Take this further,

is it to do with the closed brain argument, which tends to fix exploration?

Dear Stanley,

Your question is highly pertinent and touches on a central point in this discussion. Yes, I believe the issue I am raising is intrinsically linked to what you call the 'closed brain argument' or, more broadly, to reductionist and localizationist views that tend to fix and limit exploration in neuroscience and psychology.

When consciousness is sought in a single point or when static models are applied to an inherently dynamic and complex reality, the understanding of emergent phenomena is inhibited. My work, the Emergent Cartography of Consciousness, precisely addresses this by proposing a dynamic and nonlinear interaction of five functional pillars (memory, thought, emotion, perception, and integrated corporeality). This perspective, along with the Neurotopological Hypothesis, suggests that consciousness emerges from hierarchical, multifractal, and oscillatory-modulated activation patterns in distributed neural networks.

This approach seeks to overcome epistemic reductionism by integrating phenomenological richness with a neurotopological psychometrics that measures emergent coherence. It is by recognizing this dynamic "lived form" and phenomena like isostasis in extreme conditions that exploration is liberated from fixed paradigms, opening new avenues for understanding the complexity of mental health.

Arturo,

As an argument the closed brain makes no sense as each brain's activity remains theoretically localised and yet each operation is also somehow shared. If you notice here, evolutionary activity becomes redundant.

The above model aids neurology and the physical treatments of psychiatry, drugs for example. The same and yet shared, One pill for all. It does not and cannot account for nearly all human phenomena.

Dear Stanley,

Your critique of the 'closed brain' is key; brain activity, far from being purely localized, is intrinsically distributed and integrated, transcending simplistic models. I agree, current epistemic reductionism is functionally ineffective and phenomenologically disconnected from lived experience.

My Emergent Cartography of Consciousness (5 pillars) and Neurotopological Psychometrics (coherence, isostasis) offer the framework to integrate this complexity.

This framework, based on neurotopology and the 'lived form', helps advance a deeper understanding. It's an honor to continue this dialogue.

Yes

Arturo, do you have any reading materials that address these questions in the terms you are using? I found your to be reflections very insightfull, and I would like to share some material with my research group.

hi guys,

I thought i'd put this on here. For years i have been gathering evidence on psychiatry and the drugs they use. I first warned on this ten years ago.

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Arturo, it is highly likely that, given its origins, there is little scientific value in psychiatry as much of it rests on a believe us standpoint and the scientific methods we use, none or little of it bears scrutiny.

Just to be clear, you are not asserting neurological conditions are reducible to psychological dispositions i.e. if diagnosed as on the autistic spectrum or as having schizophrenia you are going to be a conservative or socialist voter?

Paul, I am not sure how you picked that up from what I wrote here. Bear in mind I write a great deal on these subjects and on the evidence produced for the different -illnesses-. I have indeed critiqued the case for schizophrenia and was yesterday in a long discussion with a remarkable young woman who has according to her brother lost her language skills. She radiates warmth. This has absolutely nothing to do with your declaration and pivots upon neither political or social concerns.

Schizophrenia, it arose out of syphilis, its symptoms the same. That may mean nothing. The first identifier, Kraepelin, identified Nazism and and wrote the original ideology. That may not be connected to his clinical skills and position certainly as he took many of his assumptions from genetics. Do I see mental health as a genuine position, but the term covers a great deal of illnesses and symptoms. , and no i don't. i see it as the consequence of historical changes within professional groups based on stages in that change. Belief is an emphatic condition that in other societies might appropriately be viewed as a madness. The significance of belief in mental health claims is often unseen, exhibited instead as a specific form of undeniable science. Some of it may be, some of it is, some of it prevents these matters from being seen differently, and ideas must be doubted if power is in only one discipline.

Added, Twenty years ago I claimed psychotropic drugs were dangerous. this is now shyly accepted but not the degree of their danger. Mental illness caused not alleviated by doctors. Look at my piece on Jack Kerouac on here. He entered an asylum convinced of his writing skills and future, placed there because he did not like Bootcamp. He left a nervous wreck, damaged for life.

Arturo

Yes, the brain's functions regarding connected brain activities are scattered around in small bits and bobs suggesting selected reasons and activities, not mass operating together.

Dear Pedro Luis,

I greatly appreciate your interest and the insight you find in my reflections! Yes, of course I have material that addresses these questions in the terms I use.

My main work is the thesis "Emergent Mapping of Consciousness: Proposal for a Neurotopological Psychometry for the Measurement of Human Coherence" (currently in Spanish and soon in English) and several essays that support it (all in English on my profile). They are all publicly available on my ResearchGate profile and on OSF. You can access them directly from my profile or search by title.

I would love for you to review them and share them with your research group. Your comments and those of your team will be very valuable in further developing these ideas.

I remain at your disposal for any questions.

Best regards

Hello everyone,

Thanks to Paul for his question, as it allows me to clarify a crucial misunderstanding.

Paul Healey, I am not at all arguing that neurological conditions can be reduced to psychological dispositions, nor am I linking diagnoses to political preferences. My critique is directed at the inadequacy of linear and static psychometric models and epistemic reductionism, which limit our understanding of mental health to mere symptoms, rather than recognizing its dynamic, neurotopological, and bodily integrated nature of lived experience. My goal is precisely to go beyond simplistic reductions to understand the "lived form" in its complexity.

Stanley Wilkin (and in response to the general discussion), I greatly appreciate your continued and valuable contributions, Stanley. Your reflections on the scientific value of psychiatry and the historical and current role of psychotropic drugs reinforce the very heart of my argument. I agree that the reliance on "trust us" and the lack of rigorous scrutiny are fundamental problems. Your experience gathering evidence on the dangers of psychotropic drugs is vital testimony.

The difficulty of current models in "accounting for almost all human phenomena" (as you rightly point out) is the basis of my proposal to build a science that not only classifies but also understands lives. The Neurotopological Psychometrics I propose seeks to overcome this limitation by integrating algebraic topology metrics with phenomenological exploration, precisely to subject emerging coherence to more rigorous and nonlinear scrutiny.

This dialogue is essential to moving toward a deeper and more effective understanding of mental health.

Regards,

Arturo Salazar Chon

Dear Stanley

Your final clarification is extremely valuable. I fully agree: the key is not a mass operating together, but rather the interaction and organization of dispersed fragments that give rise to an emergent coherence.

Precisely, the Emergent Mapping of Consciousness and its Neurotopological Hypothesis seek to model how consciousness emerges from the dynamic and nonlinear interaction of functional pillars, manifesting in hierarchical and multifractal patterns that transcend the simple operation of the mass. Our Neurotopological Psychometrics seeks to measure this emergent coherence through algebraic topology.

Your insight underscores the need for tools that capture this distributed and integrated complexity.

Best regards,

Arturo Salazar Chon

My idea is that these pieces pick up external factors, part of the problem that is simply ignored. We are the only creatures who have structured in depth our own environment. The body is ignored even though this provides immense information which is restructured within the brain, but not as a single block. It is the interaction that results, the dynamic structuring of the external within group selection.

I came across a piece on dopamine on the human brain and nature. I placed a sarcastic response /dopamine does everything. That's all we are. One chemical. This is typical of psychiatry and neurology! One thing. One item. Absolute nonsense!

A science? Hardly.

Because of the origins of modern psychiatry i strongly suggest it is not true and that modern society has been subject to manipulation.

Kraepelin based schizophrenia, (dementia praecox) which substantiated Reflections on “Emil Kraepelin: Icon and Reality” modern psychiatry, its structure and treatment methods, psychiatry online, he employed ideas used later by Nazis and embedded in his psychiatric theories.

Kraepelin died in 1926, before the rise to power of the Third Reich, but he mentored three prominent Nazi psychiatrists: Robert Gaupp (1870–1953), Paul Nitsche (1876−1948), and Ernst Rüdin (1874–1952). Gaupp echoed the thoughts of Kraepelin when he wrote that he felt wrong caring for “his patients, when people of ‘full value’ were starving to death in the world outside” (2). Nitsche was the director of the Sonnenstein hospital where tens of thousands of mentally ill were killed under the guise of mercy killing (euthanasia),

Hey ho, it was psychiatry that first began euthanasia of invalid children in children's hospitals. Is it just an arm of authoritarianism and diagnosis simply a means of changing identity?

Kraepelin introduced a science not of diagnosis but of identity perceived by an authoritarian group. They decided others' identity, calling others dangerous and mad. Vis a vis Jewish identity. .

Thank you, Stanley, for your thoughtful and multilayered contributions. I will respond to your comments in an integrated manner, as they all point to a deeper critique of psychiatry and psychology's epistemological foundations.

You are absolutely right to highlight the reductionism involved in current models that ignore the body as an active informational matrix. The brain is not an isolated processor but a dynamic node embedded in a corporeal and ecological system. Ignoring the somatic, affective, and neurodynamic processes reduces the complexity of human experience to static abstractions. The body doesn't merely "accompany" the mind — it shapes and transforms it continuously. This is one of the main reasons why I propose a neurotopological and psychometric redefinition that includes spatiotemporal, corporeal, and phenomenological dimensions.

Your critique of dopamine-based explanations reflects a broader issue: the tendency of neuroscience and psychiatry to reify one variable and treat it as causally sufficient. Saying "dopamine does it all" is not science — it's a narrative trap. Consciousness, suffering, and human subjectivity are emergent phenomena, irreducible to any single neurotransmitter. Neurotransmitters modulate, not determine, meaning and experience. As such, we must move beyond chemical determinism and toward models that respect the complexity of recursive, non-linear systems.

Your historical analysis of Kraepelin is also deeply relevant. It is not merely a matter of outdated theory, but of epistemic violence. Diagnostic categories have been used to define the "value" of lives, and psychiatry — particularly in its early 20th-century form — became complicit with ideologies of eugenics, nationalism, and authoritarian control. When the act of diagnosing becomes a mechanism of identity imposition and social exclusion, it loses all claim to scientific neutrality.

That is precisely why I advocate for a paradigm that integrates mathematical rigor with phenomenological richness. The concept of isostasis, for example — persistence through collapse — seeks to capture states of existential organization that defy both pathological and normative classifications. Mental suffering cannot be fully understood unless we grasp the lived form, the dynamic reorganization of meaning under pressure, and the microstructural dance of neural activity over time.

Ultimately, we need a science of consciousness and mental life that is not afraid to interrogate its historical roots, its philosophical assumptions, and its clinical practices. Your comments serve as an essential reminder of the need for this ongoing critique. I truly appreciate the depth of your engagement.

Again, thank you for enriching this dialogue with your vast experience, it's a pleasure, Dr. Wilkin.

What happens to someone not diagnosed with schizophrenia, if they take psychotropic drugs? Psychedelics effect people differently; I knew someone who did not hallucinate from them. The case for different strokes for different folks?

Paul, diminishing the effects of drugs has been going on for 70 years, especially by the medical profession. You present the present medical position that only some patients are affected but hey Paul do you really know the extent and depth of those effects , especially the psychological ones. The medical profession know as usual what they want to know and in many ways what, by not really discussing with those given them, they wish to know.

Paul, thought I'd add, the view that only some are negatively affected is simply another medical myth, and covers in this case the long term damage to all who take such drugs. My point above considering Kraepelin needs to be considered in depth, the presentation of medical models based on racism and which arrived in part from German Americans, inheritors of American racism, and its understanding of identity which removes others from society and care. Kraepelin produced a specific model of symptom cluster within discrimination and reflects the ideas of both American racism and modified Nazism from individuals are to be blamed for their illnesses and the implications f authoritarianism in both their diagnosis and treatments.

Kraepelin instituted a way of looking at mental illness through medical, thereby biological tropes, which is now considered scientific but are they really no more than medical ideology and what genuine proof is there, as against belief in the fundamental belief systems and sense of superiority of doctors? From this biological understanding came the use of drugs, all from my knowledge dangerous, and the reinforcement of a medical and professional ideology.

And all this from the mind and pen of one of the first Nazi? Am I surprised? No. The roots of concentration camps are also the roots of psychiatry! And, look at my earlier work, the roots of both are in the slave camp, concentration camps of American slavery from where the biological/genetic idea of human nature arose in action.

Stanley, I think you misunderstood my intention. The question was directed at mental diversity, not uniformity; why the reactions to the same drugs can be so different? Why is that those who experience psychosis are not affected by hallucinogenics in the same way?

Being self-consciousness I presume is not the same as as the possibility of consciousness. Consider the Socratic idea of severing recollection from a tuning, the identity of both together or apart?

Paul, i reject the claims of psychiatry as to their benefits except as temporary suppressants. I believe certainly that people not intimately involved with the effects of drugs do not realise how dangerous they are especially if the only listen to the medical profession.

there is a marked preference to repeat what psychiatry assets even though it often makes little sense, and a marked tendency not to check out what they affirm.

Dear Stanley and Paul,

I deeply appreciate the depth and insight of your comments; they touch on the very heart of my debate and the very reason for my work. Your observations reinforce the urgency of re-evaluating how we conceptualize and measure consciousness, well-being, and suffering.

To Stanley Wilkin

Your critiques of traditional psychiatry and its connection to historical models that have led to discrimination and a limited understanding of human experience are crucial. I fully agree: the "effect-diminishing" of treatments and the medical profession's limited understanding of the depth of psychological effects are due, in large part, to the persistence of epistemic reductionism and the search for "homogeneous and universally applicable" constructs. This ignores the irreducible diversity of subjective experience.

My proposal for neurotopological psychometrics arises precisely from this need. We do not seek to "regulate consciousness, but to map its diversity," aspiring to a "singular map: that of each consciousness in its complexity." This approach is a fundamental ethical safeguard against the ideological drifts you so aptly point out, which have led to the reification and dehumanization of human experience. Measuring without violating experience is, for me, an ethical act.

To Paul Healey

Your point about "mental diversity" and individual variability in response to drugs, psychedelics, or events like a stroke is central. Precisely, my argument focuses on the fact that current psychometric models fail to treat constructs as "stable and homogeneous entities," ignoring this fundamental diversity. Consciousness is not a fixed substance, but an "emergent dynamic configuration" that manifests as the coherence or incoherence of the information patterns that permeate a person. This explains why reactions are inherently "different."

My work addresses this through:

Neurotopological psychometrics, which seeks to map this "irreducible diversity of human experience" through metrics that reveal how the "forms taken by the activity of the nervous system determine how the world appears to the subject."

The network entropy model, where a decrease in subjective coherence (e.g., suffering) correlates with an increase in network entropy, reflecting disorganization.

The Subjective Coherence-Incoherence Scale (SCIS), which I just published on my profile, assesses the perception of integration in pillars like Narrative Coherence (Memory Pillar), directly related to identity and memory that you mention.

Finally, the idea of "attunement" that you introduce resonates powerfully with my "Phenomenological Trace" model. I postulate that the brain, in states of "Conscious Activation," can "tune in" to a residual energetic "echo" or "trace" of neuroquantum events, decoding it as meaningful information. This "tuning" is an active process of information integration in the system, which could explain not only "insight" but also phenomena such as the enigmatic Déjà vu.

Collectively, my work seeks to build a "dynamic, multiscale, and multimodal atlas" of consciousness, which not only recognizes the uniqueness of each experience but also allows us to understand the trajectories, ruptures, and reintegrations of consciousness in all its complexity.

You again for your valuable contributions.

Best regards and hugs.

Thank you for continuing to stimulate this great debate.

Arturo

Emile Kraepelin is considered the inventor of modern psychiatry, inventing names for moods, behavior and habits and claiming each was a form of mental illness. Did he invent or borrow a format placing identifiable moods and behavior under identity cards as it were, placing accepted treatments under each. Did he simply re-identity patients, that is impose new identities in them? Schizophrenia thereby becomes a social role with immense consequence for the victim. The process is top down but believed in because the medical profession runs the show. My work describes changes within societies with the middle classes assuming more power, at the same time as Kraepelin's emergence.

Your comment delves into a fundamental critique of the foundations of modern psychiatry and allows me to further articulate the core of my proposal. Your description of how Kraepelin "invented names" and imposed "identity lists" that could, in effect, "re-identify" patients underscores the dangers of the approach my discussion challenges.

Precisely, my argument is that traditional psychometrics, by relying on linear and static assumptions and treating constructs as homogeneous and universally applicable entities, can lead to the imposition of rigid categories that fail to capture the complexity and fluidity of human experience. By reducing dynamic phenomena like schizophrenia to a "social role" defined by lists, an epistemic reductionism is perpetuated that limits our understanding and can dehumanize the individual's experience.

My neurotopological psychometrics seeks to radically move away from this "top-down process" and the imposition of identities. Rather than "inventing names" for static states, our goal is to map the dynamic and topological configurations of consciousness. We seek to understand the "lived form" and emergent coherence of subjective experience, recognizing that "consciousness is not measured as a 'thing' but as a topology: a set of transformations, tensions, coherences, and incoherences within a dynamic space."

This entails an approach that integrates objective data with the individual's subjective narrative, in a bidirectional process where experience both informs and is informed by the data. The ambition is to construct a "singular map: that of each consciousness in its complexity," respecting interindividual diversity rather than subsuming it into pre-established categories.

Even concepts like isostasis, which I have proposed, address vital persistence and functional reorganization under conditions of chaos, where classical categories of disease or collapse prove insufficient. This demonstrates the need to go "beyond conceptual collapse" to capture how life and mind persist and reconfigure in ways unanticipated by rigid models.

Your critique, Stanley, is a powerful justification for the need for this paradigm shift in measuring and understanding the psyche.

Arturo

We use different language but you replicate my concerns. As first an historian I will provide my viewpoint, that this kind of psychiatry emerged as the profession, and the medical profession itself, was growing more powerful and began to organise itself. It began to exist outside institutions. If you look at my paper on Jekyll and Hyde you can see how the professions changed in order to be given more power. psychiatry, a relatively late development used its 'expertise'. and its 'science' to gain power, which it began to assume after WW2, Via the DSM and ABA. This was when the use of drugs as primary treatments emerged. ABA and DSM remain connected to the pharmaceutical companies and subject to corruption. Ordinary GPs sell drugs to patients (I know they do).

So growth of professional classes and their rule and running of Western societies, and identification with it.

diagnosis had to be directed in a scientific way, through identification and naming. Patients needed to be seen as belonging to one group or diagnosis or another and now people everywhere use this (dubious?) methodology.

Proof-patients are forced through repetition and bullying to accept and echo back their diagnosis. Identification, both self and public, through diagnosis.

A deeper understanding comes when Kraepelin's politics is focused on.

Arturo

concepts of mind have changed and at present much energy is focused on the 'ill mind'. this has a great deal to do with the provision of drugs, which play a huge role in western economics.

Arturo

Many believe Hitler invented Nazi politics and ideology but in fact it was invented by medical professionals at the end of the 19th century and that needs to be factored in to any understanding of modern psychiatry and its evolution.

The connection is evident in its ideology, its use of power, its development of ideas based on control. Its ideas, although accepted, are not based on science but power, medical and class influence which emerged during the end of the 19th century and genetics that evolved from American slavery.

Stanley, I sincerely thank you for continuing the debate with the depth of your historical and sociological analysis. Your comments are invaluable because they add a fundamental layer of critique that I hadn't articulated.

You've hit the nail on the head. While my critique focuses on the methodological inadequacy of current models (their linear and static nature), you reveal the sociopolitical root of that inadequacy: that these models are not only scientifically limited, but were designed and perpetuated as tools of power.

This is where I see a powerful connection. The "bad science" I denounce—psychometrics that don't measure, reductionism that ignores the "lived form"—is precisely the vehicle through which the power you describe is exercised. An ambiguous, non-falsifiable model is the perfect breeding ground for corruption and the imposition of diagnoses that benefit the system, not the patient.

In that sense, my proposal for Physicobioneurodynamics, with its demand for mathematical rigor and falsifiability, is not only a quest for "better science," but, consequently, is also a political act: an attempt to create measurement tools so precise and transparent that they are resistant to manipulation and return power to the understanding of the genuine experience of the individual.

Your historical perspective is crucial. It reminds us that no scientific theory exists in a vacuum.

I am very grateful for enriching my vision.

A warm hug.

• My view is that these sciences, and possibly all sciences, exist as contingent models that cannot be viewed as absolute in any manner or right in any manner. As you, and I, constantly voice the evidence just isn't there to any degree, as these sciences claim. Often as with psychiatric power and other social and psychological factors, it is rhetoric only in the end. Many factors play a part as for example the rise of parliamentary government and professionalism, its hand maiden.
• Stephenson's Jekyll and Hyde is a substantial effort on caste change and the substance of professionalism, which emerged in the late 19th century as organised middle class caste groups.

An ambiguous, non-falsifiable model is the perfect breeding ground for corruption and the imposition of diagnoses that benefit the system, not the patient.

All my research, largely talking to and with patients/clients, indicates the drugs are psychologically dangerous and are feeding the growth of mental illness. The propaganda around these drugs fits well your claim italicised above.