Cognitive psychology vs. Socionics

[Singu]

Psychology is never empirical. Even if you could do brain scans on people and see everything that's going on, you need someone's subjective report to know that they're depressed in the first place, and you need that subjective report to be able to know how to correlate brain states to it. The brain reflects everything in the physical world. To completely understand it, we'd have to understand everything in the physical world and then there'd have to be no new things. But there are always new things just as a matter of course. People won't understand my argument because it's basically the same fundamental argument as ultrafinitism but it's true. Abstractions are not real. Abstract means "to take away." But you have to take away from something. If you take away everything, there's nothing left.

Well that's probably in the realm of explanations. Socionics fails at the explanation department, because it doesn't give a convincing explanation on why people feel a certain way or behave in a certain way.

Saying "Your depression is caused by Fi" is about as good as an explanation as saying "Your depression is caused by the goblins in your head". They're both based on an observation that indeed, there appears to be all sorts of behavioral and outward manifestations of a depression in a person, but neither are actually providing any convincing explanation as to what is causing it, and why.

The reason why self-reporting isn't always reliable is because, there are all sorts of reasons and explanations on why they feel the way that they do. The explanation could be this or this or this or that. It's very difficult to just pin down to a single explanation since there are so many.

So what we would need to do is understand exactly what is depression at the most fundamental level. We would need an explanatory "theory of depression" and even "theory of consciousness". Maybe that could be achieved by cognitive psychology and cognitive science, with the aid of things like AI programming.