of events that anyone with a personality can ascertain. We take in information through our senses. Our nervous system, with our brain at the helm, coordinates our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions in such a way that we can make sense of the incoming information. Once we synthesize the information, we make a cognitive prediction about what to do next. From that prediction, we make a decision. Once we make a decision, it is reflected via our personality.
Human biology is geared for humans to actively participate in one and only one single activity to keep its biological engine running. Our one singular activity is to make decisions. Every other human activity is involuntary or instinctive. We make decisions quite well because our sensory and nervous systems do most of the work for us, and it is what we are primed to do all day long every moment of every day we are alive. We are our decisions, our personalities reflect our decision making capacities and processes, and every single solitary decision we make, makes sense from our perspective. We are not wired to interpret, predict, and decide in ways that are suppose to make sense from any perspective other than our own.
How do my sensory and nervous systems work together to allow me to make decisions, the decisions that end up being reflected as my personality?
This is a very easy answer. My eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin all allow me to take in information. My brain and nervous systems, which include my thoughts and emotions and behaviors, allow me to process that information, interpret that information, predict what to do with that information, and then make a decision about it. My personality is the reflection of the final product of my sensory and nervous system working together to allow me to interpret, predict, and decide upon an action to take in any given moment.
Other than making decisions, there is literally nothing else left up to human beings to physically do in order to be living, breathing humans. All other human functions occur automatically or instinctively, requiring nothing from us. For example, if I want a cup of tea, I decide to pour it from the teapot. My muscles take the direction from my brain and engage themselves to support my decision to pour tea. I don't have to operate a crank to make my muscles work for me. I simply make a decision that I want my muscles to do a particular task. My muscles engage until I make the decision to stop. Then they stop, pretty much like magic when you think about it. But it's not magic, it is biology.
If I wake up and drink a cup of tea, make my daughter breakfast, and then write, these action behaviors all represent decisions I am making throughout the morning. This particular morning my personality is reflecting a tea drinking breakfast maker who writes. I make many mini decisions to accomplish each action behavior on this morning, but the sum total of each decision I make is who I am at any given moment. My personality is not fixed, or something you can talk about or define as if it is a noun that never changes. You also cannot talk about my personality as if it is a thing that does something. It reflects something. It reflects my decisions. It doesn't DO anything.
The term personality disorder makes no sense, nor does the concept behind the term. A personality disorder is really a decision disorder. But there can be no such thing as a decision disorder; it is a biological impossibility to have a decision disorder and be alive. Every single human, no matter how they look to an objective observer, is always making decisions that make sense from his or her perspective. If a person's decisions are bizarre, there is a biological need for them to be so. We are always operating within the dictates of the requirements of our biology at all times.
It seems to me we have long needed to reframe how we understand and talk about the human personality in order to get to the bottom of our catastrophic amounts of mental illness. If we reframe our understanding, I am convinced we can problem solve in ways that will alleviate most human suffering due to completely preventable mental illnesses. These mental illnesses are adaptations, not illnesses, and I truly believe most of them are quite preventable. If we stop requiring people to adapt their moment to moment decision making to fit the parameters of other people's perspectives, then people will be able to exercise their decision making capabilities comfortably, reliably, and predictably. I will expand upon this idea later.
Currently, psychologists, neurologists, physicians, biologists, etc. define and use the term personality as if it is a stable, predictable state we received at birth and are kind of stuck with, good, bad, or otherwise. Personality theorists believe our personality influences our behavior. Again, I am saying our personality reflects our decisions, it doesn't influence them. The party line you see most often when researching the definition of the personality is this:
"Although no single definition is acceptable to all personality theorists, we can say that personality is a pattern of relatively permanent traits and unique characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a person's behavior."
(Feist and Feist, 2009)
First off, the fact no single definition exists about this entity we call the human personality that is the recipient of vast numbers of diagnoses and drugs via the psychopharmaceutical industrial complex is one of the most jarring intellectual discoveries I have ever made. Secondly, this optional, imprecisely defined, and non-agreed upon definition upon which the whole field of psychology is based has literally no applicable meaning or verifiable validity of any sort. The above definition uses words put together that label a static thing, and the words used in the definition share no agreement or firm definitions among theorists either. Temperament and character traits are both completely fabricated concepts that have philosophical meanings, but can never be distilled down to anything tangible or verifiable.
The idea the psychopharmaceutical industry clears trillions of dollars each year to fund the very research that perpetuates the conclusions that will perpetuate the use of its drugs is plenty disturbing. The fact this research is being performed to supply drugs for personality disorders when there is no mutually agreed upon definition or theory of what the human personality even is, stuns me more and more with each passing day.
Psychopharamceutical companies donate hundreds of millions of dollars every year to mental research facilities doing research for their drugs. Many foxes are guarding this henhouse.
The fact psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, and neurologists have not caught this inconceivable error of not providing a valid theory for the human personality hardly seems possible. I believe one reason the field of psychology and psychiatry has let the lack of a definition for the human personality go undetected so long is because students go to school and doggedly try to master the bodies of knowledge put forth in these fields. They don't try to constantly tear down the existing theories and rebuild them like mathematicians do and other scientists. Psychology is also weighed down with way too much homage paid to its founders, their outdated theories too precious to ever strike from the books.
Another reason psychology cannot see the stunning number of contradictions and invalid information it promotes is because it is a field constantly trying to prove itself right. The main ingredient of scientific research is that it is always trying to prove itself wrong, not right. Psychology does not apply any intellectual rigor to it's concepts. Its members vote on disorders and allow a grab bag of imprecise, vaguely defined, and non-empirically arrived at definitions and theories to serve as its foundation. You can't really disprove concepts that have never been proven, so keeping foundational concepts vague has allowed the fallacies to hide in plain sight for many decades now.
Finally, we have come to know ourselves backwards since birth due to our incorrect ideas about how the human personality operates. This is why the incorrect definitions remain so entrenched. We have to literally change how we understand ourselves before we can see the inconsistencies. It is a catch 22, big time. I stumbled upon one inconsistency by accident, and like a fire in a dried flower factory, all the rest of the inconsistencies lit up in my brain. The whole field of psychology is completely wrong about virtually everything. The model of supporting people can be used if they reframe, retool, and re-conceptualize literally everything.
Psychology's premise about the human personality is wrong. Literally every concept psychology has come up with is built upon a wrong premise. The definition of a scientific theory is this. "A theory is NOT a guess or a belief. A theory is based on empirical evidence found through scientific research that was rigorously controlled to avoid bias." Theories serve as guidelines for how to interpret new and existing knowledge for the scientific concept they define and explain. According to Steven Schafersman, scientific theories are the most rigorous, reliable, and comprehensive form of scientific knowledge. They are derived from empirical evidence, and can be utilized as reliable instruments of prediction.
The current "optional," non empirically based definition of the human personality has steered us head first into heartbreaking numbers of suicides, depression, anxiety, mental health break downs, addiction, divorce, and personalities labeled by the industry as disordered.
Human suffering due to mental health problems is real and it is staggering and it increases exponentially each year.
Is our human personality really that inadequate for the task of being human, or are we causing our personalities to break down due to our misunderstanding of what the human personality is and what it isn't?
A trillion or quadrillion dollar a year psychopharmaceutical industry, whether at the drug sales end or the manufacturing end or the therapeutic end, is not going to go looking for ways to debunk its existence. It is constantly creating research that will "prove" the need for it's diagnoses and its drugs.
People who work in these fields want to do good work and help people and pay their mortgages and make their car payments. If you are psychological researcher, with much debt, your only real hope for making good money is via grants from drug companies. You are not going to look for ways to make less money. I wouldn't. Not because I want to perpetuate invalid research, but because it wouldn't really occur to me that my foundational concepts for my research were dead wrong. Nobody in any field spends much time trying to negate its foundational concepts. This is not how our brains typically work. I started looking into our foundational concepts of the human personality totally by accident. I was trying to use our current research to help myself and my family, not to debunk current research. Due to my 25 year long unrelenting search for answers to personal problems, I gave up, cried uncle, resigned myself to accepting the problems as part of the so called human condition. Then, one day, by accident and the help of my daughter with special needs and her friends, I uncovered a series of intellectual mistakes we have made throughout history about the biology of the human personality. I have discovered these mistakes have radiated outward and perpetuate many false beliefs about how humans are biologically wired to exist optimally. Sadly, these false beliefs perpetuate practices that cause us to undermine the integrity of the predictive and decision making structures and functions in all humans. Science, research, and practices concerning the human brain and personality have serious deficits due to the misinformation we are harboring and disseminating concerning our human personality.
Here is our first piece of false information about the human personality. My personality doesn't jump into the womb with me ready to make me who I am. I am not bathed with a unique personality state complete with character traits and a relatively fixed temperament, all of which are ready to spontaneously appear as soon as I can talk in order to make me who I am. Nor does my personality form over time as I grow and develop, mysteriously arising from my identity and creating a kind of whispering director in the spaces between cells, informing me what to do and how to do it.
However, the above descriptions are exactly the psychological view is of the human personality. The reasons psychological theorists give for why they think the human personality develops as it does is totally made up stuff based upon their imaginations only. No theorists has come up with a theory of personality for which they can say definitively, "Yes, this is what personality is."
Furthermore, one's personality is not the driver of one's personality which is how the term is thought about and used currently. This makes no sense any way you look at it. Personality is a REFLECTION of how humans interpret information and make decisions. That is all it is. A reflection of what humans do cannot be an influencer. We don't say a mirror causes us to look how we look. It reflects our image back to us. Our personality is the sum total of how and what we think, and how we act on that thinking.
Temperament, the most oft used word psychological theorists use in describing the human personality is not the driver of my personality either. Here is one of the many baffling definitions of temperament:
Temperment: "a person's or animal's nature, esp. as it permanently affects their behavior. Example, "She had an artistic temperament." Synonyms: disposition, nature, character, personality, makeup, constitution, mind, spirit."
Moving along to the term character traits. My character traits are not the driver of my personality. Traits are hair and eye color, degree of muscle tone, skin color, bone density, etc. But character traits is another word that has no identifiable meaning behind it. Character is a made up word that every person in the world has a personalized definition for, making it virtually meaningless as a scientific descriptor of a human. Plus, character is a metaphorical and relativistic word. There is no structure in our skull or our body called a character. These kinds of metaphorical words can not be part of a scientific definition of any kind, least of all as part of defining the most elemental aspect of the human being.
My personality is what it is based on the way I am making a decision and the kind of decision I am making in any given moment. My decisions have a similarity to them quite often because of the way my particular sensory motor and nervous systems are able to perceive information. I can only understand how I understand in order to make the decisions I do in every passing moment. My decisions can become increasingly more sophisticated as I gain more experience and knowledge about any given subject.
We somehow got lost in a logical quagmire when defining human personality throughout history. In fact, I believe this mysterious thing many people like to ponder called consciousness, is simply our ability to understand how we operate as humans. We have the ability to understand how we operate, but our collective wrongess about what our personality reflects as opposed to what it does makes us think we don't know what consciousness is. Of course, this notion of consciousness for me has no relevance. People looking for it are looking for some cosmic link between the human mind and some universal distributor of "consciousness" floating around either in space, or molecules, or energy particles. This quest for consciousness I never questioned until I realized how simple the answers are for how people think. Now that quest seems funny to me.
What is not funny is that our collective wrongness and misconceptions about the human personality causes us to make grave mistakes relating to each other, mistakes that drive unfathomably massive psychopharmaceutical, divorce, therapeutic, and prison industries. These industries are not inherently bad. Given our current understanding of personality, we need these industries to do damage control.
However, the fact cannot be overlooked that psychological theorists provide exactly 8 guesses about what the personality is. There are officially 8 theories of personality on the books, up for grabs for practitioners and researchers to choose whichever they like, or to cut and paste and make up their own, or to close their eyes and choose, or to simply shoot from the hip by never choosing a theory of personality.
Many aspects of psychology are handled this way. Psychology has several theories of emotion because it can't decide on one. Psychologists use the word emotion incorrectly, and have promoted very damaging notions about our emotions. (To be discussed later.) In researching psychological psychological terminology, I have found most all of terms to be very vaguely defined, to lack uniform or mutual agreement, and to be guesses based upon theories that are also guesses, and to lack empirically based, verifiable evidence.
The implications of incorrect theories and optional pick whatever you want to use theories, or don't bother with a theory, is one reason psychological research cannot be replicated in order to be validated. Nobody knows which theory of the human personality, if any, a researcher may have chosen for his or her research. For this reason, there is no way to accurately interpret that research or to replicate it. Incorrect and optional pick your own theories is also why there are zero cures for the 297 disorders of personality listed in the DSM, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. In 1952, the American Psychological Association put together the first DSM-1 and listed 106 disorders. In 1980, it listed 265. And by 2013, they've moved up to 297.
These disorders all have an insurance code listed right there in the book, making it super simple for any prescribing psychiatrist or doctor or "consulting therapist" to list the code on the insurance form and be reimbursed 100% of the time from Medicare and Medicaid, no questions asked. If a private insurer covers mental health costs, they will also honor these codes, no questions asked.
Disorders of personality get listed in the DSM by a vote taken by the members of the American Psychological Association. Can you imagine surgeons basing their choice of heart medications via voting? We require thorough testing for drugs for our body, but any prescribing psychiatrist or physician can order drugs for children as young as 2 now, because a group of random psychology association members voted to approve this treatment. Research that approves psychotropic drugs for 2 year olds is sketchy at best. It is chilling.
Our choice is to do more of the same or to make some changes. We can unquestioningly accept the foundational concepts of biology and psychology in terms of how they have loosely, vaguely, and admittedly imprecisely defined the human personality. We can continue to allow the current vague, optional, and imprecise, and multiple definitions of human personality to inform and feed the psychopharmaceutical industrial complex. If we do not create and disseminate an accurate definition of the human personality, we will continue to witness increasing numbers of depression, suicide, anxiety, addiction, incarceration, divorce, domestic violence, homicide, rape, personality disorders, and insanity.
We have been waiting for a magic discovery of a magic chemical, pill, or brain finding that can give us all our answers.
Our nervous systems are indeed as complex as the solar system, but the function of our nervous system is easy to understand if we just observe ourselves as existing inside of a completely functional and integrated biological system.
I believe with these few paragraphs defining what the human personality is and dispelling the myths about what it isn't, we can begin to lift the veil separating us from reliable, predictable, and consistent mental health and well being.
How does my definition of human personality translate into practical application?
How can the practical application of this new definition put an end to what we now refer to as personality based disorders and personality based mental health problems?
Essentially, we cannot harm an individual's ability to trust in his predictive capabilities. He needs to be able to make sense of information in his environment at every moment he is alive in ways that make sense for him. Threats to how a person is deciding or against what they have decided feel like attacks to their nervous system. Humans will do anything to avoid the discomfort of these kinds of attacks via withdrawal or aggression, or some form of numbing.
Stay tuned for more...
No comments:
Post a Comment