You Can't Argue Your Way Out of a Body
A naturalist and predictive processing critique of logic-based therapy
“Perhaps the most damaging dualism for psychology is the Cartesian mind/body split. Dewey saw this as deeply embedded in Western culture since the advent of Pauline Christianity. It has resulted in misleading questions such as: do cognitions cause behavior, or are they merely epiphenomena?”
(from The Wiley Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology)
Imagine with me for a moment a group of cheetahs having a beer as they gaze out across an African savannah, looking down upon the smaller animals scurrying here and there. Were they of a species capable of doing so, their conversation may very well be one where they share the difficulties of the day amongst their speedy feline compatriots.
“Lost another antelope today. Is it just me or have those things gotten faster?” asks Fred (because a cheetah named such definitely makes sense).
“Not just you. I think they’re likely juicing on something,” responds George.
“Really guys?” Benny asks, reaching down to grab a second haunch of antelope that he’d caught. “Have you tried just thinking you’re faster?”
Regardless of whatever names you give your wild animals, and the absurdity of any conversation they’re likely to get up to were they evolutionarily constrained to develop a surplue of neurons and a greater degree of social cohesion that required short-hand communication to convey increasingly complex concepts, namely, language, it stands to reason that they’d likely focus on the thing that set them apart from the other animals. It would define them and, based on that central identifying characteristic, be the cause of both their successes and a focus when addressing their failures. For the cheetah, it’s their speed. For us, it’s our amusing uninvited guest we call our consciousness.
For us, though, conscious experience isn’t enough to satisfy our hubris. Despite the uncertainty about its exact nature and the wonder of exploring it, we have projected a false dividing line for ourselves between the supposed competing forces of emotion and reason. This has done us no favors in helping us understand ourselves better, but it does serve the social benefit of providing an easy way to declare oneself better than another by referring to another as “emotional” (ridiculously often conflated with a certain supposedly “softer” sex and therefore expanding the process of negatively othering an entire half of the human species). This is, of course, juxtaposed with the “hardness” (seriously, the euphemisms write themselves) of reason as a “rigid” system of rules for informational discovery.
Because of this internal Maginot Line we’ve created, we often find ourselves attempting to hide behind the fortifications of reason to avoid the distressing internal environment we experience in life, only to be constantly reminded that discomfort simply finds a way around them. Not to be deterred, since we can’t seem to give up the idea that evolution stopped at the neck and reason somehow allows us to transcend the material constraints of biology and its extensions, various therapies have been created to help us double down on the ego-inflating notion that if we just set up our logical syllogisms better, everything will go along.
Here enters Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), itself an iteration of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), and, as inspiration for this article, Logic-Based Therapy (LBT). Of the three, REBT is likely the most honest when it comes to acronyms, as it declares its foundational philosophical assumption: reason and emotion are separate, and emotion follows from reason.
Elliott Cohen describes LBT as a more philosophically focused extension of REBT, having collaborated with Albert Ellis, the creator of REBT, he claims that our conscious interpretations, not the events themselves, produce the distress in our lives. As an example, a practical syllogism resulting in distress would be: If I’m rejected by friends, then I’m a reject; I have been rejected by friends; therefore I’m a reject. Cohen notes that treatment involves identifying one of 11 “Cardinal Fallacies” that LBT has isolated as creating our personal pathologies, refuting the original syllogism through logic, adopting a supporting philosophy to counter it, and then engaging in new behavior. Emotional distress, according to LBT, is essentially a logical error that can be corrected through reasoning and philosophical reading.
A Problem of Biology
Logic skills and broader critical, reflective reasoning skills are beneficial parts of our lives, not because they supersede or somehow remove our emotional lives, but because of their utility in providing social justification for our activities. We are, using these skills, engaged in some form of argumentation, selecting data that fits our preconscious understanding, and then offering up, to varying levels of credibility, a rationale for why we are correct in one or another form of behavior, from the merely verbal articulation of a worldview and/or opinion, to a behavior that involves interaction. There is a fundamental assumption ignored here in LBT, in other forms of consciousness-first intervention strategies, and by many people who think they can elevate their argumentative skills to the point of a magic spell: biology. Thought doesn’t come first as some kind of system built on biology, but rather is an add-on to the biology that already existed.
Let’s take Cohen's example of social rejection by friends. One of the so-called “Cardinal Fallacies” is that of the fallacy of Self-Damnation, which leads to the declaration, according to Cohen, that “if one’s self-worth depended on someone else’s approval, then we’d all be “rejects” (which is absurd!) since all of us have been rejected by others.”
There are several issues involved in this example, but let’s focus on the underlying assumption that one’s self-assessment shouldn’t be tied to what others think. We are fundamentally social creatures, not simply because we come from families and form groups, but more broadly, the very substance of our notion of self is tied to relationships.
Every interaction offers you a chance to “see” your self. In fact, the only way to see your self is through social interactions. (from “Selfless” by Brian Lowery)
Ignoring the biological, and by extension evolutionary, underpinnings of the mind is never a helpful way to start determining a course of self-understanding. As Lowery notes above in his excellent book, the substance of a self is relationally constructed, rather than individually. The social construction makes far more sense biologically, as genetics operates through kinship, and any moral system will stem from that basis in social connectivity. Determining who is and isn’t part of the in-group, a determination required by evolution and civilizational development, places the very nature of individual identity within social bonds.
With this framework in mind, one’s self-worth is very much dependent, necessarily though not sufficiently, on other people’s approval. This kind of thing often comes up in therapy for me, where the frustration is expressed as a desire to learn not to care about anyone’s opinion. My rejoinder is to ask what kind of person they think acts without a single care at all about the judgment of others, with the response being one thing: a sociopath. Now, is all rejection warranted? Of course not. But that’s a different question to ask than whether rejection itself is a fallacy.
Acknowledging our social foundation, itself a product of the particular biological nature that we are, is to also note the backwardness of placing conscious thought as primary. Yes, it’s backward. Again, based on naturalism, conscious thought is an emergent experience arising from unconscious, and therefore inaccessible, processes, none of which even resemble conscious experience. This highlights the deceptive nature of verbiage, as an un-conscious seems to indicate there are events going on within the brain in the same way that conscious thought is being experienced (note that this is why mind-reading, besides being a fantasy, also would never actually work the way fantasists think of it). However, this is like saying that experiencing a hurricane is equivalent to noting the meteorological mathematics that went into its formation.
Syllogisms do not generate emotions. Instead, syllogisms are the post-hoc verbalizations of a mind/brain having already generated an affective judgment. This stems from a predictive processing model of human biological cognition, the best-to-date understanding we have about how our natural embodied nervous systems — of which the brain is one, admittedly large, part — make decisions for allocating resources.
“…the primary task of all the prediction machinery in our heads is to help us stay alive. A major part of that staying alive involves keeping our own inner bodily states within the surprisingly tight bounds of biological viability. That means acting and responding in ways that help create and maintain the many inner physiological states essential to our continued existence as a living organism. To do this, our predictive brains must also target and proactively control a variety of crucial internal physiological conditions.” (from “The Experience Machine” by Andy Clark)
Simply correcting a conscious sentence doesn’t touch the generative model that gave rise to the sentence itself. The thought has already shown up, itself felt to be a validation of the initial emotional judgment. This is why I often refer to these practices as internalized gaslighting, in which we try to convince ourselves that we had absolutely no reason to form that judgment. The reality is, we most certainly did: the preconscious assessment that was completed automatically and without conscious deliberation, based on the social situation. LBT, like CBT, would have us constantly judging our thoughts themselves as deliberate errors we chose because we were tripped up by a fallacy. And yet, as I have pointed out previously, none of us actively choose the conscious thoughts we have. They just appear.
The real fallacy to be concerned with here is the false notion of how the mind works. Without a naturalistic basis in understanding the embodiment of our consciousness, we will forever be fighting the wrong battle. It’s little wonder so many have been convinced that therapy takes a long time, because that deception rests on the false assumption that they need to fight against the reality that their brain evolved just like everything else, and that its purpose is not to pursue truth but to manage resources.
LBT is correct in one of its steps: adopting a new philosophy. One that doesn’t falsely separate emotion and reason as if they’re two separable systems, rather than parts of a whole. One that acknowledges we are evolved creatures, embedded in various levels of social connectivity, and embodied in physiological expressions of a fundamentally natural order of things.
Acceptance is where all of this should lead us. Acceptance that our thoughts are not things we choose. Acceptance that what we think is less about identifying truths of reality and more about structuring how we spend our time in the giving and pursuing of limited resources, predominantly our attention. Acceptance that errors in judgment are not errors in identity, but the inevitable outcome of a brain that makes guesses based on limited data and previous limited experience.
We are wholly and utterly human. Mistakes are inevitable. Don’t forget your towel.
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