Reddit reviews Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World

Where to begin...

First, we need to work on definitions.
What do you mean by "psychology"?

I mean experimental psychology. Are you referring to clinical?

Even within the two camps, there is much disagreement on the nature and direction of psychological research. This is good, insofar as this promotes discussion and different approaches, but also may lead to disagreements about the general positions.

Regarding the "Cartesian mistake", I don't see it. If anything, psychology has been too bound by its history and focus on previous social research, so much so that Freud still claims some relevance amongst a few (although diminishing) adherents; this was much more the case with behaviorism, and introspectionism before it (to which behaviorism was a reaction); just as in any other field of human endeavor, there are trends. But being blind to the history of social research, that's just not true.

Regarding freud's work, his key error was overgeneralizing. From a small, self-selected group, he generalized his findings to the general population. Of course, we still do this to a degree (e.g., college students, generalizing to the general population, and in fact, there are attempts to counteract this trend), but Freud's problem was to claim that this was an inherently necessary part of ALL subconscious processes, and in fact, pushed to delegitimize (and in some cases, destroy) those who disagreed with him.

I quote from this text regaring my position on Freud:

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Freudian theory is now, at this point of time, extremely controversial and there is a lot of well-known criticisms and attacks on Freud. This is just actually an excellent book on The Memory Wars by Frederick Crews, which--and Frederick Crews is one of the strongest and most passionate critics of Freud. And the problems with Freud go like this. There are two ways you could reject a theory. There are two problems with the scientific theory. One way you could reject a theory is that it could be wrong. So, suppose I have a theory that the reason why some children have autism, a profound developmental disorder, is because their mothers don't love them enough. This was a popular theory for many years. It's a possible theory. It just turns out to be wrong but another way--And so one way to attack and address a scientific theory is to view it as just to see whether or not it works. But there's a different problem a theory could have. A theory could be so vague and all encompassing that it can't even be tested. And this is one of the main critiques of Freud. The idea could be summed up by a quotation from the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. And Pauli was asked his opinion about another physicist. And Pauli said this: "That guy's work is crap. He's not right. He's not even wrong." And the criticism about Freud is that he's not even wrong.

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Yes, he spurred the imagination, and yes, he led to many insights and avenues of future research. This is why he is still revered and studied.

But his actual views are simply not tenable today. It's not a case of disavowing the history of social research: it's just not compatible with the modern understanding of the mind and the contemporary world.

You may claim this is unfairly delegitimizing the pre-scientific worldview, but that is not the aim of psychological research, either intentionally or unintentionally.

To address your next point (related to the above), your critique of psychology's view of "underlying mechanisms" is itself unjust, for the following reasons:

We cannot claim to know what we cannot know. Yes, there are people who happily overgeneralize their findings to support fundamental mechanisms of cognition and social interaction, but this is generally considered a cardinal sin of research (and in fact, those who, like Skinner and Watson before him, who claim to have a fundamental understanding, are well-deservingly supplanted). Peer review, supported by empirical data.

Research is often on the obvious, because the whole point is to investigate thoroughly what we assume to know, but often do not really know. For every claim that drinking causes people to make risky choises (obvious), there is a finding that we do not pay attention to nearly as much as we think we do (nonobvious). You have to investigate everything.

As for lack of theory, we cannot claim to know something that we don't. For example, we do not have a comprehensive theory of consciousness. Not for lack of candidates, but usually from those less respectful of the scientific process. You have many charlatans who claim to have some fundamental insight to the nature of consciousness, but upon inspection, we find that much of this is just wishful thinking, self-serving biases. I can site too many examples to list here, but we continuously see case after case of people who claim to have some fundamental insight or theory, only for it to fall apart upon inspection.

It seems you are focusing on social research in a very different function from the generally understood function of experimental psychology. Social research is, IMHO, largely, storytelling. Following Dennett's heterophenomenology, a social researcher looks at the data from an anthropological position.... as a "narrative" or "text", and thus seeks internal consistency and plausible explanatory mechanisms as one would do a literary analysis.

However, all we can work with is pre-existing data with "historical experiments". It is both implausible and unethical to consider infecting people with the Plague to see its effects on a particular society, so you have to work with what you have.

Experimental psychology is different. You may disagree with the possibility of finding underlying mechanisms, but the reality of contemporary research is that we are able to determine mechanisms in different cognitive, and even social systems, surprisingly well. If they seem pedantic, it's because you cannot claim to overreach, without being shot down by your peers for overgeneralizing.

This is good. In fact, this is essential to the pursuit of knowledge.

And what kind of knowledge is this? To paraphrase Chris Frith (whose book I highly recommend if you really want to get to the crux of this argument, of the role of contemporary psychological research), this is to develop causal models of phenomena, and revise them as new information becomes available. The fact that we can do this at all is surprising, and this led to the "cognitive revolution" in psychology. Today, this means that we have the benefit of empirical, quantitative data, rather than simply introspective reports.

You see this as a negative; I see this as a positive. From my understanding of your words, it seems you think this is a form of disrespect to the history of social research. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, this is building on previous generations, but at the same time, cognisant that we cannot hold on to models that don't match the reality of the data.

As Feynman once said (paraphrasing), if your theory doesn't agree with the data, then you need to throw away the theory.

In terms of ballpark, pray tell, what is the correct ballpark? You seem hell-bent on suggesting that contemporary psychology has it completely wrong, but you haven't said how.

The "right ballpark", in this case, is the ability for the data to lead the discussion, and to not get ahead of yourself. Right now, psychology is at the bean-counting stage, collecting data. This is good. In previous generations, psychology, as well as social research in general, has claimed too much... it's been far too ambitious in its claims, and generally focused more on theoretical elegance than any adherence to the empirical evidence.

You may claim I suffer from physics envy, but this model works extremely well for those areas wherein it is available, particularly in experimental psychology. For areas outside of direct experimentation, we can causal models in a more heterophenomenological manner, but all the while maintaining both rigor and humility in suggesting what one's model can (and more importantly, CAN'T) explain.

This is the problem with Freud, and similar models. They explain too much, without explaining anything.

I'm sticking by my claims. I've spoken with far too many social researchers (even dated one) to know that we're never going to agree on this. But the reality is that psychology is a young science, and both parts of that phrase are important: young, and science. It is not literary deconstruction.

Any book that take a scientific look on how we perceive and integrate stimulu. (Here is my choice).

Any Oliver Sacks book. Understanding the broken brain is a very good tool to get the healthy one.(start with this one)

There is that Crash Course Psychology.

For me it's a good to understand what are attention and perception, what is it to learn and the importance of working memory. You can get all that without understanding memory, but it would be interesting to.

It can be cool to have a general idea of when our brain use shortcut because it's important not to waste energy.

And then for the social side of it welcome to the field of influence.

For a bit of history, the declassified documents are on the source section.

If you are looking for something written for a popular/lay audience, a few good starting points:

Making up the Mind by Chris Frith:
http://www.amazon.com/Making-Mind-Brain-Creates-Mental/dp/1405160225

Older but particularly relevant for emotion and consciousness- "Descartes error"
http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X

If you want something from a less mainstream perspective dealing with embodiment and consciousness, you may enjoy Brainstorms by Shaun Gallagher:
http://www.amazon.com/Brainstorming-Views-Interviews-Shaun-Gallagher/dp/1845400232

Hope these help!