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Swimmer963 comments on Neurological reality of human thought and decision making; implications for rationalism. - Less Wrong
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The first thing that should be noted is that any theory of a massively parallel system simply must be abstracted in order for humans to be able to understand it. Take, for example, anything that tries to describe the behavior of a large population of people: economics, sociology, political science, etc. We always create high-level abstract concepts (describing the behavior of groups of people rather than the fine details of every single individual).
Keeping that in mind, psychology is intentionally high-level and uses abstract concepts, which have an as-of-yet unclear correspondence to the lower level descriptions of the brain we have from neuroscience. This relation is analogous to that between high-level descriptions of large populations, and actions of individuals.
The answer then, in my opinion, is to keep working towards bridging the gap between the lowest level which we have a near-deterministic understanding of (we know how individual neurons work and a little about how they are connected in the brain), and the higher level intuitive descriptions of mind which are descriptive but not predictive. The massive parallelism required by the low level theories is NOT ignored, so far as I know, by neuroscientists and neuropsychologists, which makes me a bit confused as to why you think further emphasizing the role of parallelism is necessary.
Unless of course, you are criticizing the intuitive, "folk psychology" understanding of the mind. That, however, is arguably instilled in us evolutionarily (Dennett has argued for this).
This would be awesome! School would be so much better if psychology could be understood from a neuroscience point of view...and vice versa, I guess.
If that is to happen, the bridge needs to be built from the higher-level intuitive downwards. Neuroscience is already building up from the bottom, so the unexplored and key parts are more likely in the upper-middle. If they were in the lower-middle, we'd probably feel closer to a solution by now.
Good point. Although I'm not sure exactly how you'd go about building downwards from intuitions. Has that ever been done before?
The main hitch to that type of progress is that there is too much infighting between which model is right in neuroscience, and which model is right in psychology, nobody has a sturdy enough raft to set sail into the unknown between them. How I would go about it would be to risk being wrong and start off from the most likely track in psychology, and invent the factors that, if followed through, would result in a currently accepted model of psychology. Like flavor for quarks. It would necessarily be mostly theoretical until the answers it gives become useful. Then, repeat as necessary.
Do you have any interest in working on something like that?
My automatic answer is YES!!!!!, but I don't exactly have relevant schooling.
Also, from what I've seen I tend to clash slightly with psychology majors...I had a roommate in 4th year psychology and we used to have hours-long debates where she would eventually accuse me of being a reductionist (which to me is a good thing).
Why necessarily psychology? You can go the biology route, then take a grad neuroscience program, though I suppose this is nearly impossible to pull off while working as a nurse full time.
Yeah... I may end up doing it, or something like that. My mother and father are making bets with each other on me ending up back in school for a significant chunk of my life.