Introduction to “Psychology in the Snow”
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/30
Link to eBook availability:
Let me start with this: I did not expect this collaboration or the project. Even though, they’re my fault. I tend to fart around a lot with a wide smattering of projects, topics, themes, personas. I find them fun. I remain a playful and experimental person, even as I get older. Maybe, especially as I get older, it seems like deep temperament. Something to plumb. I enjoy reading authors who exist as kin to Kurt Vonnegut. A survivor of war: so trauma survivor — a funny writer. A physical sensation of pleasure to read the architecture of the written word by authors like him. Perhaps, that roots the element of play with me. As the late and prominent American humanist Isaac Asimov purportedly said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’”
Atheists, agnostics, brights, freethinkers, humanists, satanists, und so weiter, I, often, get a sense of whimsy about a life so short in community with them, because the so short life must take a whimsy sense given its brevity. My matrix or meta-premises of orientations about the world, my self, and the relation between the two, sits somewhere between the superset of these. A common thread with the superset comes from the presence of humour and use of empirical means to grasp elements of the world. The religious discourse, on the other hand, tends towards the asinine, the boring, the cruel, the dogmatic, the dreary, the dull, the dumb, the erred, and — no doubt — the faithful. Words in some sense seem ineffective in the display of overwhelming wonder present to generations of humanity with nothing but religious iconography, tales, and text to guide them. A sincere and naive wonder bound by ignorance without a method to know deeper functional and pragmatic truths about the universe. A “Eureka” followed by silence. Science gave the “that’s funny” response to the “Eureka” reverberating through the human animal in response to Nature.
Psychology as a purported claimant to scientific status appears late in the empirical game in the 1870s with Wilhelm Wundt. An empiricism beginning in the contemporary centuries, maybe, in the 1500s. Modern science garners respect for functional truths about the world, pragmatic truths about the world. These functional truths represent operationalism. These pragmatic truths represent practical application. The latter following from the former. To represent operations of Nature means the possibility for practical application on Nature, thus, we come to the basic sciences: biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics, with the development of technologies following from these fields of inquiry. The greater the magnitude of complex systems, then the more difficult the discovery of deeper truths about those systems. Human information processing remains a great problem to solve, potentially a mystery. Regardless, as an evolved production of Nature and the unitary nature of Nature, the functional truths about Nature apply to us. In theory, psychology can act as a scientific conduit to learn deeper truths about human information processing with the possibility for technological developments to modify it. Is that true, funny, or both?
Counselling psychology comes from psychology. Ideally, psychological investigation remains empirical: the “that’s funny.” Counselling psychology, naturally, follows this vein. The counselling psychology interviews with Dr. Robertson represent an educational series devoted to casual discussion of complex counselling psychology ideas and topics in relation to counselling psychology. As both humanists, the bias sits on this fulcrum: the “und so weiter” — my people. As a trauma survivor who did his work, life can be trauma. Counselling psychology becomes a necessity there. In the aforementioned sense, a technology, a tool, to modify human information processing for healthier living. The articles come as bonus materials to interested readers.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
December 28, 2023
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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