Hi Luis,

There's at least three challenges in working in this area.

The first is to acknowledge that 'mind' is merely a concept  not a real
thing,  AND that our apparent self perception of ourselves when we do
'thinking' does not provide any valid support for our ideas about  how
thinking 'works.  I suggest, any ideas we have about how  we think and what
are minds are  illusions/delusions as a matter of course. An example of a
similar situation, if you do a calculation on a calculator, you can watch
yourself and attempt to infer what is going on in the calculator (equivalent
of watching yourself thinking). You can even get to the point that you can
believe your theory of how the calculator works (equivalent of theory of
mind) is right because it fits all the available evidence that you see in
how the calculator responds (equivalent of confirmation with self
-perception of a theory of thinking and mind). Almost certainly you are
wrong and  the calculator internally does not work anything like you have
deduced (e.g. it may be working using reverse polish  or...). There is
likely no elements of what happens are similar to your model of how the
calculator works (equivalent of theory of mind is a self-perceptual
illusion/fallacy). This seems to be a useful a general principle: the
subjective and objective worlds are incommensurable. 

There is a strong similarity to cargo-cult thinking in which our images of
what we have called 'mind' are a bit like model  aeroplanes made from
fencewire that we attribute reality to as if they were real aeroplanes. The
same is found in how we think about thinking and what has been conceived of
as 'mind' - they are illusional stories only made up to match what we
perceive  and have negligible connection with reality. I suggest this
always means that the idea of mind and theories of mind are always a false
delusion. It may be  the most that can me hoped is to create mechanistic
theories that mechanically predict human behaviours and interior thought
images. These theories, however, are unlikely to have any accurate
relationship with the reality of what is going on inside us. Instead they
offer us the 'theatre' and false ego support that enables us to believe that
our self-perceived constructed  images of 'what we think is going on' is
reality. 

Second, is the idea that humans appear to biologically operate as bodies
first,  and have 'thinking' as a small superficial subsequent secondary
extra that gives us an illusion/delusion that we are deciding things
ourselves ( and even the sense of self appears to be a secondary illusion).
I suggest behaviour  is the primary unit of analysis because  it is
behaviour that is crucial to almost all activities and survival of humans.
Thinking about anything is predated by one's body having already undertaken
processes that define the outcome of the thinking. In other words, our
bodies have already decided to do something or think something before it
comes into mind and we have the delusion of thinking  and of pretending we
have free will.

Third is the importance of avoiding eliding between 'designing' and 'doing'.
They are two different activities and in careful analysis it is usually
important to keep them separate. It is especially so in any  discussion
about designing, agency, self-perception, 'mind' and action.   This is a
problem in some parts of your paper.   For  example, elision between them
occurs  in page 2 para 2 between 'devising course of action' (i.e the output
has the ontological characteristics of  a 'plan' (a set of instructions to
do something)) and the activity of change itself (see, page 3 para 5). Over
the course of 2 pages, you have fallaciously elided your  definition of
design between two epistemologically very different constructs. This is
followed in para 6 (page 3) by a further redefinition of design that
implicitly defines the concept of design as having agency and selfwill
('"Mind design" investigates....'). 

Whoa!

Your  idea makes good sense that we can make some plan (i.e. design) to
undertake  activities to improve how we think and act.

To progress with that without getting deluded and muddled (and most common
reasoning about thinking and 'mind' is badly muddled!) would seem to require
being a bit more careful  with the concepts and the reasoning.

PS Watson and Skinner have already been down a lot of this path in much more
detail... Also see the upcoming  field of 'Motivational Design' - for
example Keller.
 
Best wishes,
Terry
==
Dr Terence Love
Love Design and Research
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
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+61 (0)4 3497 5848
=



-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Luis
Inacio
Sent: Tuesday, 6 March 2012 5:59 AM
To: Dr Terence Love
Subject: Mind Design: towards a new framework for the study of mental
modification of human behavior

Hi all,

I have posted a short paper in my blog, Designio
2.0<http://designio2.wordpress.com/>,
about the interesting field of Mind design. The title of this, Mind Design:
towards a new framework for the study of mental modification of human
behavior - a short
presentation<http://independent.academia.edu/LuisInacio/Papers/1512834/Mind_
Design_towards_a_new_framework_for_the_study_of_mental_modification_of_human
_behavior_-_a_short_presentation>,
presented at the 12th International Conference for Philosophy & Psychiatry
2009, in Lisbon, Portugal. It can be accessed in Academia.edu.

I would like to have some of your brainpower over this issue. Its a broad
theme (in the sense that implies various fields of inquiry), and I made a
little twist in it. At the present time I had made a progress in this
matter. My current position is not reflected in this presentation. But it
serves as an introduction for a theoretical discussion in this list, because
its a pressing issue and we are witnessing to various forms of mind
designing through psychological and economical theories, pedagogical
theories, etc. Here is the abstract:

«‘Can we design our minds and our behaviors?’ this is the driving question
that presupposes the framework of this field of ’Mind Design’. This term is
not original. It is used by John Haugeland, in the collection of essays Mind
Design II (1996), to a new emerging field where the subject matter was
‘psychology by reverse engineering’, studying the mind in terms of how it
works, in order to build intelligent artifacts in the field of Artificial
Intelligence.
However, this new approach of mind design expands its field (combining the
study o practical reason, the cognitive sciences and psychotherapies) to the
possibility of calculated modification of/in our minds and behaviors,
assuming that behaviors and mental states are subject to manipulation,
combination, and deletion of whatever patterns that are conditions of
courses of action in a human mind.
This appeal to mind engineering might be perceived as artificial, but in
fact it is as natural as any codification of whatever action we execute.
The set of questions that mind design elaborates are: What it is when we
talk about mind engineering? Can an agent autonomously design his own
behavior? What type of engineering is necessary for such thing to happen?
Are there limits of such design? What are the structures of such
possibility?
This set of calculated and intentional modifications of human mind and
behavior are presupposed in psychotherapies. That is why Mid Design defends
a close relationship to various sorts of therapies and their respective
conceptual background.
Therefore, this essay aims to present a brief account of this new framework,
by i) delineating some of the philosophic background and the connection to
psychiatric therapies, ii) the goals of this field and iii) the delineation
of possible future routes of concern of this ongoing investigation, leaving
room for possible discussion.»

Thank you all!

Best regards
--
Luís M Inácio
________________________________
Filósofo | Designer de Comunicação
Philosopher | Communication Designer
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