Psyche as a System: Modules, Subminds & Parts
Interweaving perspectives on the multitude of mind
Most people think the mind is a singular solid entity. Yet with some contemplation, this view falls apart revealing that our minds manifest as a multifaceted dynamic flow of patterns. In this piece, we will explore how this insight is continuously being rediscovered in various fields from computer science, evolutionary psychology, psychotherapy, and meditation to give us a better understanding of how we can work with the mind.
In his 1986 book “The Society of Mind” the cognitive scientist and co-founder of MIT Marvin Minsky paints an intricate picture of the mind as being composed of many smaller parts and processes. Minsky proposes that each part itself is “mindless” but as many parts come together they create what we call intelligence. He refers to these parts as cognitive agents and explains that they work in a hierarchical fashion where higher-level agents oversee and control lower-level agents.
This view of the mind is very similar to what Robert Kurzan proposes in his book “Why Everybody Else Is a Hypocrite.”Kurzban explains that the brain is made up of many modules that often don't have direct communication with other modules. He writes:
“We have brains that seem to be divided up into different sections, with different, even mutually exclusive sets of beliefs. This situation — the architecture of human cognition — allows hypocrisy as just one kind, albeit a very important kind, of human inconsistency.”
According to Kurzan, different situations trigger different modules that’s why we can operate from one belief one moment and a completely contradictory belief in the next.
Thousands of years before the Buddha also realized that the mind is not a solid structure but an intricate process of many parts arising and interweaving with each other. In his book “The Mind Illuminated” meditation teacher Culadasa combines Buddha’s insights with neuroscience to explain that the mind is made up of many sub-minds. According to Culadasa, the purpose of meditation is to bring conflicting sub-minds increasingly into unification.
In recent times, one of the biggest propagators of the view that the mind is a multifaceted system of parts is psychotherapist Richard Schwartz. Schwartz came to this realization, during his extensive therapeutic work, where he continuously noticed a multitude of conflicting voices arising in his clients' sessions. Schwartz went on to name these voices "parts" and created Internal Family Systems, a therapeutic modality that is particularly popular in psychospiritual spaces today.
None of this explains what the mind is but it helps us understand how the mind manifests and how we can better work with it. Meditation can help us recognize that we are not the pervasive voices that we hear in our minds. Learning to disidentify from our thoughts is an important skill for all humans to develop but it can be particularly difficult to do when we have a volcano of unprocessed pain pushing them up.
The beauty of Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems otherwise known as Parts Work is that it allows us to communicate with persistent patterns of thoughts & emotions (different parts) which can resolve internal conflicts and reconnect us to our innate wholeness. Those of us who have a strong rational part may find it difficult to engage with parts work as it goes against the conventional view of the mind. But it can be helpful to know that even a hyper-rational cognitive scientist like Marvin Minsky came to see that the mind was a system of parts.
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