In 2008, at the age of 50, I decided I would stop trying to please other people (I graduated first as an engineer) and do what I have wanted to do all my life- discover something important and scientific.  Naively, I typed 'what is the most difficult problem in science?' into Google. The answer popped out- 'How the human mind works'. Temporarily freed from the daily requirement to earn a living by my meagre savings and blessed with an understanding partner, I set out in earnest, not really knowing what I would find, or even if I was both clever enough and sufficiently committed to complete the project. Actually, at that stage, it wasn't important- I was just happy to finally be living my real life, doing what my heart said was right. I had an encouraging set of meetings with a couple of my university lecturers.  Though they must have thought I was having some kind of mid-life crisis, they treated me absolutely seriously and professionally, which was more than just nice- it was probably necessary, and so I owe them a debt of gratitude.

 

This wasn't citizen science, which is something high-school kids and volunteer retirees do, usually when neoliberal governments decide to make funding cuts. No, this was amateur science. As I see it, us amateur scientists don't really have a choice- we are a driven lot, pushed by the pressure of a passionate desire for facts, plus a little bit of fame if it is there to be had. Not many people know that Columbus was an amateur scientist, and he discovered the Americas. So was John Couch Adam, the young English lad who worked out that Neptune existed by looking at the maths, then became a royal astronomer and confirmed his prediction experimentally.  

 

The real point of difference between citizen and amateur science is that more often than not amateur scientists are convinced that the entire scientific establishment is wrong, and that, against all reasonable odds, they are right. This is not a sound basis for an academic position at any level. Often, like Columbus, they are right, but for the wrong reasons. His estimate of the sailing distance across the sea was much too small- the prevailing scientific estimates were by and large correct- but the establishment didn't count on the convenient loop formed by the three major ocean currents, while Columbus' open-mindedness allowed him to see the bigger picture. Also, he got lucky, only losing one ship, the Santa Maria. The rest is history!

 

I believe that Western (that is, Occidental) Cognitive Science has got almost everything that matters about the mind wrong. It is not that they are not intelligent enough, but on way too many occasions, they ignore the right voices and listen to the wrong ones. The 'classic' example of what I mean concerns the discovery of what is called the 'Situation Image' (SI) in TDE theory, the successful framework for human cognition that I discovered between 2008 and 2011. In the 1920's, an Estonian scientist called Jacob von Uexkull worked out all of the important relationships later established by the post-war cyberneticists like Weiner (US) and Ashby(UK), including a concept called 'umwelt', identical to my concept of SI. 

 

After the war, his work was wrongly classified under the labels 'hermeneutics' and 'semiotics' when in fact it was identical to, but more advanced than, existing control system engineering. Incredibly, the same mistake was later repeated- in 1970, the American William T. Powers rediscovered von Uexkull's insights, and packaged them as a psychological/behavioural therapy called Perceptual Control Theory (PCT), which referred to SI/umwelt as the 'method of levels'. Most physical scientists and computer engineers simply aren't exposed to topics that lie on the other side of the great science/ humanities divide, and so this crucial information remains largely unknown to the 'hard' sciences to this day.

 

The most serious error of omission committed by establishment cognitive science is ignoring Charles Sanders Pierce. When I present my work, the most common response to my claims is 'prove it'. Of course I can prove specific facts from my theory -for example, the TDE-R predicts that right cerebellar lesions should produce cognitive deficits that are virtually indistinguishable from Broca's Aphasia- this is indeed the case. But generally, it is impossible to prepare a closed form logical proof for an entire hypothesis. Pierce provides the answer here, a technique known as abductive reasoning (or abduction). Most 'normal' folk have another name for it- common sense (see diagram).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are three principles I use on a daily basis while doing research.

1. Occam's Razor     2. Pierce's 'Arrow' (the principle behind abductive reasoning)  3. Holmes' Shroud

 

The last item refers to Sherlock Holmes. The author, and inventor of the fictional detective character, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was tremendously interested in problem solving in general, and solving the problem of crime in particular. In Victorian England, as today, people were both horrified and fascinated by the criminal classes and aberrant psychology. While Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo chose to tell heroic tales, Doyle went to the 'dark side', in terms of his choice of characters and story topics. All three in their own way went on to become famous authors producing classic works.

 

The term 'shroud' literally refers to the cloth wrapped around a dead body. Metaphorically, I use the term to refer to 'dead' ideas, those which by inspection or by analysis, are impossible. We throw a shroud over them when we invoke Holmes' Shroud- "When we eliminate the impossible..." - that is, when we take these options 'off the table'- "whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". Note the italics, denoting the 'rub' of the phrase, that part of the reasoning that is most likely to generate 'friction', or cognitive discomfort, but the part that also brings the largest return on one's intellectual investment, or 'bang for your buck'.  With Pierce's Arrow (PA), the 'rub' is the part containing the phrase 'a matter of course'. PA is also expressed using the word 'unremarkable' in the same thematic role.