Post date: 15-Feb-2014 13:07:20
Abstract has been accepted for the poster session:
We claim that human sciences are still missing one overarching framework to conceptually unify all physical, biological, psychological, and social processes happen! ing in the human system. We propose such a framework, which in our view provides us with additional conceptual tools to explore consciousness. Interestingly, our framework naturally includes the concept of memes.nnThe traditional biopsychosocial view describes different types of processes affecting human beings: physical (e.g. blood pressure), biological (e.g. cell divisions), psychological (e.g. conditioning processes and cognitive processes, and social (e.g. relationships). This conceptual framework barely passes as a fundamental and unifying model of humans, but is rather the explicit acknowledgement of the existence of separate biological, psychological, and social processes. Moreover, those processes are fuzzily defined in terms of mental constructs (such as "to love" or "to age") and overlapping (loving and ageing use the same body and brain).nnWe assume thatn1. only a framework based on physical states can ever provide for holistic and operational models of the human! system, and n2. humans are information gathering and utilizin! g system s (I.G.U.S.), and their brain's informational content, apart from body and environment, drives our behaviour and experience. nnOur framework constructs overarching models of humans by slicing up the physical world into domains while considering the physical representation of information. The slicing method ensures that our description is complete. Our simplest human system model consists of four domains: n1. the environment (outside the human body),n2. the body,n3. the confined memories ("ames"), and n4. the communicable memories ("memes") .nnImportant consequences of the model are:n1. Processes of any type (physical, biological, psychological, and social) always involve changes in one or more of these four domains.n2. To understand any human process, search for elements driving the process in all domains.n3. Psychotherapy is about changing the informational content of the client.n4. Mental constructs are stored within our brain and are the patterns that some types of recurr! ing processes share.