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5. The Intentionality Model Diagrammed and Defined in Relation to the Duplex Pyramids

5. The Intentionality Model Diagrammed and Defined in Relation to the Duplex Pyramids .

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5. The Intentionality Model Diagrammed and Defined in Relation to the Duplex Pyramids

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  1. 5. The Intentionality Model Diagrammed and Defined in Relation to the Duplex Pyramids • The intentionality model diagrammed on the next four slides represent structures and processes that have been gradually built up from the infant’s more simple elements to the full blown structure and process elements common to most adults. The structural elements and paths of the processes are present in the neonate in rudimentary form but become more differentiated and content laden as the child develops. In other words, if one were to think of the dynamics of the model as somewhat like a feedback loop that is constantly and rapidly cycling through each stage, the model would be representing this loop as a flow chart. • Researchers studying the processes of the mind should eventually find that brain activity that is recorded and plotted in a way that conforms to consecutive flow that is depicted by the consecutive stages in the model or flow chart. The researcher should find that cycling through the stages is typically extremely fast, in milliseconds. The recruitment of neurons and electrical activity at each stage should ebb and flow, sometimes spreading within a stage and sometimes narrowing, but the flow through the processes should remain the same. As can be seen in the model, some stages have mini-loops and sub-structures of their own so that the flow in the instrumentally enabled observation of the brain may not seem so fixed and mechanical. • An intriguing question that remains open for me is whether the flow is always basically unidirectional or is it possible that there can be rapid reversals to a prior stage before proceeding through the loop? • If one thinks, with the help of the model, of what the mind must contain and what it must do to interact quickly and spontaneously to stimuli in world on some occasions and on other occasions must step back and engage in complex reflection, then the model may help in formulating experiments of a cognitive nature that address a wide variety of questions about the nature of mind and mental activity on varying levels of complexity. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  2. Dyadic Relationships Roles Interaction EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENTAL CONTEXT CONSTRAINTSand SETTINGS  SITUATIONS  ACCOMMODATION PERCEPTIONRECEPTIONRETRIEVAL INTERNAL REPRESENTATIONof ENVIRONMENTAL CONTEXTSand SCHEMATA for SOCIAL SETTINGS ASSIMILATION vs. ACCOMMODATION MEMORY PATTERN READINESS for PRIOR SCHEMATA and PRIOR SCHEMES of COMPLETED vs. INCOMPLETE GOALS Model of the Duplex Pyramidsand their Interacting Structures and Processes Encompassing Environments External Structures and Systems INTENTIONAL PROCESSESORGANIZING ASPECTS OF THE WORLD Institution or Organization Breadth and Unobservable Settings within Institution INTENTIONAL PROCESSESORGANIZING ASPECTS OF THE INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL WORLDS Situations Situational Identities Surface and Observable emiT Time Internal Structures and Processes Depth and Unobservable Self-concept Physical/Verbal Behavior Cognition Emotion/Feelings Perception Background: Prior Schemata and Schemes/Species Genetic History The content of the Intentionality Model’s representational structures to the left can be conceptualized as consisting of the categories represented by the Duplex Pyramids above. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  3. Relationships Roles Dyadic Interaction EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENTAL CONTEXT CONSTRAINTSand SETTINGS  SITUATIONS  ACCOMMODATION PERCEPTIONRECEPTIONRETRIEVAL INTERNAL REPRESENTATIONof ENVIRONMENTAL CONTEXTSand SCHEMATA for SOCIAL SETTINGS ASSIMILATION vs. ACCOMMODATION MEMORY PATTERN READINESS for PRIOR SCHEMATA and PRIOR SCHEMES of COMPLETED vs. INCOMPLETE GOALS Model of the Duplex Pyramids andthe Dimensions of the Arena of Your Mind The Arena of yourmind may range frombroad, deep, andtemporallyexpansive tonarrow, surfaceand temporallyimmediate. Encompassing Environments INTENTIONAL PROCESSESORGANIZING ASPECTS OF THE WORLD INTENTIONAL PROCESSESORGANIZING ASPECTS OF THE WORLD Institution or Organization Breadth and Unobservable Settings within Institution Situations Situational Identities Surface and Observable emiT Time Depth and Unobservable Self-concept Physical/Verbal Behavior Cognition Emotion/Feelings Perception Background: Prior Schemata and Schemes/Species Genetic History The Arena of yourmind may range frombroad, deep, andtemporallyexpansive tonarrow, surfaceand temporallyimmediate. The content of the Intentionality Model’s representational structures to the left can be conceptualized as consisting of the categories represented by the Duplex Pyramids above. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  4. Dynamic Interaction between Levels of External Structures and Internal Processes Settings and Situations Identity Descending from Top to Bottom:Most Immediate, Transient and Directly Observed and Directly Influential Dyadic Interaction INTENTIONAL PROCESSESORGANIZINGASPECTS OF THEINNER WORLD Closer to Surface and Inferable PhysicalVerbal Behavior From Most Rapidly and Directly Influenced down to Least Influenced by External Structures Deeper and Less Observable Self-concept Cognition Emotion/Feelings Perception Background: Prior Schemata and Schemes/Species Genetic History Most Indirectly Observed; Most Pervasively, Enduringly, but Indirectly Influential Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  5. LEVEL PERSPECTIVE  EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENTAL CONTEXT CONSTRAINTSand SETTINGS  SITUATIONS Roles Dyadic Interaction Dialectical Reasoning MODELof the INTENTIONAL PROCESSES ENVISIONINGASPECTS  PARAMETERS OF AWARENESS PERCEPTION, RECEPTION, RETRIEVAL RE-ENGAGE CRITERIAFORFULFILLMENT ACCOMMODATION TRANSCENDENCEand REORGANIZATION Storage FORSHADOWINGCOMPARISON INTERNAL REPRESENTATIONof ENVIRONMENTAL CONTEXTSand SCHEMATA for SOCIAL SETTINGS REVISINGGOAL MASTERING MIRRORING ASSIMILATION vs. ACCOMMODATION DISENGAGE EXIT FAIL FORSHADOWING MEMORY PATTERN READINESS for PRIOR SCHEMATA and PRIOR SCHEMES of COMPLETED vs. INCOMPLETE GOALS COMPLETE CRITERIA FOR FULFILLMENT GOALSETTING DECIDING INDIVIDUATIONPHYSICAL, COGNITIVE, SOCIALHEDONIC TONE DEGREES MENTALASSESSMENTLEVELS INCORPORATIONSTATES ENVISIONINGASPECTS ADVENTURINGASPECTS STATE TRANSFORMATIONS IMPLICIT OTHER EFFECTS BODY EXPERIENCE INCORPORATION EXTROSPECTION IMPLICIT OTHER EFFECTS PLEASURE +++ PSEUDO-DIS-INCORPORATION TEMPORAL EXPERIENCE EXTROCEPTION ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS PLEASURE ++ HEURISTIC-DIS-INCORPORATION EXTEROCEPTION PLEASURE + TIMING HEURISTIC-INCORPORATION INTEROCEPTION PAIN + PSEUDO-INCORPORATION <<<TIME PERSPECTIVE>>> EMOTIONAL BY-PRODUCTS INTROCEPTION PAIN ++ DIS-INCORPORATION STRATEGY: COGNITIVE OPERATIONS INTROSPECTION PAIN +++ DYS-CORPORATION PSEUDO-DYS-CORPORATION Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  6. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes • External Environmental Context, Constraints, Settings, Roles, and Situations. The world, or reality, is in constant flux. Your mind actively or passively accommodates to these changes. Your mind is exquisitely attuned to even the most subtle change. Typically, the global, external environmental context remains fairly constant. On the other hand, you constantly move from one setting to another. Settings, for the most part, stay the same yet with minor changes. However, sometimes there can be dramatic changes in a Setting. Settings are typically structured in ways that evoke or allow for a limited range of situations and behaviors. One stabilizing factor for settings is the fact that most or many involve formal ‘roles’ for the people present and/or participating. Roles are typically either individual-specific or Setting-specific. Setting-specific roles can be inhabited by different individuals. Individuals can each rotate through a Setting-specific role, making the role itself remain relatively constant in spite of the change in occupants. There can also be Setting-specific ‘sets of situations’ that typically change rapidly. A situation can suddenly develop and evoke a situation-specific range of behaviors. Among this range of behaviors, or repertoire, some exhibited by certain individuals can be identified as characteristic for that individual, but which are modified, or tempered, mainly by the presence of Setting-specific roles. However, the behaviors exhibited or selected by a group of individuals can often seem somewhat kaleidoscopic if one has only a small sample to draw from. As samples accumulate, patterns emerge. Consequently, the selectivity of Setting and Situation Specific behaviors exhibits an exquisite sensitivity. This sensitivity is illustrated by the individual instantly and accurately sensing what has changed at each level, from the global environment down to the idiosyncratic behavior of members of a group in a Setting as its Setting-specific Situations arise and Situation-specific behaviors evoked. Sensing the change in the structure of their environment, the individual typically accommodates appropriately. The un-orchestrated, Setting and Situation Specific, choreography of behaviors flows and no one stops to notice the exquisite sensitivity of even the most disturbed participants. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  7. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional ProcessesExternal Structures External Environmental Context, Constraints, Settings, Roles, and Situations (Cont.). • Now, given the above definitions and descriptions of functions, the task for you is to learn how to become conscious of these levels of external contexts; to understand how they influence you; and to understand how they cause you to make conscious decisions either to immunize yourself against their effects; to selectively change aspects of the context; or to creatively adjust your own behavior so as to optimize success in reaching your goals within a context. • If your focus is on or your concern is about relationships, then the task becomes trying to assess and understand the significant aspects of the various levels of the external, environmental contexts and what kinds of influences these significant aspects are having on the relationship. Once you have a tentative understanding of these influencing aspects, your interpretation of the interactions in the relationship can shift from attributing to personalities or the motives of the inner person to attributing causality to structural influences. Finally, you and the ‘other’ in the relationship can begin to approach the structure using the alternatives in a). • If your focus is on an intellectual project, then the task becomes trying to assess what it is about the structure of the context that is influencing your choices, plans, and conduct with respect to your project. You could ask if there are roles of persons vis-à-vis you in the relevant setting or context that potentially could influence the way you choose, plan, and conduct your project? If so, are they diverting you from what you truly want or are inspired to do? Are you imagining or exaggerating the degree of influence they are exerting? Could their suggestions actually be a positive influence? You could ask if other structural factors are influencing you, such as other types of requirements: temporal aspects; specified audience; types of resources available; the purpose or significance of the project; who will evaluate and how will be the project evaluated; possible comparisons with others conducting such projects; personal conflicts in this context; and possible constraints and official requirements concerning the project itself, for example? Are there other types of relationships that might be exerting an influence? Furthermore, are there personal factors such as preparedness for this type of project; emotional or health factors; relevant skills; long range personal goals; personal or family relationship factors; economic factors, and the like? Once you have assessed these structural factors you can use the same strategies mentioned in a) again to help you deal with them. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  8. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional ProcessesPerception and Memory • Perception, Reception, Retrieval: As was mentioned above, people have an exquisite sensitivity to their environment. Your senses are perceiving this world. Yet, you are constantly ‘not’ noticing parts of your world. This may sound like a contradiction. The reason it is not a contradiction is that while you are exquisitely perceiving, you are also ‘selectively’ receiving what you perceive. You are aware, I am sure, of the fact that while you are focused on some task or event, you have been oblivious to most other things in your world. This selective noticing and not noticing what your senses are perceiving is going on all of the time. Without knowing it, you have established patterns of ‘not noticing’ huge segments of your world. The status of these ‘deselected’ items is that they simply do not exist for you. This is true not only for you but also for everyone else in your world. On the other hand, the seemingly non-existent world may contain factors or information that could possibly be of vital or enormously significant importance to you, especially as you approach some new project or task. To grasp the significance of this fact, or process, to you, you could examine, or attend to, the processes of perception operating in your self or in some other single individual to try to understand or assess how you or they tend to uniquely perceive the world. Try detecting what you screen out. Probe others to see what they may be screening out. Things of great significance are typically there and going through changes that could be important to you but you cannot react to them if, for you, they are ‘not there’. Each individual is sensing these changes in their external world, or perceiving them, and as they do, they each react with varying degrees of receptivity. So, perception, reception, and retrieval are important in two ways. First, for the ‘other’, receptivity means that that individual is focused and as such begins to retrieve memories related to their focus. This happens very rapidly and is rarely detectable by other people. The memories they are retrieving are a result of their unique life history and history of exposure to the object of focus. Consequently, you may need to determine what it is in the world that the ‘other’ is not receiving, or, if they are perceiving and retrieving what you expect or want, then the task is to determine what they might be retrieving from ‘their’ memory bank that is distinctly different from what ‘you’ would retrieve. Second, you need to make this same kind of analysis with respect to yourself. The way you approach new situations and new projects may be decidedly uncreative if you cannot break out of this kind of solipsism. If you are not taking this possibility into consideration with respect to the other or your audience, you will not be successful in getting them to enter the world of novel insights you are creating. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  9. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional ProcessesInternal Representation of External Structures • Internal Representation of Environmental Contexts and Schemata for Social Settings: Internal memories in the present awareness tend to be for the immediate objects of focus. Our senses perceive an enormous plethora of stimuli and from that an extremely limited amount is received. What is received has meaning which is derived from past experiences and starts a spreading to related past experiences or memories, a process referred to here as retrieval. These memories are in the form of Internal Representations of the Environment so that whatever is received and retrieved is within a context that is supplied by the way our unique history has constructed a world, your world. From the beginning of people’s lives these representations build upon one another. Our constructed world becomes more elaborated and coherent. These representations of environmental contexts expand and become increasingly differentiated. Each representation gradually begins to have a structure that consists of levels as mentioned in the section on Duplex Pyramids. The parts of that stratified external world have a coherence which, as a type, is unique to each individual. The stratified external world can be taught and learned so that, in spite of our uniqueness, there evolves a commonality and language that makes it possible for people to communicate about the types and relations and other attributes when perceiving the same things. We can call the shared commonality when perceiving or relating to the same thing a Schema. One could examine the unique way each person retrieves, learns, shares, etc., such Schemata. One could also examine Schemata themselves. For example, some schemata are for social situations like a game in sports, or educational classrooms, for example. The main point to consider in this context is that the structure of the levels of the external world is being differentiated from one’s internal representation of that world. In one case you look outward and in the other you look inward. When you begin your intellectual project it is important to keep this distinction in mind. The question to ask yourself is, in what sense or degree is your internal representation of the world, especially the extremely small part of the world, similar to that of other persons? How communicable to others is what is in your head; the small part of the world upon which you are focused; the perspective you have on it; the way you see it situated within and between the levels of structure of the external world or representations thereof; the question or insight about it that you wish to communicate to interested persons; and the significance of the way you plan to go about studying it? How do you bridge these subtle and complex distinctions from your mind to the mind of the interested others? If you assume there is an automatic, one to one, exact transmission of what is going on in your head to that of another to or with whom you are communicating, you practically guarantee that they will be conceiving something far wide of the mark and you will get back from them remarks that can make you quite frustrated. The frustration will most likely be mutual and will cause further disappointment and sense of being misunderstood. Once you have a clear understanding of this dynamic, it should help motivate you to attend to ways you can bridge the ‘natural’ communication gap. This will be one of your major challenges. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  10. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional ProcessesLearning and Accommodation • Assimilation vs. Accommodation: As the person encounters a setting and its situations, if there has been little change, their retrieval will be in the form of assimilating it to familiar Schemata. If there is radical change, the familiar Schemata will not work. Now they have to accommodate, or change, their Schemata so that it faithfully and accurately matches the changed reality. Accommodation requires mental effort and often emotional adjustment as well. A person’s ego can be involved with the original Schemata, or the person’s reference group may insist on their own rendition of the Schemata, resulting in inner conflict between what they are confronting in this new, radically changed situation and these tendencies to maintain their original Schemata, their reference group’s version, or their own rendition of its revision. If your project or experiment happens to present subjects with information that is inconsistent with their current knowledge and beliefs, you may need a way to detect this and to induce accommodation. • Schemata and Schemes, Though Intertwined, Involve Two Different Kinds of Learning. A schema is a set of concepts that go together is such a way that perceiving one member of the set will result in calling the whole set into play. For instance, hearing a baseball play over the radio should automatically call into play schemata of ballparks, bases, players, rules, etc. A scheme is a set of behaviors that are bound up with a schema such that perceiving one member of a schema’s set will also call into play a readiness to enact the scheme’s set of behaviors as appropriate. For instance, if called upon to play ball and assume a position on the field, one could grab a mitt, run to the position and be ready to play. One can learn a schema without learning the scheme but not vice versa. When a schema is learned, its recall will be greatly enhanced if the related scheme is learned, the latter, however, requiring considerable more time to be learned with proficiency. For example, it is difficult to learn the schema for the game of baseball. Learning this schema is made easier and more thorough if the schemes are learned as well. This type of memory is more enduring and more easily recalled as well. If a couple is taking a class on communication effectiveness in an intimate relationship, learning to enact the related skills makes learning the concepts more thorough, works out the bugs, results in much better transfer to the home situation, and more resistant to fading over time. In a test of some types of knowledge a subject with relevant knowledge and experience should do much better than a with only knowledge. Might gender, etc., be sources of such differences. Would this difference, if not taken into consideration, skew your results and their interpretation? In conducting an experiment on human behavior it might help to keep this distinction in mind. Also, in another vein, in designing a study, or experiment, it might help to make a trial run since enactment of the behaviors related to conducting the experiment is likely to reveal any bugs or mistakes in the planned execution of the design, but also increase proficiency in conducting the experiment. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  11. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional ProcessesResponse: Schemata plus Schemes • Memory Pattern Readiness for Prior Schemata and Prior Schemes of Completed vs. Incomplete Goals: The internal representations of settings and situations, or Schemata, are accompanied by patterns of behavioral response. We can call these patterns of readiness-to-respond-Schemes. Schemes are bound to Schemata so that when Schemata require accommodation, their Schemes must also accommodate and new patterns of readiness to respond have to be learned. These revised schemes also tend to be relatively intransigent. Both Schemata and Schemes are in the mind. At this point our analysis is only about what is in the mind and not about the actual interaction with the world. For example, if you have a new project that involves writing, you approach the writing assignment or project using assimilation of what this means in this instance to your familiar Schemata and Schemes. For creativity to occur, you may have to detect your assimilative retrieval process and prepare yourself to break out of the pattern, or accommodate. While the situation or requirement may not demand it, nevertheless your new, self-imposed criteria to be creative may require it. Schemes bound to schemata are in the mind but the schemes get there as a result of behavior, acts that are required for interaction with the world and other people when schemata are in play. The behavior may be verbal in the forms of writing, speech, or reading behaviors that communicate or use the schemata correctly in interaction with the world. The behavior may be acts that have an impact on both the physical or personal worlds. If a couple is speaking of their love for one another, they each have schemata for the concept ‘love’ with love related behaviors bound up with it. If the love schemes of one do not match the partner’s schema and schemes for love, interaction between them will not flow smoothly and feelings will have a sense of pretense, fakeness, or lack of authenticity that is vexing and perplexing rather than the expected sensuous, almost melodic, confluence of love. With divergence, the ecstasy of romance fades into a sense to struggle to accommodate, please, and to make it work. Let us say that you were given a clearly delineated idea of what a certain writing project was to look like and you find yourself immersed in the project and creative insights begin to emerge. These emergent insights seem to need a format that differs from the one prescribed. The format prescribed, and the format needed if it is to be tailored for the emerging creative insight, begin to feel like they do not harmonize. The conflict reveals itself in the writing schemes as tension, paralysis, or an emotional seizure. One could mistakenly label the interrupted flow as writer’s block but perhaps we should reserve that term for the earliest or prewriting stage. If one chooses to continue to comply with the prescribed format, performance of the task will feel arduous and time will feel heavy and dragging. Pleasure that accompanies unfettered creativity is transformed into drudgery. Upon official completion of the project, one path will lead to a sense of fulfillment and the other will lead to a sense of doubt as to whether it was really worth all of the effort. In the love relationship, a time will come when there is a feeling it has been a one-sided matter of doing all the giving, emptiness, resignation, smoldering upheaval, or rage and rejection. A delicate attention to the way schemes are unfolding, usually unneeded if not impossible if things are clicking, should clue you into the acknowledgement of a mismatch inhibiting creativity and one must disengage and work on finding a satisfying revision of the project or some major aspect of it, if fulfillment is to be possible. Designing, practicing, executing are all stages that may require detection of this inner sense of disharmony and struggle in order to make revisions that can maintain the creative fire that produces a higher quality of work. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  12. 5. A. Definitions and Functions of Intentional ProcessesAssessment through Interaction with Schemata • Mental Assessment Levels: This topic refers to an examination of the way persons tend to assess the relevant levels of the world from the perspective of their schemata of the external world and human internal worlds. As you begin to consider possibilities for the subject of your project, consider also how each possibility will be situated within the complex of all of the related disciplines with which you are familiar and re-examine their domains of focus and levels of structure. The various disciplines of arts and sciences, technology, fine arts, and humanities exist within hierarchies. There are those that address very large domains and extended temporal perspectives and from this global level disciplines descend through narrowing levels of scope down to those with a microscopic and immediate focus. In some way all disciplines can be seen as related. From a different perspective the non-academic domains of government, business and industry, the professions, education, non-governmental organizations, religious institutions and the like also exist within hierarchies. Considering the various degrees of scope and temporal perspectives of each of these domains one can discern their levels from the broadest and temporally expansive to the most local and present oriented. If you were to draw a multidimensional map representing all of the above domains and then pinpoint where your study or project lies within the multidimensional, conceptual space, how would this affect your perspective on your project? For example, try to imagine where yours would fit if you include the rest of the nations and cultures in the world in your assessment? Astronomy? Molecular biology? On the other hand, returning from imagination to reality, restrict your focus to your own discipline and contemplate its nature. What is it about? What kinds of research are done in your discipline? What is the range of topics typically studied? What are the typical types of research designs? Where does your project fit within the range of topics and experiments? What is the history of studies related to your topic? What do you think is the significance of strain of studies that are related to your subject? What significance do you think your study will contribute to this line of research? Slipping back into imagination and stepping outside of your discipline and line of research, how might your study’s results relate to its counterpart in the real world, that part of the real world that is most relevant to your study. How might your results contribute to that segment of the real world? Is yours designed to support what is already validated and in vogue, add to it, raise questions about it, or does it set forth more viable alternatives to it? Once you feel you have a reasonably clear perspective on the significance of your study, begin to consider what effects your results, if employed, could possibly have on the structure and systems encompassing the real world arena to which your study is relevant. Remember that structures and systems of organizations are notoriously difficult to change. Typically, when there is a problem in an organization, the participants tend single out an individual(s) as the source of the problem. If teachers have a problem student, it seldom occurs to them that the source could be in the structure rather than the individual. The structure is sacrosanct and therefore the teaching and classroom management techniques which are a part of that structure are also. To suggest the methods, or other structural aspects, should be changed could be met with the same reception as would an escaped convict crashing a formal, exclusive, socialite party. Consequently, it should be a definite prerequisite to have an extensive familiarity with the context within which you are recommending the results of your study be employed. To make the kind of assessment recommended above one must first have some degree of understanding of the meaning and nature of structures and systems. This will be introduced in the following slides. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  13. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional ProcessesRelating to External Structures • Mental Assessment Levels: The Concept of Structure Accommodating to a new paradigm, such as Structuralism, requires intense mental labor. People do not follow that road without great trepidation, frustration, and even resentment. Before the journey, it just looks full of uncertainty and potential danger. When they 'do' go up that road, they may reach a pinnacle and look down to a vast new view that is clear, refreshing, and rewarding. One gets that great 'Aha' feeling that comes so rarely. Do you think is it possible to induce this kind of accommodation and, if so, what approaches might have the greatest possibility for success? The key concept to look 'for' and 'at' here is the concept of structure. It is necessary yet difficult to communicate the total, novel idea of Structuralism. As mentioned above, it is often hard to accommodate to any different paradigm of the world. The natural tendency is to try to fit the new into familiar concepts, or assimilate. In the case of Structuralism, you are being asked to step back and decommission the familiar and look as though you are seeing and learning for the first time. Though difficult, could it be rewarding to train oneself to think in terms of structures? When a paradigm or conception of the world changes radically, it can shake up a person mentally and even physically. Everything in the mind that is related to the new concept has to be re-organized. Many things that were thought to be true and valuable may now come to be seen as useless or even counter-productive. People hold their beliefs and conceptions dearly and take them personally, of course. Letting go is mentally hard but even harder emotionally. As you read further about structure, see if you think it is possible to test people’s reactions to the structuralism thesis. What methods might be used to successfully reorient people to heuristically adopting the Structuralist approach? If subjected to an experiment to bring about a change in perspective with regard to Structuralism, is it possible to measure what people who have changed versus those who have not do? Could it be possible to have them report on the thought processes involved in making the change in perspective? What is Structure? Structure is a perspective, a way of looking at the world and at organizations. Structures consist of aspects, or components, of an organization and the way those aspects or arranged. The hierarchy of authority is an aspect of structure. Schedules, formal roles, location, the arrangement of seating in a setting, whether activities are monitored or measured, rules of conduct, modes of communication, equipment, purpose of activities, and all of those aspects or factors that are influencing the ongoing processes and their outcomes can be included in your analysis of a structure. Even the history of an organization or activity that is a part of that organization can be included in your construction of a structural perspective. Structures determine the kinds of 'situations' that develop and the kinds of "interactions between people" that take place during these situations. Therefore when problems arise that cause us to focus on one or more problem individuals, with the structural approach we have to ‘reverse figure and ground’ in the Gestalt. In this structural approach, the individual personalities are not considered to be the cause, the structure is the cause. Individual personalities, like genetics, contribute only a small percentage as a cause of behavior. To many this is likely to seem counterintuitive, contrary to a long and hallowed tradition, and without confirming evidence. To test this assertion, one could find two instances each with a person who is thought to be emotionally disturbed and in one case analyze the structure and try making changes that should ameliorate the symptoms and a second case in which counseling or other treatment alternatives are tried and compare the results of each. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  14. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes • Mental Assessment Levels: The Concept of Structure (Cont.) Looking through the lens of structuralism versus individualism is like going from using our natural eyesight and looking at the immediate, close at hand, environment to mapping terrain from high in the atmosphere with satellites and powerful telescopes. From the perspective of outer space, metaphorically speaking, you see relations and understand patterns and causes as never before and are astounded. However, from this perspective, you now understand the complex web of relations and now know what to do as never before. Learning to analyze and change structures requires this kind of new way of thinking, but gives you a very powerful tool for good. What kind of experience could you set up so that people could take this kind of perspective with respect to something like a school or institution? How could you find out what insights the subjects might have gained about structuralism versus individualism? What suggestions might they come with up to alter and improve a particular structure like that of a public school or even a single classroom? What variables in the person would they be attempting to influence and what results would they hope to achieve? What other settings or organizations could be used for such an experiment? When the members of an organization are assisted to get this perspective, they begin to have a sense of empowerment and to share a positive vision. As they work from a holistic vision they are likely to feel a deep sense of ownership and profound sense of satisfaction with their individual contributions and the achievements of their group and the total institution. What effect on their product could such an incorporated holistic vision have? Descending from the view from outer space the levels of structure can emerge. The levels of structure can correspond to levels of academic disciplines from macro disciplines like economics, political science, or environmental sciences down to sociology to social psychology to personality to cognition and emotion, to physiology and genetics. A similar descent is possible from the macro to micro in the applied disciplines like management and education. In the non-academic, real, world this kind of descent is not represented by an organization’s hierarchy, but rather by a movement, from the perspective of external structures, from encompassing structures like the total organization to settings to situations and to the immediately observable interactions between individuals. While from the perspective of internal structures the descent is from the immediate and observable to the unobservable, historical, extremely and only indirectly divined, but stored, life history and specie’s genetic history. Could a project combine relevant academic, applied, and real world levels as an interdisciplinary study? Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  15. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes A. Mental Assessment Levels: The Concept of Structure (Cont.) Structures are not things. Structures are the way we conceive of things, our perspectives on things. There can be an infinite variety of conceptions of structures. Taking perspectives and conceiving of structures with respect to any phenomena is an art. Typically, people see what is immediately present. It is possible to see the same entity or group of entities or parts from the perspective of history or histories. It is also possible to see the same group from the perspective of its place within encompassing structures, in the midst of coextensive or related groups or parts, or as a structure that itself encompasses substructures. You can create and choose the components and systems of the structure as well as the perspective you will take on them. Once created, you can change them again. You can change both the conceptions of structures and the perspectives you will take on them. They are there merely to help you analyze and solve problems more effectively. Each time a structure is conceived, it is then possible to observe and analyze the interrelations of its components. One can examine the structure of a poem, a game, a machine, a tree, a body of water, or anything. After deciding upon your units of analysis and isolating particular units in a structure or in systems, you can observe how these units influence one another. At first it may appear that one unit is the cause of the behavior of another unit. However, when taking a structural perspective, it could become the unit or units are a long standing part of the history of the organization. Historically it has its place within the arrangement of numerous units with a more encompassing structure. By continuing to experiment with structural perspective taking, a more comprehensive understanding of the organization may emerge. Such insights might even suggest more effective strategies for rearranging units and aspects of an organization. At the same time, from this structural perspective, it may become possible to see and understand why prior strategies have not worked or worked only briefly. In fact, it could become apparent that some solutions that were successful for one component of an organization, ironically, contributed to dysfunction in other components. Occasionally success is achieved for the short term but promotes dysfunction later on. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  16. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional ProcessesRelating to Systems within Structures A. Mental Assessment Levels: Systems within Structures (Cont.) Structure and the Duplex Pyramids The Matrix of Systems An essential part of structure is the concept of systems. 'Structures' predetermine 'systems' and systems consist of patterns that are shaped and constrained by structures. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  17. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional ProcessesLearning to Create a Taxonomy of Systems Mental Assessment Levels: Creating a Taxonomy of Systems When examining the way components are interrelated or affect one another physically, temporally, or psychologically, we are examining the systems within structures. Once again, it is possible to take multiple perspectives on systems and examine their interrelations and interactions. The important point to weigh here is that it is the taking of multiple perspectives on structures and on how structures are encompassing systems and then on the systems themselves. This approach yields the most powerful results. When attempting to restructure structures and systems, the advance work done by taking different perspectives is likely to yield the most effective and enduring results. I have listed below nine systems that I have found valuable when analyzing and troubleshooting organizations. These are arbitrary categories and other categories that someone else might find more useful could be substituted for them. Whatever categories you choose to use, they can best be developed when working within each organization rather than from the outside. An initial analysis will yield data that seem to be related. As you progress in your analysis, your data will represent factors that begin to group themselves into clusters which have an interlocking nature. These factors are prone to have more connection with and influence upon one another than other factors. If extracting all other factors but those in your cluster does not essentially disturb the inner coherence of these clusters of factors, you probably have constructed a ‘system’. Likewise, you should find that adding other extraneous factors also has little effect on the cluster. Yet, removing a cluster’s factor does essentially alter all others in the cluster. Using this analytical method you can arrive at a set of very useful systems. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  18. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes Mental Assessment Levels: Creating a Taxonomy of Systems I started referring to these clusters of factors as Systems. It seemed to help if I looked at everything in a cluster as a System in which all parts were integrally related and all parts maintained the pattern of the total System even in the face of concerted efforts by top administration, or any other authority with the power to do so, to change one or another part of a System. In other words, the parts of a System maintained each other and changes to one part resulted in eventual pressures by the other parts to return the whole system from the change back to the status quo of that System. Systems Below is a set of systems that have proven helpful in the past. • Vertical Systems or Hierarchies • Horizontal Systems: Locations, Layouts, and Distribution of Functions • Performance Systems: Job Requirement, Evaluations, and Measures of Results • Financial and Compensation Systems • Communication Systems • Temporal and Longitudinal Systems • Social Systems: Organizations, Informal Associations, and Families • Educational, Training, and Development Systems • Histories and Descriptions of Entities within Levels of External Structures Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  19. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes A. Mental Assessment Levels:Interactions between Systems While all of the Systems seem to be relatively independent of each other, nevertheless each interacts with one another to exert pressure toward maintaining the status quo of the whole.  When analyzing an organization, it is effective to take each system, examine it, and try to determine the way it works within the whole and grasp its essence. If problems in the organization have previously been noted, then using a systematic method of looking at each system and trying to assess whether and, if so, which, aspects of that system might possibly be contributing to each of the cited problems should yield useful results. This method usually yields information that can lead to corrective actions that can be included in eventual restructuring plans. However, the analysis must be taken a step further. Typically, there are interactions between two or more systems that could be causing problems that become evident during this process. For example, taking from the list below, Vertical Systems, Performance Systems, and Financial and Compensation Systems could be interacting in such a way as to prevent a recommended reform from being enacted. Certain persons in the organization become oppositional and therefore designated as ‘people with problems’. Yet, when the problem with these systems are corrected, both the initially cited problems and the ‘people with problems’ dissolve and a well functioning and productive organization emerges once again. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  20. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes A. Mental Assessment Levels:Restructuring Using Structures, Processes, and Systems It occurred to me that, if one were to implement a new program successfully, and one that would endure over time, it would be necessary to work with the entire institution and all of its Systems simultaneously and not just try to implement a single program by itself. While it is impossible to work on everything at once, it is possible to have a blueprint of the totality in advance and to address individual parts as they arose, in their own time. A change in any part would be addressed from the perspective of the whole blueprint. Pilot projects restricted to an insulated program or department would be doomed to eventual regression the status quo. The whole organization and all members or employees would participate in the change of each part of the organization. This would result in each person being involved in, having intimate knowledge of, and incorporating each step toward the restructuring of the whole. With participation and input from everyone, a wide range of different perspectives are aired and shared, contributions acknowledged, and implications examined. From these insights and suggestions coming out of the whole organization it is possible to devise a comprehensive, integrated set of strategies designed to solve problems within structures and systems. TAKING THE TEMPORAL PERSPECTIVE     When working with a large institution or organization, it is important to consider the past, present, and future of the multidimensional interaction of levels of external structures and systems with the current internal structures and processes of participants. It is important to include in the restructuring discussions both the history of the institution and the histories that individuals have had with the institution. The institution’s history is a foundation for understanding its present status as well as a foundation upon which to devise future plans and goals and implement restructuring strategies. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  21. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes • Mental Assessment Levels: External Structures and Systems Can Selectively Affect Internal Structures and Processes.In the slides that follow we will examine structures and systems in some detail and attempt to show that selected aspects of structures and systems can cause selective effects in the internal structures and processes of an institution’s client population. Since one cannot see structures and systems per se as they are a matter of the perspective you take, you have to imagine an aspect of a structure or of systems within the context of the whole and then try to imagine changes and how each or all of the changes might selectively affect internal structures and processes. Below are some guidelines for undertaking this exercise. The Implications of Choices between Approaches to the Planning and Implementation of Structural Changes in the Institution. With respect to institutions for youth and related types of institutions, whenever someone proposes some change of policies or the way the institution is organized, the question to ask is: “What traits or qualities are likely to be called out from the client population as a result of these changes?” What institutional people tend to ask is: 1. “What changes in policies or organization are likely to make the institution most efficient as far as the work of the staff is concerned?” What the administration and staff should ask is: 2. “How might these changes in the client population affect the way they adjust to their home community, family, and free organizations like school and sports or clubs, after they are discharged from the institution?” Ironically, 1. typically seems like it will be more efficient before the proposal is implemented, but, after implementation, the efficiency of the staff decreases and the behavior of the youth in the institution and post release becomes more negative. The decrease in positive behavior is typically blamed on the fact that the institution is receiving a more negative client population. Ironically, 2. typically seems like it will be more inefficient before the proposal is implemented because it is initially more demanding of the staff and less harsh with the youth. However, after implementation, the efficiency of the staff eventually begins to increase and there is a marked increase in the youths’ positive behavior both in the institution and post release. This increase tends to be attributed to the fact that the institution is receiving a better quality of client population. Using Counterfactuals in Making Your Decision Imagine what it would be like if certain elements or aspects of your institution and its program did not exist. Imagine what it would be like if certain elements or aspects that are not present were introduced. Imagine that you had the freedom and authority to experiment with subtracting or adding elements or aspects and if they worked or there was no harm you could repeat the process and build changes on top of one another. Imagine that you could experiment with and use any strategies for making changes that you chose. Do you think you could find a way to restructure your institution so that it would produce optimal results and reduce or eliminate negative results? Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  22. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes • External Mental Assessment Levels: • Extrospective: This Level refers to the characteristics of the larger context, the organization, building, profession, neighborhood, or even current events that could be having a prominent or subtle effect on the receptivity or involvement of the subject. You can also choose any size environmental context you think is meaningful for your analysis. You could choose your or any other decade, era, millennium, country, culture, or whatever. You can choose the Extrospective Level or dimension that is currently encompassing your study, but you could also select a comparable one from a different time in history or place on the globe for comparative purposes. The point is to consider that your immediate context may restrict the possibilities for generalization for claim of universality. Your perspective on this consideration is of paramount importance, as we shall see. • Extroceptive: This Level refers to the visible room, location, or setting for the experiment or type of activity. Extroceptive means how you or the other perceives the immediate, observable setting. What perspective is being taken on this level of the external world. Each setting has its own characteristics. For example, characteristics could consist of the activity taking place in the setting; the purpose; the schedule or other temporal factors; the roles typically in play in the activity; the nature and characteristics of the participants; the types of relationships that might exist between participants; the furniture and decor; the rules or customs in play; how it is viewed from the point of view of outsiders; what significance or impact it may have on participants’ lives; and, of course particularly, the agenda. Any of these salient characteristics of a setting could be creating an effect or making an impression on the subject and evoking unwanted or unaccountable mental or emotional attitudes toward the transactions and purpose of the experiment or activity. Another important consideration is how the external levels above and below are each, in turn, influencing the mind set and intentional processes of the participants. These characteristics can be varied and measured to attempt to determine how they influence the outcomes you are interested in. • Exteroceptive: This Level refers to the immediate contact with objects and persons. If you observe and listen to how participants or subjects behave in a setting, you, as well as the participants, can notice how formal roles are being assumed and enacted. You can notice what informal roles persons are taking and how they express themselves in these roles: their facial expressions; how and where eyes are focused; voice characteristics; who is relating to whom; who is relating to and listening and talking to whom; characteristics of the group’s communication and vocabulary; whether they direct their communications to the topics of the unfolding agenda; whether they attend to the focus group members; their body language; whether persons are acting with appropriate timing in harmony with the ongoing activity; whether they are adhering to instructions, suggestions, requests, and positive or negative feedback. You can compare how their behavior changes as and after they enter, during the activity, and as the program or activity is drawing to a close. You can select any of these characteristics you wish for measurement so as to determine how features of the program or activity and/or factors from the Extroceptive and Extrospective Levels are influencing the group and selected types of participants. Having this information can lead to experimenting with the aforementioned features and changing, extracting, or adding features according to your hunches as to what will produce the kinds of effects you want or your purpose requires. If you decide to move to a consideration of the Internal world of your subjects, clients, or participants, you now have information that can assist you in assessing what has been referred to as persons’ exquisite sensitivity to their world and its effect on their intentional processes. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  23. 5. B. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes • Internal Mental Assessment Levels:This topic refers to the basic and most elementary processes of self perception and self examination. This involves not only self examination but also examining how other persons tend to assess themselves. An assumption is made that this process begins early in life and becomes increasing more elaborate throughout the person’s life. It is also assumed that people learn from their own experience and from the feedback of others to examine themselves in terms of differentiated levels of self awareness and self knowledge. The first and most primitive level is sensory experience. The second and third levels are derived from interaction and feedback from others with respect to all three of the relevant levels of their internal world. The internal levels are built up from perceptual experience and social interaction that is embedded in the three levels of the structure of the external world. This knowledge is interpreted from the perspective of the person’s combined a) schemata of their external world and their schemes that are bound up with the schemata and the b) schemata and schemes of their internal world. While we see and talk about self schemata as belonging to and referring to us and world schemata as belonging to the world, actually, the two are inextricably bound together. A project studying selves or personality, therefore, is based on a false but necessary division of self from world. The converse is also true since, for humans, the external world, whether material or social, is cultural and the basis of ‘cultural’ is that characteristic of humans we call memory. Metaphorically speaking, humans carry around a sketch of the small amount of the world they have seen, experienced, and learned or been taught. Culture exists because we all carry around our tiny, idiosyncratic sketches, each sketch having some few little brush strokes we share in common with some others’ sketches, some having more in common than others. We find strokes that allow us to hook onto these brush strokes of others and try to create little shared pictures that make us feel like we see the world in the same way or are seeing the same world. The inner and outer are not exactly different sides of the same coin or mirror images since the inner is such a tiny reflection of the totality of the external world. Whether we like it or not, the division between self and world is true in a sense. When studying individuals, we never see their sketch. It is our words that guide us by trial and error toward a consensus that we are seeing or talking about the same thing. If this leads to effective, cooperative action, then, in a pragmatic sense, the consensus is ‘good enough’. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  24. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes • Mental Assessment Levels (Cont.): Often there are problems and the cooperative action is not effective. Then we may try to learn more about the other’s sketch but also the one doing the sketching. In other words, we want to find out what this other is like, discover their attributes and traits. We may even go so far as to try to discover how they got that way. If feedback suggests ‘we’ are the problem, then we turn this probing in upon ourselves and we call this introspection. Therefore, in the final analysis, paradoxically, the distinction between the external and the internal is, after all, only a needed pragmatic distinction and the assumption of realism that everyone sees the same world, or has the same inner sketch, is also a pragmatic necessity. As you get deeper into designing, executing, and writing about your experiment or project, there are likely to come phases or points at which you will want to back off and examine how you have been relating to your project. Your perspective does not come with a guarantee of correctness. How has your mind been oriented and how has ‘it’ been attacking the various stages and tasks of the project. Should you question your assumptions? As this perspective takes shape in your imagination, you can mull over and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your progress and consider possible alternatives and their merits. You may get ideas for changes you might want to make at these junctures and sketch out your revisions before reengaging in the project itself. Similarly, you may want to examine what has been, and is, going on with the subjects of your experiment. If yours is not an experiment but rather some other kind of intellectual project, your experience so far may cause you to want to step back and delve deeper into what the interior world of your subjects might be like and get a deeper feel for how they might be feeling about, seeing, and relating to themselves, to you, and the various levels of the external world. You might want to get a deeper feel for differences among individuals you are studying or differences among types of persons in your population. How do you go about assessing these and other relevant issues and assumptions concerning your population or populations? How might they seem when looked at from the point of view comparison populations? Is there a way of getting a closer approximation to an understanding of your subjects and how to go about structuring your study? Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  25. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes • Mental Assessment Levels: (Cont.) • Interoceptive: First, this Level is the point where you are directly in sensory contact with the physical and personal aspects of your experiment and its subjects. Putting yourself in their place, you can attempt to sense how each of the different physical aspects of the setting might be affecting them. Second, this is the point where you try to get inside what your subjects’ are sensing in this setting as subjects of the experiment. You can ask yourself about each stage of your experiment and how your subjects might be feeling about the immediate situation, the surroundings, the immediate task, and how they might perceive these elements. As subjects, their reactions might be quite different from your own. If you decide to ask what their reactions are, then, of course, if this is an experiment, you run the risk of contaminating the experiment. If you plan to run the experiment again, you can ask these questions, using a non-threatening technique, when the experiment is over. When you ‘look’ at your, or the, setting and its subjects and constituent objects, your ‘looking’ is automatic or second nature and you can readily describe objects and surface characteristics. However, if you step back and ‘regard’ how you are looking and what you are seeing and how your perspective may be idiosyncratic or unique due to your purposes and possibly not shared by everyone, this is a quite different way of looking. If someone were to ask you to run your fingers across a fabric and describe what it is like, you might, if it silk, say that it feels like silk. Doing the same with burlap, you would say it feels like burlap. However, if you are next asked to describe the sensations in your fingers, especially if you close your eyes, you might say of silk that it is smooth, pliable, and cool, whereas the burlap sensation is rough, grainy, and coarse or inflexible. With respect to subjects, you could observe that they are or are not assuming the desired role of subject, doing well, compliant, progressing in a timely fashion and so on. On the other hand, if you are asked to imagine that you are one or another of your subjects and imagine how they are seeing the current situation, how they feel about and relate to you, how they feel about the task and how they are relating to it at some particular moment; you have to get outside of yourself. At this point you might sense or discover that how you had been seeing them and what their inner experience might really be like could be vastly different. You might even realize that you do not know and perhaps had better set up an extremely non-threatening situation in which you could elicit that kind of inner, personal information from them. Yet, if you are conducting a controlled experiment, the only way you could use this kind of information for altering the experiment would be to simply start over. Your experiment would probably be rejected if you changed conditions or controls midstream. Experience is a good teacher for the next experiment. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  26. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes • Mental Assessment Levels: (Cont.) 5. Introceptive:This Level has to do with current self knowledge: what one is feeling; what one likes; the nature of one’s desires; one’s self concept as opposed to one’s generalized identity and specific situational identities; how one’s public persona differs from one’s private self and how this difference affects one’s feelings and moods and way of relating to others; the degree to which a person is transparent and authentic and the degree to which one is empathetic; one’s communication skills; how one tends to perceive others and how this affects one’s general style of relating and the way one relates to types of others; how one structures close relationships; one’s capacity for bonding with others; one’s worldview and how this affects one’s way of being in the world; the kinds of informal roles one tends to take in types of settings; what one’s informal roles are vis-à-vis family and extended family members; one’s relation to various reference groups; how one sees one’s place in society; how one tends to structure one’s life; how one reacts to types of situations; one’s level of maturity; one’s social skills; one’s kinds of knowledge, learning style; one’s work and survival skills; the degree to which one tends to live in the past or future; how one envisions their future; and the breadth, depth, and accuracy of one’s self awareness. These are all qualities we can ask one another about. When we get answers from each other, we can compare answers to observable behavior. We make lack complete accuracy in this kind of knowledge but we generally find that, given such knowledge, we can anticipate fairly well how the other will act and we know how to act in synchrony fairly successfully. All of these qualities come together in the individual as a Gestalt. People tend to get impressions of one another on the basis of the way all of these things come together in that Gestalt without knowing or having the time or words to designate these qualities. Nevertheless, each person is exquisitely sensitive to subtle changes in these qualities as they are exhibited in immediate situations just as they are exquisitely sensitive to the structure of their immediate environment and subtle changes in it in the immediate setting. If you are conducting an experiment with human subjects, this enormously complex Gestalt is uniquely in flux with each subject, yet each and every subject is reacting to the complex and ever changing structure of the experimental setting and therefore tends to exhibit a degree of similarity in reaction to every facet of the structure of the experiment, including the experimenter. How do you control for all of this in your experiment so that you are purely and exclusively testing and measuring the precise variable or aspect of your subjects that is essential to your hypothesis? You do not. That is why in such experiments statistical methods include a way of accounting for and estimating the ‘standard error of measurement’. Because of this, you can never accurately generalize from your results to specific individuals but rather only to aggregates of people with relatively similar characteristics and in relatively similar settings. It should also be plain that inferences from your results to specific inner characteristics or processes will be very risky and such interpolations can never have certitude. If you are one of a group of persons collaborating in an experiment, you also have to be aware of and cope with the enormous complexity of the Gestalt of each collaborator and yourself as well. Metaphorically speaking, you see yourself and others only as the through the smoke and mirrors of something approaching magic. Appearances are always deceiving. This is why transparency is so important; it helps to clear your smoke a bit. It is also why empathy and an non-threatening stance is important when working with others, it helps reduce their smoke and also clears their mirror a bit so that you may see more accurately how others are reacting to you. When you study or experiment with people or institutions you and the structure of your study are most likely having an effect [in addition to the complex constituents of their Gestalt mentioned above] on your subjects’ identity and perhaps even their self concept even as you are conducting your experiment or testing them. This too can contaminate your results and introduce error into your statistics. An awareness of, and sensitivity to, such influences can improve the accuracy of your study and can help prevent negative effects on your subjects. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  27. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes Mental Assessment Levels: (Cont.) 6. Introspective: Why and How We Probe to Discover Who We Are: This Level has to do with a deeper examination of the self. Introspection can be dedicated or cursory. Occasionally some unusual event or major alteration in one’s life leads to a more thorough self examination. Ending a significant relationship; assuming a formal role in an organization or at work that is incongruent with one’s self concept; an unsuspected, piercing comment about one’s self from another person; being rejected or excluded; even finally attaining some coveted, long sought for goal; embarking on a new challenge, these are the kinds of things that induce a long-lasting dwelling within thoughts about oneself. Questions, such as ‘Who am I? What am doing or going to do with my life? What do I really want out of life? What is the meaning of life and particularly my life? Why am I this way? Why is life treating me this way? Why do people treat me the way they do?’ can arise and cause much time to be spent probing into one’s self. Often at these times the person can explore their recent to distant life history, especially the history of relationships with family and significant others and what impact they have had on one’s life. The death of a loved one or going off to war knowing one may face death may cause a deep and sometimes shattering questioning of the value of one’s life. Information from interaction at the Introceptive Level can sometimes be the trigger for self examination. Contact with something at the Interoceptive Level can evoke memories from the past and generate not only nostalgia but also a questioning of how different life is now from that earlier period and how one could have arrived at this point in their life. Such probing of the self is like groping in the dark when you do not even know what you are looking for. Asking the question, ‘What is the matter with me?’ may lead one down many blind alleys. If this depiction is true for you, then how much more will it be true for a search to discover what the nature of the ‘other’ is? While we can observe and recall patterns of words and behavior, we cannot know the inner nature of ourselves or others except indirectly and cannot know our deepest inner nature except very vaguely, we can know that, with rare exceptions, all humans and most living creatures, at a minimum, experience degrees of pleasure and pain, have memory, have feelings and emotions, have a sense of timing, can look ahead and execute goal directed behavior, can repeat and correct goal seeking behaviors, and can act in synchrony with others. Unlike Introceptive knowledge, we cannot inquire about these processes to get meaningful answers. These processes are basic and primitive and to know what they are like we would have to be able to observe our mind as the processes are in play. We cannot observe our mind and we cannot observe these processes in play. Like self knowledge, however, we know these processes indirectly, or at least we have developed names for them. Nevertheless, these processes go on quite well without our having direct knowledge of them. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  28. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes Mental Assessment Levels: (Cont.) 6. Introspective: Psychotherapy and the Search for Self: When interacting with others, we can ask such questions as “What are you feeling now?”; “Do you remember what happened?”; “What do you want?”; “Could you try to do that better?”; “Can you wait until just the right moment?”. When we say such things we usually get expected responses but we do not know how this is accomplished. In a professional relationship like therapist and client, there is a structure to the relationship that involves complementary, formal roles that call for postures and behaviors that are role specific. The subtle, basic, primitive processes are unconsciously adapting as prescribed by the complementary roles. The structure of the roles is defining the client. The processes of the client will change and develop in accord with what the therapist is calling out. While the client is telling his life story and revealing problems, the structure of the role relationship is each of the client’s processes to develop in a manner channeled by the way the therapist enacts his/her role. If one asks what kind of ego mastery skills the client needs to develop versus what this particular role relationship is calling out, one might find a discrepancy. If, for example, the therapist acts as the expert with the necessary knowledge and with control over the therapeutic process, then the client will decommission his/her knowledge seeking, goal setting, and adventuring skills and will develop a passive receptive ego. Regardless of the amount of insight gained in the session, if ego mastery skills are not being developed, success outside the session is unlikely. The results of early research on the degrees of success with various modalities versus quality of relationship revealed and subsequently often substantiated, that it is the quality of the relationship that has the greatest and most positive results. This is probably because what is referred to as a qualitative relationship is one that creates an atmosphere which calls out and facilitates inner strength and ego mastery skills. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  29. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes Mental Assessment Levels: (Cont.) 6. Introspective: Sources of Self Definition: Looking for a cause for the way one ‘is’ is made impossible if one has naïve and animistic concepts of what cause and cause and effect relations are. Nevertheless, the modern structured culture with its professionalism and ubiquitous media provides ready made, though dubious, answers to questions of what is wrong with us, what ‘the’ cause is of almost everything, and quick and easy solutions or treatments. When told that you probably have ‘the problem that we just happen to have the cure for’ the new media reared public responds in relief with ‘Oh happy day I can buy that fix and my problem will be gone in a New York minute.’ When one of the human health professionals or pastoral counselor says you are such and such a type, the new public reared to be dependent on the professional authority responds with ‘Wow, there is a name for what I am so my questions are answered and I have an identity validated by a genuine authority.’ When a reverend says you are secure if you do what I say and believe what I tell you to, or a palm reader, or psychic tells you what the future holds for you, the new public, reared on fantasy and a sanitized social order, says, ‘Thank god! I don’t have to think for myself, I don’t have to go through that hopelessly confusing search for self knowledge or figure life out for myself. I’m saved! All I had to do was say 'I do believe.’ ’ Due to the structure of the media, it has become a major source of opinions and beliefs about self and the world that have little relation to people’s behavior, have little impact on one’s life conditions and welfare, making the two strangely inconsistent. On the other hand, the enormous strides of technology extend power over nature while it separates people from consequences upon nature. Technology homogenizes genders, expands the range of choices and increases desires for things while it expands and shapes preferences and interests, accelerates a shift of the nature of community from one’s neighborhood to one’s work and from physical proximity to electronic communications, from community enforced conformity to near unlimited lack of concern with conformity or anonymity through impersonal electronic communications. This is an abbreviated description of contemporary changes but it highlights the shift in cause and effect with respect to shaping the self and self-concept and social identity. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  30. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes Mental Assessment Levels: (Cont.) 6. Introspective (Cont.):The structure of the new American social order provides the suggestions to the definition of who I am: ‘Just listen to our next broadcast!’ If a person is out of the loop of this new social order, and many people are, they are lost. No structure, no clue! High structure not only supplies its answers for you but rigidly prescribes and monitors your adherence. No need for self examination or wrestling with the relationship challenges, great social issues, and ethical dilemmas of life in the seamless weave of control present in many of our new social institutions and organizations, whether political, religious, industrial, educational, military, athletic or recreational. No structure and you are lost, everything is inscrutable, a void as oppressive as control, a bewildering, even terrifying mystery. The dictum now should be, ‘Do not seek because you will not find.’ Degree-of-Structure of your social setting determines the manner and extent to which you will be introspective and the degree to which your own unique self actively engages and exchanges with life. Neither extreme is conducive to self examination. If you wish to probe for knowledge of selves and intentional processes, look outward to structures. Which approaches or conditions work to give you the kind of self knowledge or knowledge of others you are seeking? If you are not seeking self knowledge but, rather your purpose is to study or experiment with others to acquire knowledge of their selves, what and how much do you think you will learn from a highly controlled, highly structured experiment? How much do you think you will learn from even the most carefully constructed or the most open-ended technique for interviewing samples from a narrowly defined population or a subculture? If your answer turns out to be ‘very little’, then perhaps the assumptions underlying your quest have fundamental error. Perhaps the starting point of studying the person is the problem. The structure of our national culture dictates that your focus will be on the individual, even when your discipline is sociological or anthropological. But, just as the sun and not the earth is the center of our little universe, it is the structures of human existence and not individuals within that provide the answers to who we are, how we got to be this way, and where we are going. If you want to know who you are, what you are like, and what causes you to be the way you are, look carefully and long at the structures within which you exist, the structures you course through during your day and throughout your life, the general structure of the conditions of your life. The way structures are designed is reflected in the way people come to see the world and the way they see the world brings about a way of being in the world which in turn is reflected in the kinds of moods ebb and flow in their lives. Each aspect of the structure addresses some aspect of the self. If, for example, you design some aspect of the structure with the purpose of giving the person self esteem, that design must evoke intentions to act and actions that are worthy of self esteem. The design must include ways of letting the person know that their actions are respected and valuable contributions not just to themselves but to the community. Words of esteem by themselves are not sufficient. It is necessary that estimable actions are intentionally evoked, the person must want to and will to act in estimable ways. The structure must be designed so that paths are open to them that lead to positive growth and maturation and so that the consequences of positive, mature actions leave a recognizable record of their positive impact on the structure and in the community. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  31. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes Mental Assessment Levels: (Cont.) 6. Introspective: the structure of life’s ages and stages also shape personality and behavior. Levels of Maturity and growing up from childhood to teenage to adulthood, coaching, teaching, psychotherapy, management, law enforcement, religion, politics, business, marriage, parenting, athletics, media communications, scientific research, international relations With normal, non-delinquent, non-criminal, adults, the progression into and through the teen years and on into adulthood has a pattern similar to that cited in the previous slide. Biological parents become implicit others, peer groups become secondary implicit others, affiliations become a part of the secondary implicit other as well. Passing beyond teenage to adulthood their parental implicit other loses its dominance, peer groups become more influential, but affiliations such as profession, place of occupation, and social and political clubs and organizations become dominant. The values of the organizations with which one is primarily identified are ascendant over everything else. If the peer group or parents maintain the strength they had from childhood and adolescence, these implicit others diverge from the institutionalized implicit other and conflicts in values plague the person and life choices become difficult and riddled with ambivalence and indecisiveness. Typically adults have left behind or become emancipated from earlier peer groups and parents and their implicit others and the institutionalized implicit takes over and provides a framework for the formation of a new, revised set of values leaving the choice process consolidated, crystallized, consistent, and less vulnerable to ambivalence. Examining the affects of institutional, organizational reference groups on the dynamics of the self Determinants of and Effects on the private person versus public persona Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  32. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes Mental Assessment Levels: (Cont.) 6. Introspective: The Structure Of Nations’ Life Conditions, Cultures, And Communities Shape Personality And Behavior. • Learning to appreciate what a tremendous variety there is in the life conditions among peoples of the world. • Learning to appreciate what a tremendous variety in cultures • Learning to appreciate what a tremendous variety in communities • Learning to appreciate what a tremendous variety in institutions like schools • Learning to appreciate what a tremendous variety there is in personality factors among peoples of the world. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  33. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes Mental Assessment Levels: (Cont.) 6. Introspective (Cont.): A few of the key factors that can be redesigned to promote emotional well being and maturity are dimensions of the community, settings, roles, and role relationships. Why people might doubt the natural systems approach. The degree of structure proposition. Effects of Minimum Structure on Relationships Current Structure, when absent, results in trends induced by past structures to ascend and those aspects of the self that had been pseudo incorporated tend to be shed and the pseudo dis incorporated to begin to erupt. Outside of the structure of an institution, or work in a building, there is typically a minimum but not an absence of structure. What structure there is will likely come from the immediate and extended family and close friends.  Another kind of structure that will be operating has to do with the regular, familiar places that you visit, the paths you regularly take, the stores, places of entertainment and recreation, and the organizational meetings you attend.  This type of minimum structure provides you with many choices but they are never outside a range that had come to be acceptable.  One does not tend to go outside of the range of this ‘acceptability’.  The principle sources of constraints in this minimum structure are the implicit-others, the secondary implicit-others, and institutional forms of implicit-other.  The most constraining force in minimum or absent structure is the parental implicit-other.  In adulthood the parental and secondary implicit-others fade and the institutional ascends in influence.  However, if emancipation did not take place and dependence upon or frequency of contact with parents persists, the parental implicit-other maintains its’ powerful influence and can even be the predominant influence in an intimate relationship.  Of course, a person in this condition is not aware of the parental implicit-other interlocutor.  Nevertheless, this prevents the naturalization of a relationship in which the public persona, the-best-foot-forward pattern, dissolves and the private person begins to emerge. This is when the relationship begins to develop a bona fide structure of its own and the two become more similar and adapt to each other’s eccentricities. Maximum, medium, and minimum structure Remember that in the beginning I said people are exquisitely sensitive to their external world and changes in it? Now we have come full circle. With that same exquisite sensitivity, we can discover who we are by discovering what in our external structures our exquisitely sensitive beings are responding to, what in these structures are shaping us. Will this help with your next project? Will it help with your own self discovery? Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  34. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes Mental Assessment Levels: (Cont.) 6. Introspective: An Example: A Juvenile Correctional Institution with Medium Structure and Its Transformation of the Self: The youth often have had very negative or almost no parenting. When they bond with one or two, usually two with one being the main one, staff members, over time the closeness of this relationship allows the implicit other they came with to be supplanted by these two staff members. As teens, they are typically separating from their parents but in need of guidance. Normally relative or other adult such as a coach is permitted to take over that function. However, the implicit or actual parent is not supplanted by these adults that they turn to because their parents remain the constant, controlling, and dominant influence over the teen. At the 24/7 institution, separated physically as well as emotionally from parents, this supplanting of the implicit other is able to take place. Since, or if, the supplanting staff provide a strong, consistent, positive, warm, supportive, and rewarding influence within a new bond, becoming the new implicit others, they are likely to be permanently incorporated. When the youth leave the institution, this new implicit other continues its positive influence. However, as a teen prior to the institution, a secondary implicit other is forming and this is their peer group. For delinquent youth the peer group is usually negative but they act as facilitators of emancipation from parents and protectors from the omnipresent hostilities of their age group. This secondary-implicit-other becomes a powerful, transforming force in the life of the youth. In the institution, however, a new peer group is formed in the dorm. A strong resident, or student, government that begins to exert a strong, consistent, positive influence over each new youth entering the dorm organizes the dorm. At the same time, a high-ranking youth from the dorm assumes the function of buddy or big brother and inducts, guides, coaches, trains, rewards, and support the new youth. This becomes another positive bond, which solidifies identification with the new peer group. This new peer group eventually supplants the secondary implicit, other that was formed in the home community, just as the implicit parents were supplanted. Parallel with this there is an open, personal, organized, productive, and rewarding community of the total institution, including the attached school. For most teens another aspect of the secondary implicit other consists of the institutions, clubs, youth programs, church programs, and the like with which they are identified. The values, codes of conduct, tastes, and interests, and goals of these more official entities are incorporated but not as strongly as the peer group. Delinquent youths typically form antiestablishment attitudes and have no institutional implicit others. The community at Stars and Stars includes all of the youth in official roles in the institution and provides them with the conditions (open, personal, organized, productive, and rewarding) necessary for identification with and incorporation of this community as their institutional implicit other, thus supplanting the antiestablishment secondary implicit other. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  35. Psychologist Adult Historian Teen Child Extrospection Level Extroception Level Exteroception Level Interoception Level Introception Level Introspection Level 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes The following shapes represent the configuration of Levels by orientation to time by age and type. Configurations of Levels of Mental Assessment, Knowledge, and Awareness Levels change and expand by age and types People vary greatly in terms of the extent of their knowledge and awareness of Levels and Temporal Orientation Children are aware of the present and immediate past and future objects they sense. Adults have more extensive knowledge and awareness of the distant past and anticipated future of objects they sense, sensations, their surroundings and vicinity, their feelings, and to varying degrees the history and destiny of their life and the world at large. It may be important to your study or project to know and understand the variations among your subjects on these features. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  36. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes • Individuation and hedonic tone: In this case individuation refers to the degrees of physical, cognitive, and social hedonic tone that are the original basis for selecting alternatives for moving in life’s infinite variety of possible paths. Since the human can develop layers in the status of ownership and involvement with each and every experience, it becomes important to differentiate between first and subsequent status assignments. A first reaction to an object or experience could be physical pleasure. Following that, you could experience disapproval from a significant other and this could be social displeasure, causing you to define the ‘pleasant object’ as ‘bad’ or displeasure. A layer has developed. The second layer redefining the first, or original layer. As you to use this analytical technique and begin to take this approach, you could examine examples of the primitive, un-moderated, unmodified, original pleasure and pain sensations and feelings the person experiences and observe the way these hedonic reactions shape their personality and steer their navigation through the world and how subsequent experiences redirect that navigation. Such pleasure and pain sensations can be purely sensory, but can also be cognitive and social. In other words, there can be primitive pleasure and displeasure reactions to bodily activities as well as sensations from external stimuli. There can be primitive cognitive pleasure and displeasure reactions to statements of concepts, ideas, and other intellectual configurations. For example, architecture, art, machines, etc. can produce cognitive pleasure and displeasure. There can also be primitive pleasure and displeasure reactions to individual people, social groups, social situations, social institutions, professions, cultures, etc. The degrees of pleasure and pain will be scaled as follows: • Extremely intense pleasure • Strong pleasure • Mild pleasure • Mild pain or displeasure • Strong pain • Extremely intense pain • Transformation of Degrees of Hedonic Tone into States of Incorporation: Given a basic, primitive, un-moderated, unmodified pleasure or pain reaction, subsequent events can result in a modification of its status, or State, as the term will be in this document. The concept used here is referred to as State of Incorporation and, as we shall see in the next section, there are several States. A basic, primitive, un-moderated, unmodified pleasure or pain reaction can be transformed into any one of the other States and subsequently transformed again and again, creating a history of layers of States of Incorporation and their transformations. Typically, something in one of the Mental Assessment Levels exerts an influence over the primitive pleasure or pain reaction that causes a transformation in its state, as will be elaborated upon in the next slide. For example, the media dominated new social order, the Extrospective Level, can be extensively transforming original Incorporated pains or pleasures into Dis-Incorporated States, and vice versa. Consider how this might relate to your study. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  37. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes • Incorporation States: You could examine how this steering occurs. From the Natural Systems perspective, it seems to occur through a kind of categorizing of the experiences whereby some experiences, pain or pleasure, are incorporated and some are disincorporated while some we could say are pseudo-incorporated or pseudo-disincorporated. These pseudo categories are like faking it inside the head but leads to faking it in relation to others. Some pain and pleasure sensations and feelings are simply the subject of ongoing hopeful curiosity or pessimistic questioning, or are just left open-ended. Finally, some sensations have to be repressed, whether physically pain-full or pleasure-full. In other words, peoples' inner worlds are chopped up or parceled into these various states. The way the content of the world falls into these states or categories forms their worldview. • 8 • 8 • 8 • 8 • 8 • 8 • 8 • 8 • Transformations between States of Incorporation: Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  38. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes (Cont.) • Envisioning Aspects: You could examine the content of how they envision the future as based on these states of "incorporation". You could also examine how they envision what might possibly happen in the future and what they might possibly do in the future. These are highly significant inner processes. • Level Perspectives: • Time Perspectives: By training oneself to be attuned to significant happenings in the present so as to collect instances in both similar and different situations over time and compare and extract tentative generalizations and detect trends, a person can develop hypotheses about the effects of structures, systems, and settings. This perspective on the differential effects of structure, formed on the basis of a wealth of instances into history that exhibits a theme relating to the structuralist hypothesis, can lead to much more well informed plans for appropriately restructuring an institution so that it has the aforementioned positive selective causal influence on the client population’s internal structures and processes. This is one of the most powerful cognitive strategies available to humankind for developing a vision for its future. • Level by Time Perspectives: • Maturity and Level by Time Perspectives on Consequences Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  39. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes (Cont.) Envisioning Aspects: Implicit Other Effects:Incorporation, or rather States of Incorporation, is different from the concept of Implicit Other. The Implicit Other is more closely associated with Freud's Superego, yet not the same, of course. As for States of Incorporation, every experience is initially parceled into one of the States but can be transformed into different States later. The Implicit Other relates solely to the Incorporation of people who exert a pervasive influence over our behavior and even our thoughts, feelings, and values. The Implicit Other also can cause items of experience to be transformed from one State of Incorporation to another. The Secondary Implicit Other, almost universally in America and probably many other cultures, arises during the transition into the teen years when the peer group starts to gain ascendance. Even if a teen has no friends, no peer group, the changes in their age cohorts still exert the influence of the Secondary Implicit Other. A 'developmental task' for the teen is to learn to identify and resist too much influence from peers, a form of emancipation, in a manner slightly different from emancipation from the influence of parents. When moving from teenage to young adulthood and on into an identity and self-concept as an adult, there is a transition, either during advanced education or directly to work or an occupation, which adds a sense of independence, self-reliance, and assumption of responsibilities as a marriage partner and parent. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  40. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes (Cont.) Envisioning Aspects:Cultural expectations play a big role in shaping the transition from adolescence to young adulthood. In the contemporary culture both genders tend to take the role of provider, both get jobs, many enter 'positions', as distinct from ordinary work, or professions. These new 'life conditions' serve to contribute to the new identity as 'adult' and this transforms a wide range of interests, preferences, tastes, values, time and resource distribution, and even dress and demeanor . This happens almost automatically and unconsciously. I used the word 'Typically' in the previous email because there are differences in either whether they make this transition and/or the rate at which they do so. People tend to notice only the exceptions, the cases in which the person remains fairly similar to the way they were as a teen. When a young adult takes a job, a position with a large corporation, or enters a profession, their new life circumstance begins to assert its influence. One becomes identified as a GM, NBC, DOW, Wal-Mart, SBC, Texaco, Coca-Cola, Ernst and Young, DreamWorks, Luby's, etc. type person. 'Typically' their self-esteem gets a boost from this identification and it gradually creeps into their self-concept. The essential meaning of being a good provider who is affiliated with such and such a corporation is that 'you are somebody' with all the nuances associated with being a successful provider, a corporation X person, a responsible member of society, a person automatically trusted as a good financial risk, a home owner, a family man, a member of such and such Church and such and such social, political, business organizations, and on and on. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  41. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes (Cont.) Envisioning Aspects:It is the exception when the earlier influence of the parental and Secondary Implicit Others maintains significant or noticeable influence over the adult, even if they have regular contact with them parents and teen peers. This is something that is increasingly rare in contemporary culture. Even the influence of spouses is greatly diminished in contemporary America. Notable exceptions are the families of recent immigrants or ethnically Hispanic families. Many people in these families do not follow the conventional phases of the "Typical" modern American. Their struggles that result from this antiquated pattern are legendary and even a frequent topic in the film industry. The nature of relationships and the frequency of contact with family and non-work related friends have been greatly diminished. An exception may be for those living in impoverished Ghettos. The toll taken on moderns from moving into this new era, with its cataclysmic technological and social changes, is a topic that is constantly being written about, discussed in the media, and portrayed in movies. A person walking down Fifth Avenue with a Cell Phone glued to their ear is an example of the sense of isolation and estrangement and the switch to electronic versus face-to-face contact. Regardless of whether it is taking some kind of toll on them, to them, the more trappings of the modern age they have, the more they admire themselves. Environmental Conditions: From envisioning the nature of the client population to envisioning the nature of a project designed to study a particular client population. By envisioning the topical climate of your academic discipline with respect to this type of study, one can gauge how receptive your audience in your discipline will be to your project and make adjustments in either in your study or in how you present your project to that audience. By envisioning the immediate environmental conditions of your planned study and their affects on your subjects or client population, you can make adjustments in your design so as to optimize the experiments control and eliminate bias and increase objectivity. By envisioning possible things that could go wrong in your study you can avoid invalid executions of the experiment and the possibility of having to make reruns and being questioned about undue efforts by the experimenter to influence the results. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  42. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes (Cont.)Strategies Envisioning Aspects: Strategies: Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  43. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes (Cont.) • Criteria for Fulfillment: You could examine how they use these processes to select the criteria that will make them feel fulfilled. This is a fulcrum concept as, although it is hidden, often from the person themselves, this process, nevertheless, is the guiding principle of their life. Resolving the discrepancy between the demands of external structures and their inner criteria for fulfillment by making decisions and then setting goals is a crucial process. • Foreshadowing: Often a person will go through all of these processes up to this point of setting criteria for fulfillment and then will have a sense of 'foreshadowing' of how it is going to turn out. This foreshadowing that may be bleak or optimistic, while the actual outcome could be quite different from their foreshadowing. Often people can tell you about this experience of fulfillment or lack of it and matching or not matching their foreshadowing. We are getting ahead of ourselves here. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  44. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes (Cont.) • Deciding and Goal Setting: • Adventuring: Once they have gone through all of these processes, which occur very rapidly, they usually engage in the adventure of trying to achieve their goal and then, at the end, experiencing degrees of that sense of fulfillment that comes from their reaching their criteria. • Body Experience • In types of action • Conflict • Cancellation • Temporal Experience In types of action • Timing • Impulsivity • Delay and types of delay. • Queuing • Emotional By-products Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  45. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes (Cont.) • Dialectical Reasoning Processes: • Disengaging • Mirroring • Foreshadowing: • Envisioning Aspects: • Criteria for Fulfillment: • Revising Goal • Re-engaging: Normally they will meet obstacles and barriers along the way and will have to disengage, review or mirror what they have done and how they have done it as well as what they have encountered along the way, revise some part of their strategy or plan and then re-engage. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  46. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes (Cont.) Failure or Incompletion of Tasks and Goals and Looping Scenarios • Completion, Failure, Exit: Finally, the person will come to the completion phase in which they have had varying degrees of success or failure. Sometimes, at this point, they will make revisions once again but then, in the end, they will always store their experiences in a memory bank of schemata and schemes for future use. • The great principle of learning and knowing is that we do not know what we do not know. Knowing this principle, we should be on an eternal quest to discover or uncover what we do not or may not know and not rest with an assumption and assurance that we know all there to know or that is worth knowing. We often do not take up this quest because it may entail moral dilemmas, loss of approval, exclusion, loss of love, or guilt. • An equally great corollary to this great principle is that we know vastly more than we know we know but that this domain of knowledge is within us and kept unknown in order that we not risk disapproval, loss of love, exclusion, or guilt. • Time for pursuing these two types of unknowns, like time in general, in limited and must be rationed. We tend to choose to use our limited time for quests that we feel are consistent with ‘the known’, least challenging, and that are the most safe, comfortable, and self-gratifying. By not keeping ourselves open to potentially valuable information that may run contrary to those ‘consistent with ‘the known’, least challenging, and that are the most safe, comfortable, and self-gratifying’ types of information, we are depriving ourselves of potentially vast sources for creativity and productivity. • Our tendency to take this self-protective posture with regard to possible causes of failure to succeed in reaching goals and desires and causes or conditions related to tasks or goals that were not completed dooms us to repeat ineffective or even dangerous behavioral patterns or strategies. • This ineffective process is one of the principal causes of the famous Freudian ‘repetition compulsion’. Otherwise, the painful emotions that accompany memories of failed strategies would prevent their repetition, and incomplete tasks and goals would not be pursued regardless of their lack of utility for us. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  47. 5. Definitions and Functions of Intentional Processes (Cont.) • Mastering: • Transcendence and Reorganization: • Storage: • Manner of storage Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  48. 5. Relation between ‘Duplex Pyramids’ and ‘The Model of Intentionality’ • Natural Systems, with its Duplex Pyramid, uses these external structures and systems and internal structures and processes to bring a holistic perspective to the human problems we face. It provides a framework that can guide those who have the responsibility to design programs. With the Duplex Pyramid approach, one can approach a problem by systematically looking at the external structures and systems and the internal structures and processes all together and then consider how each element of the Duplex Pyramid will influence the other. This is the opposite of the more fragmented, narrow approaches that are often taken in such problem solving situations in the modern, complex world. This seems to be the more natural and 'human-friendly', as well as, in the end, the more practical, approach. As modern society itself has become so complex and fragmented, it is now not natural (or rather not easy) to take the natural approach. Natural Systems is an attempt to bring back the 'human-friendly', natural approach. However, now it has to be re-learned and, as it were, updated to the complexity of the modern world. Consequently, The Natural Systems Institute is dedicated to (re-)educating leaders in the human services areas in this holistic, human-friendly, method of analysis of social problems as well as the design of human programs so that their methods are based on the Duplex Pyramids. It is not an easy task. If you invest the energy and time in learning the Natural Systems approach, I feel quite sure the dividends will be surprisingly huge. • Processes of Intentionality and Their Role in Integrating the Components of the Duplex Pyramids. • With levels of structure • With aspects of systems Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  49. 6. Parameters of Awareness and Their Role in Dialectical Reasoning and Creative Thinking: Introduction to the Parameters of Awareness: While growing up, your mind becomes increasingly complex. In the beginning, it, our mind, is not self-aware. At some point older people, siblings, parents, and other adults try to draw the child’s attention to such things as forgetting; remembering; controlling impulses and thinking before acting; reflecting upon what one has done; having and not having certain feelings; having and not having certain thoughts; questioning ‘why’ concerning actions; remarking about what you should know; explaining dreams as different from reality; reminding about paying attention and not day dreaming; instructing about time, being on time, the meaning of yesterday and tomorrow; and the like. In saying these things to the child, adults are teaching the child to be self-aware, to manage its mind, and to control its behavior intelligently. The child will usually begin to wonder about its mind. What if there was no adult around to coach and to remind the child about these inner processes? Typically, however, humans experience a stimulus and produce a habitual response, in other words we are action oriented and habit oriented. This means, typically, we do not think about what we are going to do before doing it. When we act without allowing ourselves to be fully aware of the conditions and circumstances surrounding and the consequences of our actions, this is called impulsivity. When we act without thinking first but do allow ourselves to be aware of the conditions and circumstances surrounding and the consequences of our actions, this is called spontaneity, transparency, or authenticity. These, typical, ways of responding to the world are not recommended for conducting intellectual studies or projects or when facing major life choices or challenges laden with dilemmas. In these cases, we must allow ourselves to be aware of the conditions and circumstances surrounding and the consequences of our actions and we must also ‘think first’. If we renege on these imperatives, we do so at our peril and put others at risk as well. Consequently, it seems to me that there is a more basic imperative and that is to inform ourselves about the way awareness itself is structured and train ourselves to manage our awareness or manage our minds. The more we learn to do this expertly, the more expertly we will conduct our intellectual projects. This is one of the foundations for effective dialectical reasoning and a necessity for high-level creative thinking. Inferred Parameters of Awareness Inside the Brain or Mind: In the next series of slides I attempt to detect and describe the way my own awareness operates. I have isolated ten of what I call parameters of awareness. Who knows what is actually going on inside the brain. Nevertheless, from a pragmatic point of view it seemed to me that by describing these parameters and imagining the way they might work they might provide the reader with a tool for trying to detect their own parameters of awareness. If this works for you, then this tool might also assist you in making adjustments in the way you work on an intellectual project. Thus, it may provide a guide for deciding when to switch gears, so to speak, in the midst of your intellectual work and adopt more task specific strategies. Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

  50. 4. ORGANIZATIONOrganized • INTEGRITY 5. COMPLEXITYHightoSimple Related categoriestied together consciously by the integral natureof their relation. Non-Organized Unrelated categoriesconsidered together as though relatedor Germaine Animated Graphic Portrayal of the Parameters of Consciousness • DIRECTION • Future-Past of • External-Internal Levels Observable Brain and Hypothesized and Inferable Parameters of the Processes of Awareness • INFERABLE PARAMETERS OF INNER AWARENESS AND FOCUS • Focus • Level • Direction • Organization • Complexity • Intensity • Integrity • Boundary • Content • Perseverance • LEVEL • EXTERNAL • Extrospection • Extroception • Exteroception Internal Introspection Introception Interoception 1. FOCUS High6. INTENSITYLow • BOUNDARY A. Expanded-Firm • PERSEVERANCE OF FOCUS Contracted-Firm • CONTENT B. Expanded-Porous It is hypothesized that, at ‘all’ times, in the human brain, ten parameters of inner awareness are simultaneously and constantly being re-configured. Contracted-Porous Copyright Edwin L. Young, PhD

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