So psychologists and the scientific community alike have this consensus that a lot of human behaviour can be traced back to genetic and epigenetic factors.

These genetic and epigenetic factors are executed through hormones (just like test makes us men from boys) and neurochemicals.

Why is there a high-level descriptive "science" called psychology to describe it when:

a) High-level behaviour can be described by those that study the low-level sciences. Here is an example by a neurobiologist who did that in a book based on scientific evidence:b) The way they approach this results in theories that are pseudoscientific with a replication crisis.

c) The psychologists themselves are not trained in the low-level sciences.

In contrast, take medicine for example. Medicine is a higher-level abstraction of the biology and chemistry concentrated to observe and treat clinical symptoms.

However, doctors/dentist study a good deal of what you would study in a biomedical science type of degree in a pre-med/during med school.


Note: TheAlderian, take your psychosis somewhere else. Pls thanks.
Note: If your wife is a psychologist and you are coping, please stop. Cheers.

bump

i'm not a scientist

[QUOTE=OGmuffDiver post_id=1640685873][img]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BoXUpyeCQAA2WhY?format=jpg&name=small[img][/QUOTE]psychologist spotted?

I think you’re asking simple question in a very complicated way, and making a ton of assumptions along the way.

Are you basically asking “what’s the hard science behind psychology?”

no I know what the hard science behind psy is. I just don't think we need the high-level abstraction that is psy.

Science does not have the answers which you seek.

You need to look into esoteric sources to gain an understanding of what the mind truly is.

Explaining psychology in terms of the actual physical mechanisms going on at a neuronal level or chemical level is damn near impossible, because the complexity of the neuronal network in the brain is far too much to simply map out, in terms of computational complexity we don't really (currently) have a hope of mapping out all the possible inputs, and the qualia they will inevitably produce, all we really do is map out isolated circuits, but we struggle to look at the brains network as a WHOLE - it is unbelievably messy. The best we can do for now, is look for relationships and patterns, it's almost empiricism vs rationalism.

Therefore some kind of high level abstraction/emergent theory is needed, admittedly it's somewhat flimsy and is far from a hard science, but it's the best that we can manage for now.

Once we have an absolute understanding of our brain and the neuronal networks, and how things like consciousness arise then possibly psychology may no longer be necessary, but we're nowhere near there yet, and thus the abstraction of psychology is useful. You're also acting like neuroscience, psychology and other relevant areas of research are completely decoupled as fields, which isn't completely true... there's communication between neuroscientists, geneticists etc and some integration of information, but i will admit this information could be integrated better. I however believe this is more a problem with the way universities are ran rather than psychology itself being a problem - the way things have to be tightly categorized into 'departments' and 'schools' can really harm the integration of knowledge.. this is not just a problem for psychology but also a problem for the integration of philosophy,physics and chemistry for example.

I'm not a psychologist so no cope from me, but it's not hard to see why it is somewhat necessary, even if it still requires a lot more work, and parts of it border on pseudoscience.

Under your logic, why have any emergent sciences at all? In theory we can explain EVERYTHING that happens in the world at the fundamental level with particle physics. Why have biology, chemistry, higher physics when it can all be explained as particles doing things? The point is, it's often useful to talk about things at different levels of emergence, which is exactly why psychology can be useful.