Pleasure/Pain Principle believers Thomas Hobbes J.S. Mill Jeremy Bentham

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1 First lecture for test two The Age of Enlightenment in Philosophy Now we have Descartes Dilemma: How does this interaction between the mind and body take place? He did not solve this so others will answer the question. Spinoza, Hobbes and Leibnitz continued his philosophy. All three were interested in the Social Contract What would be the best form of government? THOMAS HOBBES Hobbes was a product of his times, he was pessimistic because he was witness to the civil war going on in the U.K. The Catholics vs. the Protestants battling for the Monarchy. Oliver Cromwell was an anti-catholic who sent in troops to kill the Irish. Hobbes wrote The Leviathan. It was a political work for an argument for an absolute monarchy. He tried to justify and explain why this should be so. This was his social contract contribution. He said humans are easy to understand; we are machines without a soul. Everything is operated by the brain. We work according to scientific principles. This was his answer to Descartes Dilemma. He said humans are prone to violence. Violence is good for survival and protection. Self-preservation is the highest motive. Free Will is an illusion because we are machines. There is a pleasure/pain principle; he offered a hedonistic theory of motivation. We seek what is pleasurable and avoid pain. It is the fear of death that motivates humans to create social order. Civilization is a matter of self-defense. Each of us should be discouraged into killing each other. What appears to be free will is nothing more than a verbal label we use to describe the attractions and aversions we experience while interacting with the environment. Hobbes believed it was the government s job to keep people in proper conduct and enforce laws. There should be a benevolent monarchy system. It was his belief that to govern effectively, a monarchy needed to understand human nature. He rejected Descartes theory of innate ideas. Everything that exists consists of matter. He is an empiricist, materialist and determinist. We could figure humans out if we knew the physiology of the brain. How do you find out about people? Hobbes idea was to listen to people talk. Ex. Find out what people find humor in. If society breaks up then who s to blame? The Government. The people will reject the government s stability. Pleasure/Pain Principle believers Thomas Hobbes J.S. Mill Jeremy Bentham 1

2 BENEDICT SPINOZA All is God No free will He grew up in liberal Amsterdam. Holland was the center of intellectual freedom and attracted Descartes and John Locke who had experienced persecution elsewhere in Europe. Spinoza said there was no separation among God, nature and the mind. He said they were all aspects of the same substance. All is God The whole universe and nature is God. An attempt was made on his life so he left the city to make lens for telescopes. The shavings got into his lungs and he died young. He used the deductive method of geometry. His answer to Descartes Dilemma is: Only one thing exists, the SUBSTANCE. Today we would call this atoms. There are two parts to this substance, materiality and intelligence. Anything that physically exists has these two properties. Substance has intelligence, everything has a stamp of intelligence lended to it. A snowflake is pretty, even a rock has to be molded over years. A rock cannot realize it has intelligence though. Where did this intelligence come from? A reflection of God. Reason why he said All is God. The intelligence of an object is the soul according to Spinoza. Mind and body were two aspects of the same thing the human body. Since God is nature and nature is lawful and humans are part of nature then everything is determined. We have no free will. It makes no sense to view God as the cause of everything and at the same time to believe that humans possess free will. He viewed his assassination as part of a master plan of the universe. He didn t have any ill will of his attacker. He accepted this action and moved away. No use to get irrational and attack our attackers. The best life to live was one with a knowledge of the causes of things. We should use our mental facilities to the best of our fullest extent. The universe has no beginning or end. There are no accidents in life. There are no random events in life. GOTTFRIED WILHELM VON LEIBNIZ There is free will He invented differential and integral calculus at the same time Newton invented his calculus. Believed ideas to be innate. What is innate is the potential to have an idea. Experience can cause a potential idea to be actualized but it can never create an idea. He believed everything is alive. The universe consisted of an infinite number of life units called mondas. Monads are tiny bits of energy, similar to atoms, and all monads are active and conscious. However there is a hierarchy in nature. Monads differ in intelligence; what is called inert matter is made up of muddled thoughts. Monads are immaterial, unlike atoms, and they are indivisible. If we break up the atom into smaller parts we discover its subatomic particles the quarks and muons that 2

3 are really energy states, not hard matter. So a table is nothing more than a bundle of energy. One special monad is the one for mental activity. There is a mental and physical world but all are reduced to monads. Mental and physical monads do not interact with each other; they are opposite of each other. Continue with Leibniz He is a psycho-physical parallest. Like two clocks next to each other, ticking simultaneously in harmony but not interacting with each other. They operate independently and tell the same information but do not interact. He said consciousness and unconsciousness lies on a continuum with a limen (border) threshold separating the two. On page 127 in Scavio s book, Leibniz describes three evils: Metaphysical evil refers to the imperfections in humans Physical evil feelings of suffering Moral evil the basis of sin. The soul uses its free will to transgress against divine law. Moral evil can be done by only rational beings. JOHN LOCKE Locke opposed innate ideas. Humans are born Tabula Rosa, a blank slate. He is an empiricist. All knowledge is ultimately derived from sensory experience. What becomes a person s reality? Their experiences. We cannot separate sensory experience and the mind. We identify colors but our senses do not interpret them correctly all the time. Senses are doing a translation. We think it s the truth though. There are two qualities to senses, primary and secondary. Locke said both referred to characteristics of the physical world. What distinguishes them was the type of psychological experience they caused. With PRIMARY QUALITIES there is a match between what is physically present and what is experienced psychologically. The SECONDARY QUALITIES of objects also have the power to produce ideas but the ideas they produce do not correspond to anything in the physical world. Ex. Sound and taste are not physically real but they make ideas. Both qualities produce ideas. Association of Ideas. If gravity is the force that keeps the physical world together then association keeps our ideas together. We learn and remember by similarity, contrast and contiguity. Contiguity means that the closer two events are in time the more we will be able to remember them. Association works according to principles. The mind is passive. Active reflection is imagination The only innate idea we have is active reflection. Think this was on the test too. 3

4 George Berkeley To be, is to be perceived He wanted to start the first college for American Indians. He was an Anglican minister. His slogan was To be, is to be perceived. If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? No. It makes a sound wave but with no receptor to turn it into a sound it just dissipates. He didn t like the idea of materialism because it was deteriorating the foundations of religious beliefs. Matter does not exist. Denied the contention that all ideas are derived from interactions with empirical world. Only secondary qualities exist, we perceive primary qualities using secondary qualities. All things come into existence when they are perceived. He argued with Locke in that human knowledge is based only on ideas. He was a strong empiricist and held to a subjective view of existence. 4

5 ND FOR MIDTERM SCAVIO WAS ABSENT SO WE WATCHED A VIDEO ON LEARNING AND MEMORY. 5

6 rd Lecture for MIDTERM VI. British Empiricism was modeled after Hobbes. (handout) John Locke was the first British Empiricist and John Stuart Mill was the last. Their hero is Isaac Newton. The empiricist tried to make analogies with the human mind and how physical systems operate. Mind is passive until stimulated by outside forces Sensory Input. They wanted to study the mind like Newton studied the universe. No innate ideas to stimulate the mind; Locke said we become who we are through experience. Berkley To be is to be perceived No reality until there is a perception of it. This slogan will appear in today s physics. We now have to reexamine Newton s ideas. Newton s laws work for the macro world, but not the tiny micro world of the atom. When we get into the atom it is complicated. Everything is made out of atoms. Heisenberg s Uncertainty Principle A German physicist named Heisenberg gave a uncertainty principle. When you observe the atom you change the atom. You shine a photon in it to hit an electron and it bounces back for you to record it. But the electron is bounced to. So you can only get an estimated idea about the atom. Heisenberg said you would never know two pieces of information about the same atom. You can estimate only its location or momentum, not both in the same atom. To observe the atom, you change the atom. The electron can be anywhere until it is observed. The observation establishes the electron s reality. Schroeder s Cat A hypothetical experiment. What happens if you magnify it? A cat is inside an iron box so we can t see it. Inside the box is a flask of poison and radioactive material and a Geiger counter. If the Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask will break and the poison will spill. Is the cat alive or dead? The cat is alive and dead at the same time; what determines the reality of the cat is an observation of it. Macro world doesn t work like the micro world but the macro is made out of the micro. Light is both a wave and a particle; how we perceive it determines its reality. It s either or, never both. To be is to be perceived. David Hume David Hume Many vocations. All these guys were philosophers by hobby. Gave us modern skepticism. If we have no innate ideas and mind is blank at birth, then why do we always get into arguments? Because no two people look at the world the same way formed by our experiences. We do overlap experience. We do all agree we are sensing the world, this is the only thing we can agree on. This is not a dream. But once we go beyond the senses our thoughts are only opinions. Highest level of reasoning are guesses. Think about history s mistakes on science that were thought to be exactly correct. The earth is flat. All knowledge is subjective. Why do we believe in 6

7 such ideas? Because of our convictions, strongly held beliefs. We associate ideas with our emotions. Do we associate with reality or with emotion? We cannot look at the real world in an objective manner so we make mistakes. There is neither a mind nor a self. All beliefs can be explained through association; all soul and matter are products of the imagination. Only 2 types of knowledge: Demonstrative and Empirical knowledge. Demonstrative refers to abstract imagination including mathematics. Empirical knowledge is based on experience. For knowledge to be useful it must be either demonstrative or empirical. If it is not it is useless. Continue with Hume: Mistakes happen with contiguity. We are so impressed by contiguity we make causal deductions. We say A causes B because they happen so close in time when they are not really related to each other. We cannot say correlation means causality. Correlation doesn t mean causality statistic axiom. Whenever we go beyond the senses we are wrong. Senses show reality but not when we go beyond that. B.F. Skinner said, theories are guesses. David Hartley Offered a physiological theory to explain impressions. Considered contiguity to be the most important associative principle. He gets us into the brain physiology. He was the first to try to explain neurophysiology of thought and behavior. He was wrong but he gets us into the research in the 19 th Century. Started research on the Nervous system. How do nerves work? Said the nerves vibrate information to the brain. Wrong! Vibrations were called impressions. James Mill and John Stuart Mill Father and son team James Mill thought consciousness is held together by the fusion of senses. If atoms combine to make a physical object does our mind work the same way by fusing our sensations? Sensations binds consciousness together through association. Not a bad analogy said Scavio. Known as the Atomic analogy of the mind Is a great thought a bundle of ideas? Mill said the mind consists of sensations and ideas held together by contiguity. John Stuart Mill He had an I.Q. of 180. He is against innate ideas. He was a smart person. Everyone else to him is boring. How does the mind generate ideas? Once the mind creates the idea the sensory part leaves it alone. Hydrogen and Oxygen are two different elements but combine to make water, a totally different substance than their properties alone. Ideas are created from experience but one can never reduce the ideas back to critical experience. Once the mind creates the idea, the mind separates the idea from the senses. The value of the idea exists in its own right. He didn t like his father s atomic analogy; instead a chemistry analogy is better. He brought British empiricism into politics. He contributes to the theory of Utilitarianism: Human happiness depends upon achievement. The government should 7

8 pass laws guided by one principle: Greatest good for the greatest number. Make sure they are more winners than losers. Jeremy Bentham was the man who came up with this idea. The Mills were his friend. Benton said we seek pleasure and avoid pain. Mill Jr. said this too. J.S.M.: How do we sustain happiness. What are we looking forward too? Achievement makes us happy. But happiness goes away so you must constantly keep trying to achieve success. But that gets too tiring. J.S. Mill was a high achiever. Bigger the achievement the happier we are. May have to change the achievement goals later in life. But failing makes us sad than not trying at all. He was for Labor. Ardent feminist. You must treat people equally then find out if its true about if women are less intelligent. Restrictions are wrong unless you know that genders really do differ. He brought empiricism into politics. He finally met his match with Harriet Taylor, but she was married. Her husband died and they married. But she died two years later. They treated each other as equal partners. No replacement for her. Then Darwin s book comes out saying we come from apes. This goes against his innate ideas attacks. But he s in no position to fight back. Primary laws: According to J.S. mill, the general laws that determine the overall behavior of events within a system. Secondary laws: According to J.S. Mill the laws that interact with primary laws and determine the nature of individual events under specific circumstances. These laws make precise understanding and prediction impossible. Thus, meteorology is an inexact science because knowledge of all the laws are not yet known. An inexact science might one day become an exact science though. Then came Darwin. Darwin s book says members of a species are not equal. We do not have blank ideas. Species survive by survival of the fittest. Darwin s made a campaign to sell this theory. It worked after J.S. Mill died his autobiography came out. Darwin s theory will overthrow British empiricism for good. We have innate ideas wired into our brains. J.S. Mill was the last British empiricist. French Empiricism Voltaire : Defender of empiricism, could not stand Descartes theory. Social critic. He didn t like the monarchy rule. Government was too strong. Believed that science would improve life. Science relies on empiricism. Le Mettrie : Materialist, no soul. Man is a machine. Also didn t like Descartes. All that exist is the body. Strong advocate of materialism, French gov t kicked him out. He was overweight and drank a lot. You should enjoy yourself. Not an Epicurean, he did not live in moderation s French revolution. People dispatched the royalty by public execution by the guillotine. The privileged are going to get there s, payback time in France. Cabanis did some experiments with the severed head. He whispered into their ear after they had their heads cut off. There was no reaction by the heads that were cut off. This did not favor 8

9 Descartes theory. This would favor LeMetrie once you re dead, you re dead. No soul living afterward as with Descartes. Napoleon, a dictator, did not like social science. Bans it from study. Despite this, advances are made in the brain in biological science, not in psychology though. Not until the end of the 19 th Century do we make this psych. connection with Charot. VIII: Biological Psychology Franz Joseph Gall Gall made a mistake by saying the exterior of the skull corresponds to the size and shape of the brain. How the skull is shaped corresponds with mental activity. Gall saw that people with prominent eyes were intelligent. Gall, as a scientist, was bridging the gap between biology and psychology. He mapped the skulls. Believed there was 35 areas of the skull that he could correlate with mental activity. Wrong idea, but it paves the way for more research. Florence will say he was wrong and mapps out animal brains. Florence is the leading scientist in the brain. However there are certain areas in the brain that corresponds to mental activity A man wakes up and cannot talk. Only thing he can say is tan, so his name becomes tan. Broca finds a lesion on his left temple. Broca s speech Center. But the skull does not follow the contours of the brain. Cannot determine brain size by measuring the skull. Phrenology was a wrong idea but inspired great reseat in France. Phrenology was like hand reading today. Popular back then. Vocational test were made based on phrenology. Some slang terms today include egghead and thick skull from phrenology. IX: Emmanuel Kant German philosopher. I was awaken intellectually by David Hume. I will make a Copernican revolution; I will combine rationalism and empiricism. Technically he will be a psycho - physical - parallelest. that means he will never reduce the mind to the brain. Never have a theory of consciousness. Brain and mind are separate. Mind to brain is popular in France but not in Germany. No biopsychology in Germany because of Kant. Mental powers are innate; mental powers are thinking and speaking. Good for what though? We create a reality in our mind. The end result shows up in consciousness. Mind has to turn sensations into reality. But not a true perfect translation of the real world. Consciousness is a translation of the real world. The Real World is called the Lumina. Phenomena are our mental interpretations. Phenomena are in the inside of our mind. The lumina is the outside world. So the phenomena is the translation of the lumina. Kant is a forerunner to Cognitive Psychology and information processing. Humans cannot 9

10 understand beyond the limits of the a priori knowledge. Means coming before. The mind is ready to be activated, the mind is active. A priori knowledge are innate powers for its operation (unity, contingency, cause effect reasoning, perception) Kant s free will: You are free to think what we want to think about; but no one can make you think. No brain washing. Categorical Imperative: Ethical and moral innate knowledge we have to dig to find in ourselves. Everyone has the same set of principles of moral and ethical principles but we individually find them ourselves. Limen: German word for boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness. Ideas go back and forth. In modern psychology the short-term memory is consciousness and your long-term memory is your unconsciousness. Hemholtz, leading physiologist researcher in Germany Hemholtz: French are studying the brain in the 19 th Century. His interest was in the senses. He gave us reasonable theories of color, hearing and the speed of the nerve impulse. Leads to the discovery of the synaptic gap between nerve cells. This is why a nerve impulse takes up time and doesn t travel at the speed of light. 32 meters per second. Two theories at the end of 19 th Century about nerves. Nerves wrap around each other or there is a gap between them. The second one is right. Wundt: Used the methods of research of physiology to study psychology. Physiology psychology today that means studying the brain. Fits in with Hemholtz s idea of studying the senses to get to the mind. The Doctrine of Specific Nerve Engines: The reason why we sense the world is because the optic nerves and the auditory nerves are different. But that is untrue. All the nerves are the same. Hemholtz gets credit for correcting this theory. Wrong theories leads to better research results. Going back to review again J.S. Mill J.S. Mill proposed a science on Ethology: Psychology would discover the universal laws according to which all human minds operate and then ethology would explain how individual minds or characters form under specific circumstances. The science of human nature would furnish the primary mental laws and ethology would furnish the secondary laws, such as personality. What Mill was searching for was the information necessary to turn psychology from an inexact science into an exact science! 10

11 A dedicated social reformer, his causes included freedom of speech, representative government and the emancipation of women. There was a belief that women were inferior to men. He believed this invalid and that a sound science of human nature would provide the basis for social equality. La Mettrie Man is a machine. A physical monist. Everything consists of only matter. To believe in a immaterial soul was silly. Human and nonhuman animals differ in only in degree. He equated intelligence and personality with the size and quality of the brain. Education and the development of language make us superior to animals. Intelligence was influenced by three factors: Brain size, brain complexity and education. He said acceptance of materialism will make for a better world. He believed that dualism and the belief in God are not only incorrect but also responsible for widespread misery. 11

12 th and Last lecture before Midterm Hemholtz will bring empiricism to psychology. Scientists will now study psychology using his methods. Hemholtz discovered the nerve conduction rate in a frog. X: (handout) Germany will start Experimental psychology: John Herbert, Herman Hemholtz, Gustav Fechner and Wilhem Wundt. Wundt is the founder of experimental psychology. Opens his research lab in Wundt is a pychophysical parallelist Leibniz s idea. We will not reduce the mental side to the physical side. We have a picture of reality called consciousness. We will not reduce mental activity to the physical side. You can study the senses but not inside the mind literally. Hemholtz studied the physiology of the senses. Then the next step is to ask? What do the senses do to the mental side of existence? This is where psychology starts. We start with 2 people: Fechner and Wundt. Wundt is given credit as the founder of the science of psychology because he lays out a paradigm. Fechner develops the first methods of research called Psychophysics. Psychophysics shows a correspondence between mental and physical processes but he was missing a paradigm no theory. So Wundt is given credit but there would not have been a Wundt without a Fechner. Fechner was brilliant He was a doctor and philosopher. But had no equal so became disenchanted with the world. Similar to John Stuart Mill. Psycho physics will be the first methods of psych. WEBER Pure physiologist, no psych. Background. He did an experiment testing if we could tell the difference between one object given greater weight to it. He put a 40-gram weight in a person s hand and added more weight to it. The subjects did not notice the difference until the weight difference was 1 gram. Then he started out with an 80-gram weight, to notice the difference it takes 2 grams, then for 120 grams it takes 3 grams to notice the difference; the senses follow a proportional value. There is a mental physical correspondence. Fechner is awaken from his slumber. Fechner will do another experiment. We will show a person a dim light and brighten it to see when the person can recognize the light. This very dim light is termed the: Absolute Lower Threshold of Perception. His methods are still used today, ex. hearing tests are pscho-physics. But Fechner is relying the subject s introspection, people can lie and make mistakes so he uses a lot of subjects. We are now dealing with only the conscious mind, not the unconscious. 12

13 Eventually we will have to stop the brightness of the light. He plotted the data on a graph. It is called the Weber-Fechner Law. We start at the Absolute lower threshold. S = K log R. S is the judgment and K is the constant. The greater the stimulus input then harder to tell the difference. The best sense to detect a change in the environment is hearing. We can tell the difference easy. We listen to a change in pitch. Taste works the worst. Especially for salt. Need a 25% change in salt to notice the difference. If you start out with a lot of salt to begin with and do not notice the difference then you need to add another 25% of that much to taste it. Wilhem Wundt The Founder of the Science of Psychology Wundt saw the importance of Fechner s work. In 1858 he studied with Hemholtz. Hemholtz is a very careful experimenter. Wundt teaches philosophy at school. He publishes articles for the argument for the science of psychology. Wrote a book: Principles of Physiological Psychology in Big book. He did not mean that we study the brain. In this case the term physiology means you could study behavior the way one would study biology by way of using Hemholtz s research methods. In 1875 he built the first lab for psychological testing. It was bombed in WWII. Then in 1881 he starts a journal, as all sciences have done, called: Philosophical Studies. Still in print. Need a journal to tell the rest of the world what s going on in their research. He studies the immediate experience a person has the subject s consciousness. Wundt s paradigm once called Structuralism is now called Volunteerism. The most powerful force in the mind is the will. It sets up your consciousness; the will is the organizing principle for consciousness. The Paradigm (on handout) Sensory inputs give rise to consciousness. Sensory experiences are necessary to have mental ideas. Mental content in consciousness is composed of sensations, images and feelings. Sensations are the immediate input. The images are your memories and the feelings are your emotions. Wundt spent time on emotions. He felt it was the glue holding the other two mental contents together. The introspective method is used to explore the contents of consciousness directly. Descartes dilemma: How do you access a person s mind? We have to ask them. Then we find out how sensations, images and feelings fuse together to make consciousness. Innate processes such as apperception (attention), organize consciousness. Fanciful Attention is what we decide comes inside our mind. We pick out what to pay attention to by our will. We select to look at this or that. With so much noise and information overload we decide what goes into our conscious mind. We also have an innate creative synthesis. We can produce images in our consciousness that bear no 13

14 basis in reality. Writers and artists do this. The will does this, hence the name Volunteerism. Laws of development are necessary to describe human behavior. Principles of mental growth. As a child grows older his mental abilities becomes greater. Three ways to change to judge the emotions on a continuum scale: Is it pleasurable or not? Does it arouse us or subdue us? Ex. Music. Dimension of strain. Straining emotion could be pleasurable or not. Ericson: what people want in their lives changes over their life span. Freud said what if you can t get over a certain period in your life then your stuck in that age. Wundt also wanted to know how fast it takes us to think. So he did an experiment where the subject presses a button when you see a light go off in a dark room. Then do another test where you have to discriminate between colors of light. The time it takes to decide is raised now because there is more thinking to be done. Wundt looked at Folk/cultural psych. Study how cultures influences the way you think. There is a WORF hypothesis in linguistics: How many names for snow in the tropics? One. How many names for snow in Alaska? Plenty for all the types of snow. The richness of a person s language contributes to its culture. Wundt did tests to associate words with meaning. Similar to free association. What comes to mind when I say this or that? In 1879 people from around the world came to his school to learn psychology. Who gave him the most trouble? The Americans. Because we always want to see the practical side of things. Wundt only did lab experiments. XI. (handout) Now people are going to criticize the paradigm. Gestalt Psychologists see a fatal flaw in this paradigm. There were some mavericks who ventured out into their own without any paradigm. Ebinghouse did experiments by himself on nonsense syllables. To test long term memory. He came up with re-learning part of memory called the savings method. 1. The Wurzburg School led by Oswald Kulpe emphasized Act psychology. How people make judgements with their will. Still need introspection. Gave their subjects novel yes or no thought problems. What was important was how they came to their conclusions. Ex. Anywhere in the world does it snow on the equator? Yes, on Mount Kilamanjero in India. Then the subjects are asked how they came to their answers they followed the map in their head till they came to this mountain and said yes. This type of introspection is called Retrospection. Go back and tell me how you came to this conclusion

15 Imageless Thought: This is their criticism to Wundt. We make decisions in life without any thought to them. So there is unconscious mental activity going on that affects us called the imageless thought that lies below our conscious activity. Wundt does not have a paradigm to explain this. Freud does 3. Serious criticism of Wundt was given by the Gestalt Pyschologists. Wolfgang Kohler , Kurt Koffka and Max Wertheimer They also opposed behaviorism but could not shake their influence. Today, Gestalt views are popular. They came to the U.S. in the 1930 s to escape nazism and met the behaviorists here. They said we automatically structure information when we see things. Today we call this idea schemas. Schemas allow us to organize our thoughts coherently by automatically making sense of stimuli. They did a phi phenomenon experiment with the motion of light. When neon arrows glow in fast succession they appear to be one light moving when they really are separate lights flashing. Ex. Las Vegas neon lights. But when the lights are flashed slowly the subjects recognizes they are separate light sources instead of a single moving light source. When the lights flash at 1/15 of a second it looks like it s moving. The slogan of the Gestalt group is: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Another example of an illusion is the vase with 2 faces in profile. There are two images in the picture, not one. A conscious interpretation guides our judgements of the elements we see. Why does this go against Wundt? Because we cannot introspect by analysis; it is done automatically. As soon as we have a conscious experience you have an interpretation of it, we don t think about it. The interpretation is immediate. Gestalt group advocated the study of the brain. Isomorphism Brain has to change in certain ways to have conscious experiences. It is a causal link, not a parallel system. A change in the brain causes a change in the way we think. If we had brain damage then that would effect our thinking. Kohler Led an exciting life. He was a British spy in WWII. He lived on an island in Africa surrounded by the German Navy. On this island he did his insight experiments with Sultan the chimpanzee. The ape was frustrated when he couldn t get the banana but became calm when he thought out the problem and made the solution. Sultan was the smartest ape out of the apes he tested. Sultan always solved the problem. At first the sticks were just sticks but when he fused the sticks together it became a tool and he got the bananas; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This insight changed the schema of the sticks into a tool. Schemas allow us to interpret the individual pieces. This leads to cognitive psychology, which replaces behaviorism. 15