Hello and welcome to our second session. Today you can see the fragmented legacy of Freud, the don of Seco Enrais. I'm going to pass the mic to Professor Reza. Thank you very much, Icaro. Thank you everyone. Hello. So as I was mentioning, I noticed that we are very much behind already because even if I want to go tangentially on these topics, there is a lot to be covered. It takes a lot of time. So I'm hopeful that at least we can actually go through the energetics part and cover a little bit of the philosophical
background today and then next session I briefly talk about Darwin and we start to cover what we were supposed to do this session. So So, I mean, we can actually start with a couple of, a few questions, and then I will, you know, start, go over the background, the economic arguments and the energetics background of
Freud somehow covering some grounds that are necessary for some of the later sessions. So with that said, I want to hear any questions that you might have. It doesn't matter. It doesn't need to be a philosophically complex question. Any sort of things that you would like me to clarify, no matter how basic they might be. Any questions? Obviously someone must have a question at this point.
No, nothing. really nothing no question whatsoever okay then so as I mentioned previous session Freud is often being traced back to hell Helmholtz, precisely because Helmholtz used to, in the 1860s, in the 60s of the 19th century,
he used to be almost considered as a god, as an idol. He had developed, you know, a very, after Meyer, he had developed a very robust scientific theory about the first law of thermodynamics, conservation of force during his time and later it became conservation of energy. And the reason, as I mentioned, this to be very, you know, kind of a huge leap forward is precisely because then you can, according to the first law, you can essentially trace biological realm, vital energies, to
to basically movements of particles and energy principle of physics. Essentially in a sort of circuitous, short-cutting way, it allows for the unification of biology and physics, and respectively the unification of psychology, biology, and physics. And this becomes the groundwork of certain sort of psychophysics.
It's kind of like a grand theory of unification among two emerging fields with physics, which is supposed to be quite fundamental in biology and psychology. However, I would say that from a historical perspective, Freud is not actually, it is not clear how much he's indebted to Helmholtz. Of course, he, in a number of occasions, he calls him as an idol and so on and so forth.
But he actually, in his work, never explicitly referenced to why he's indebted to Helen Holtz. He instead actually goes for two people particularly. One is Brook, B-R-U with two dots on top, K-E I think the spelling, and Gustav Feschner, particularly Gustav Fechner. Now, it's interesting that every time
that he wants to talk about energetics, the foundation as a foundation of a new psychology, he refers to Fechner rather than Helmholtz. And I'm going to explain why. And that's the twist, actually, in Freud's developmental course of his theory of psychoanalysis. And you see that it naturally leads this, you know, reliance on Feshner theory, leads from the early works to essentially the most controversial element of Freud, death drive or drive.
So as I again as I mentioned past session, Freud begins with this sort of kind of of crude physicalistic accounts of psychological activities, that he thinks that if I'm doing you know, a great scientific work. Then for this to be done, performed correctly and perfectly, psychological activities should be based upon neural description,
accurate descriptions of the nervous system. That's a very, what you might call to be a sort of rabid physicalist thesis. And he comes to this understanding that unfortunately this is not a good way to move forward. That no matter how much we collect accurate descriptions of neural activities or neurons in terms of localized anatomy of nervous systems, we cannot talk coherently about psychological activities and functions. So yes, so that's
that's usually called, you know, Freud's denouncement of localized physical descriptions being sufficient, explanatory, in an explanatory way, being sufficient for explaining and so psychological activities. And he confesses this to Wilhelm Fleiss first. He is now abandoning that project,
which he thought is tenable at some point in its entirety. entirety and instead he is now much more interested in a mechanistic energetic view borrowed by borrowed from feshtner brock and brook and helmholtz and Fleiss presses him. Fleiss, of course, is quite excited about this, precisely because when we get into the conversation of Freud and Fleiss, we see that he has, is essentially the
idea of biorhythm, which is a pseudoscientific idea, right? And that completely ruined, almost got Freud cancelled back then because of his excitement about this sort of stuff that Fleiss was peddling to him. Fleiss was already into energetics by way of biorhythmia, biorhythm. And so Fleiss presses Freud to to say whether his adoption of mechanistic energetic approach of Helmholtz and Fischner,
is it kind of you are trying to reduce the status of psychology to those of exact sciences, namely physics? and Freud answers that no the energetic view is actually a world view in general within which psychology works independently of physics right so so this is actually really important that Freud adopts the mechanistic energetic model by way of thermodynamics as a generalized worldview
that does not reduce psychology to physics, but within which psychology naturally operates, like on a different scale than that of physics. So it's kind of a scale problem here. uh thoughts uh questions before i move forward so does that mean energetics and that gives freud a process ontology to work with that allows him to break from physiological reductionism uh it wouldn't be um it wouldn't be it would be similar to process ontology but you we wouldn't be able to call it processes you know precisely because of the nature of energetics
nature of energetics is being bound to thermodynamic principles as universal laws right whereas process ontology does not have this sort of a strong commitment to certain sort of physical principles as undergirding them. Yes, someone else has a, yes, yes, Alberto. My question is, in which sense is a problem of scale? Because you said it. As I, precisely, we've come to this precisely because
psychological activities not only have explanatory requirements, which the energetics is supposed to answer, but also they have interpretive requirements. And that interpretive requirement, and hermeneutics of psychological activities retain a special status according to Freud for psychology in general. And of course this becomes a bugbear of Freud.
It comes and bites him in the butt precisely because the incompatibility or asymmetry of energetic mechanistic explanatory dimension and the hermeneutic interpretive dimension of psychology are not quite fitting together right seamlessly so it's in constant stripes in yes it's a certain sort of tension but this tension And then, at least for Freud, he's healthy and is required to claim the kind of independency
of psychology or psychoanalysis as a sovereign field from data physics. But many commentators later object to this claim that the tension is positive. They think that this tension is actually negative and shows the cracks in the wall of psychoanalysis and psychology. So Aaron? I was going to ask, are you familiar at all with Emile Dubois Raymond?
No. Because that was an interesting, I kind of stumbled upon him last winter. Will you be able to? Yeah, right. I'll sort of synthesize and share what I was going to read on him for next week because I didn't have time this week because I was too busy. but his name is Emile Dubois-Raymond, and he is sort of an important figure, I think, in this lineage. He's like a German electrophysiologist, or French Huguenot, who was very important also. Electrochemistry. Yeah, so he was the one to, I think in, I wrote it down last week, in like 1848.
Is he by any way connected Bernard's program? I don't know. Okay, I'm definitely checking. I absolutely don't know. Yeah, so he was the one who originated the great embarrassments kind of idea that Copernicus and then Darwin. Oh, the great humiliation. The great humiliations. Yeah. That was actually in his, I think he gave a funeral sort of talk for Darwin. He was the sort of leading kind of lecturer at Humboldt in Berlin in the late 19th century.
So he's kind of like the kind of like a German Enlightenment revival. Sort of. So yeah, I guess what I remember being important about him was one, his technical discovery that neurons carry electric charge in 1848, so like right after Helmholtz. And then that his kind of mechanistic interpretation of Darwin, that there was kind of a political battle going on between sort of mechanists and vitalists over the life sciences in Germany and that the vitalists, I'm trying to remember exactly how it broke down, but I'll try to go through and synthesize this for next week because it's interesting stuff. Yeah, definitely. I mean,
if you can actually give us a presentation on this, that would be magnificent. Sure, I'd be happy to. you that would be magnificent thank you so much aaron uh claudia hey um yeah so i was wondering exactly like how freud formulated this was it was it like eros is uh negentropic thetos is like entropic like i'm just like and then yeah like well i mean It's like a twisted horror story, right? What? It's like a twisted horror story, actually. The moment, a twisted horror story. Oh, okay, okay, okay. So the moment that Freud entertains,
Feshener's idea, and I'm going to talk about it, Feshener's idea of law or principle of instability or law of constancy, which is not exactly Helmholtz's principle of conservation of force or energy, namely first law, pleasure principle inevitably leads to, pleasure principle being the the erotic principle, eros principle, leads to death drive. The thesis about death drive, it's completely natural. And Freud first thinks that pleasure and unpleasure principle
on pleasure principle are basically subsumed within the law of constancy, the principle of stability of Feschner. But he soon realizes that this position is logically untenable, that that drive is actually something fundamentally different. And that's of flash forwarding but I will explain that actually leads for him to understand that the principle of stability not to be confused with the principle of conservation of energy first law is a tripatriate regime is of three specific parts namely three laws of thermodynamics
that the first law is about the constancy of energy, right? That energy can be shuffled around, so on and so forth. What is the principle of stability? Is this like adiabatic and the other two types of processes? Or I'm sorry, it's been a lot. No, I will talk about this. I will talk about this, but I just want to say that principle of stability, when you look at it carefully, it is not actually the principle of conservation that Helmholtz and Meyer have been working on, right? It is actually all the three laws. So we have a zero law of thermodynamics, which is about associativity. Yeah. Thermodynamic systems,
meaning that if two systems have equilibrium relation with a third system, then there are an equilibrium relation with one another as well. So, but the first law, it seems that already carries the bad news, the law of constancy of conservation of energy, which is hell of holes. And within In the principle of stability of Feschner, it is implied that all the three laws of thermodynamics
work in tandem, namely one, conservation of energy and energy can be shuffled around but cannot be eliminated. Two, there is a tendency toward equilibrium, rest. second law, which is basically entropy increases over time, meaning that the quantitative understanding of energy remains stable, but this stability is at the cost of degradation of the quality of the energy we are talking about. And that degradation plus tendency to art equilibrium
is what Barbara Lowe, I don't know whether any of you are familiar with the works of Barbara Lowe. Barbara Lowe calls Nirvana Principle, which Freud works on. Basically, the death drive is based on two female psychologists, first Barbara Lowe and then Sabina Ashpialed. I think Sarah, Sarah has had a question or something. I saw that she raised her hand.
sorry i can't yeah uh ravine ravine my apologies uh yeah uh just actually just curious because you just mentioned uh sabina schbillerine um who i uh have engaged with briefly but do you think that there's anything to be said for i don't know just one thing that struck me when i when i saw her is that she formulates the death drive very differently than freud does yes yes No, you know, Freud's idea of death drive goes also through a very, I mean, we don't even need to call it death drive. It's just drive, right? Drive as in contrast, conceptually in contrast with instinct.
So instinct is life-bearing. Dr. DRIVE is essentially the extra two laws of thermodynamics, approach tendency toward equilibrium and increase in entropy. Yes, Sabina Espiralín essentially talks about the idea of drive or that drive or later what's called the strudo or thanatropic in a very kind of like a, what do you want to call it to be a psychologistic way. obviously for Freud to adopt this idea
he needs to plug it into the base of energetics why precisely Freud wants psychology or psychoanalysis being subsumed within a scientific worldview as I mentioned earlier Whereas for Espielin, she doesn't have that ambition that the death drive ultimately gives in a very controversial move, give psychoanalysis or psychology, Freudian psychology, its scientific
status, namely its scientific worldview. Okay, thanks. Yeah, I agree about it. Any more questions? Does anyone know how to, I mean, so I can see some of you when you are raising your hands I cannot see because obviously this class is very populated. Is it possible to, you know, kind of shrink the size of these squares so I can have everyone on the same page?
I think if you go up to view and push view gallery that might be what you want? Yes, but then it creates two pages. Oh, right. Yeah, I don't think so. You can see all of them. Okay, okay. I think when someone raises their hand, it buttons them to the front. Oh, okay. Okay, okay. Good, good, good, good. Okay, okay, that's good. So. Let's just start with.
So yeah, so I wanted to say that. I remember that is Carl with us today. Carl Olson, probably not. So Carl on Discord shared this essay, Epistemological Foundations of Freud in relation to Helmholtz. There was a link to that article, which is available. And I'm going to read parts of it. for you and say so there is this sort of kind of as I said historical inaccuracy of fidelity of Freud to Helmholtz just because Helmholtz was you know the
prince of this sort of psychophysics energetic accounts that unify psychology biology and physics doesn't make him doesn't make Freud essentially like a child of hell holds because Freud really get his master ideas, mature ideas, not by way of Helmholtz. Yes, Helmholtz kind of builds the groundwork, but he gets it from Feschner, Gustav Feschner. And so the first time
that it becomes apparent to Freud that energetics, particularly Fesnerian account of energetics, is so constitutive and so fundamental to this project of psychology and psychoanalysis, is his co-authored work with Breuer, Josef Breuer, and that's what is it called in English? It's called Studies on Hysteria, if I remember correctly, right? Studies on Hysteria. So So Freud, in studies of hysteria,
Freud and Breuer evidently allude to a theory of which they have a high opinion, particularly Freud, a theory from which many concepts of psychoanalysis eventually are derived. Freud didn't essentially expound on this theory beyond communicating the very general idea in his own words that among the psychic functions, there is something which should be differentiated.
An amount of affect. Sorry, my apologies. Yeah, Freud did not expound this theory beyond communicating the very general idea that the amount of the psychic function, that among the psychic functions, there is something which should be differentiated. an amount or a quantity of affects and a sum of excitation. When he's talking about excitation, it means neural excitation, right?
Something having all the attributes of a quantity. Well, of course, so he wants to talk, put his ideas forward in terms of quantification of energy, psychic or otherwise. I'm saying that psychic or otherwise precisely because, you see, the moment that you actually buy into Helmholtzian, Fischnerian ideas via thermodynamics, it really doesn't matter what sort of energy that you are trying to quantify, precisely because all
the energies are being bound to the first law of thermodynamics. It's just that their qualities are different, right? So chemical energy, electromagnetics, psychic energy, and so on and so forth. But for Freud, he wants to actually say that psychic energies can be quantified. You see, quantification at this point in 19th century and even before that is a sign of a field to be scientific. Like if you don't have quantification, measurements of energy, then you are not talking about science, you're talking about something else.
But the thing is that at this point in time, at the very least at the time of Helmholtz and Feschner and Brook, it is not clear how you measure a quantity of energy. So this is becoming an extremely dominating discourse at the end of 19th century, quantification of energy. So yes, in principle, in principle, in principle, we can quantify energy. But how? You know, by way of what sort of methods?
And Freud wants to say that psychology or psychological energy, activities required for psychological activities or energies required for psychological activities can be essentially quantifiable, can be measured. But he doesn't actually say how they can be measured, how they can be quantified. So yes, to continue this citation by Freud, he continues, he says that, okay, all the,
yeah, having all the attributes of a quantity, although we possess no means of measuring it as something which is capable of increase, decrease, displacement, and discharge, and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea, like an electric charge over the surface of the body. We can apply this hypothesis, which by the way already underlies our theory of ab reaction, in the same sense as a physicist employs the conception of a fluid electric
current. So there is a lot packed here, certain sort of assumptions. So remember that we were talking about memory and the unconscious in the previous session. So So he says that an idea like an electric, sorry, which extends itself over the memory traces like this quantitative decrease, displacement and increase over memory traces. That's essentially the unconscious, right? So he's already giving the unconscious an energetic twist.
And then he says we can apply this hypothesis. You see, why is it actually calling it a hypothesis? Precisely because it is not, as he has said it himself, it is not quite evident how we can actually measure the amount of psychic energies. So we can only do it under the hypothesis that psychic energies are ultimately, at the end of the day, are psychophysical energies.
They are energies, just different qualities of energies, like electromagnetic, chemical, so on and so forth. then uh it says that uh yes we can apply this hypothesis which by the way already underlies our theory of app reaction so the idea of up reaction uh uh aaron do you know the uh german word for it is kind of off of off something like that avoidance trashing discharge
shedding well something like this uh we're talking from perception to sensation right this is the fechner law so it's like how how a stimulus gets like doesn't live charged trashed discarded yes uh something i don't know that german word but it's kind of like look like this I don't know, this is probably completely wrong, but it is actually a word that when you trash talk about someone, when you discard someone, that's actually the... Yes, yeah, yeah, okay. Someone posted it. How you can pronounce it?
Abregieren. Aaron, you can pronounce it. Abregieren. Oh, my God. Wow. Let's, okay, let's not actually, never actually speak German. It's just not, it's not good for mental health. The pronunciation rules are fairly straightforward, unlike English, but. So, yes. Okay. I have heard that flies is pronounced fleece and like, like, like river.
You know, I just off tangent comments. People who have taken my classes, they know that I just had hate that languages. The running gag is that people ask me, do you speak French? Do you speak German? Do you speak Spanish? I said, I don't indulge in dead languages. And, you know, Italy gave us pizza. French gave us baguette bread. And German gave us Immanuel Kant. And probably now you should actually fuck off and let English language to survive. You see the twist in this joke that Italians and French
only give us some sort of culinary materials, but Germans. Give us Immanuel Kant. That's actually a joke on Italians or French rather than Germans. So, yes. So, theory of ab reaction in the same sense that as a physicist employs conception of fluid electric current. So you should understand what he really means here. And this is really quite a very interesting topic that Freud and Brewer talk about it by way of some metaphors in their co-author book, Studies on Hysteria.
So the idea, as I said, that Freud wants to shed his physicalist thesis, namely basing psychic activities on localized architecture of nervous system. Just bunch of neurons firing and so on so forth. Because that looks quite antiquated even for him. Rather he wants to say that
that if you are going to use electrical currents, metaphors in psychology, being responsible for such and such, you know, mental psychic activities, you need to have a better metaphor. And the metaphor is they use it as a kind of a carnival, what's that, a fair, a fair, or a power plant. So it is not as if that if you switch something, then the bulb lights up, right, being lit.
that sort of one-to-one correspondence between the trigger and the bulb being lit is fundamentally antiquated. Rather, the electrical metaphor here is being posed within the architectonics of the entire psychic apparatus. And the metaphor for this is like, you know, you go to one of these, you know, kind of fairs, carnivals that are coming to your city, and then someone suddenly, you know, in the movies, someone suddenly basically switch it on. And then you see that the Ferris wheel starts to rotate,
the popcorn stand becomes operative, all the neon lights getting lit, and so on and so forth. So it is what you might call to be a certain sort of systematic idea of connectionism. idea of connectionism in the idea of neural activities responsible for thus and so psychic activities, meaning that for certain sorts of psychic activities and functions and contents
to be present, there should be non-localized physical activities. And non-localization of physical activities, discharges, you know, excitations, so on and so forth, can be compared with the fear, right? The idea that, you know, all of this come together and they kind of support one another. So it's non-localized. So it creates a different sort of explanatory problem, which is not anymore what you might called to be purely physicalistic. It is at this point energetic because energetics is a certain sort of non-local global view
of physical systems, dynamic systems. So that's actually a fundamental leap forward for Freud. Ehsan, you want to say something? yep uh uh i wanted to ask if this uh psyche energy is the same as what we know today as action potential or uh no action potentials are not no action potentials of a neuron are you talking about yeah no no no absolutely not no or the difference between uh cations and uh what do you say in English?
What is the Farsi word that he wants to use? Oh, ionic polarization. Yeah. No, no, absolutely. No, Freud wants to actually get rid of this. Because, yes, it actually plays a role, but it's not explanatory sufficient to explain the causality of psychic events. Yes, I saw someone, Aaron, posted the logarithmic formula of excitation by Ray of Feshner.
Yeah, this is why I call this, you know, that Freud, in a sense, if we are generous to him, He's actually the last philosopher in German of the energetics, precisely because when we are talking about logarithmic functions, which he borrows from Feschler, we are talking not about individual neurons by polarization or polarization of
or changes in localized anatomy of the nervous system. But he actually has a very gestaltic view and this gestaltic view is at the base of the energetics view of Feschner and Feschner. um brock proper brook uh probably not helenholz i would say sorry reza yes this metaphor of uh about the the fair and the plant opening energy plant uh have something related to the to the deterministic uh point of
view of the terminism or absolutely not? No, it is, it is, it is actually precisely because, you know, within a Darwinian, so there are various different sorts of approaches to Darwin in 19th century and 20th century and even now. I think that Darwin never actually entertained the idea that natural selection is a fact of nature. I will talk about this.
There is actually a letter that Darwin writes to one of his friends saying that natural selection is not actually a fact of nature. precisely because the way that Darwin sees natural selection or Darwinian mechanisms in operation is by way of, you know, myriads of causal connections. So causal connections is very interesting. So causality, usually in philosophy of science, is something, for example, you can say that x make a difference in y hence x is the cause of change in y you know of course
you can actually go on and talk about various ways that x make a difference in y nomological principles all sorts of stuff but causal connection is a very different sort of stuff causal connection means that we do not trace back a particular phenomenon why to a single cause well rather we explain why in terms of connections between thus and so causal connections is a certain sort of inference, right? You don't,
for example, say that Adolf Grumbach, actually no, Wolfgang Stegmuller has this example of causal connections. And we are in the realm with Freud, in the realm of causal connections, right? And causal differentiation, causal differences, how one single cause make a difference in an effect, right? Wolfgang and Segler has this idea that this example, a rudimentary example where he says that, look, you know, the basement ceiling caved in as the result of pillars being eroded.
Right? This is not a scientific sort of idea. And you cannot actually talk it about scientifically, no matter how much you try to do. precisely because when we are talking about causation, we are talking about systems, systems or sets of specific causal connections, meaning that in our idea that the ceiling of the basement caved in, it could be the result of so many other causes. And yet we are merely reducing it to the pillars falling down.
Well, it can be actually the pillars are falling down precisely because, you know, they have been, the wooden pillars have been eroded by rats, not by rats because of dampness, because of, you know, weakness of the structure and so on and so forth. So, the idea of the causal connection attempts to rescue determinism, causal determinism, by way of creating a system among tractable causal connections responsible for an event.
thoughts. I wonder from where this habits of thinking causality in terms of going back comes. Is it logical, logical principle? Does it have to do- Technological or theological? Is it logical, just a popular logical operation, like deduction? I don't know. Why do we think of causality as going back and finding the first cause?
we lost reza ah connection let's be clear right yeah i think i think his uh i think his is internet type or computer yeah because uh now i first i saw the connection but now i tend to think it's it might be i sent him a message if he didn't even get it yeah it might be a computer this is bad yeah the system failure not not just a single cause not just the internet connection but whole system the failure of failure of energetics okay
you guys can transfer the discussion of the chat for for here for the voice comms because could be could be a wire i guess yeah people who are typing talk I really love it because we are in class and the shot is another universe. Yeah. Another, yeah. I complete another universe. It's really, it's really nice.
It seems that Hume's induction problem has a problem very apparently. when he talks about the example from the sun, that the suns will not rise, that we think the sun will rise because it rises every day, but there is no necessity. There is no necessity that the two happen again and again. But I saw some people talking about like,
And we know right now that in 4 million years the sun will not appear, but we know that scientifically. We know that from causation-based science. I don't know. It seems a little bit misleading. Well, I'm not sure this was about prediction, or I guess it's not about prediction or necessity so much it is like justifying the existence of psychic energy as a different kind of substance.
right like we're talking about physical energy on the one hand that comes in in perception say with like light and it gets translated into a kind of stimulus response and the point seems to be that it's there's not a linear or sort of simple causal relationship between the pleasure response or the visual response or whatever, like the intensity of what you're seeing doesn't fluctuate one-to-one with the light. And it fluctuates in this logarithmic way such that there's a translation that goes on from one kind of energy to another, right?
And making that justification, it's not just that there's an electrical signal that is going through a wire and then to a different thing. It's somehow there's a force acting upon it within the neuron that that translates it into a percept into a sensation. Right. Right. And I guess the parallel with evolution was a bit tough, but it's, I guess that like fitness also isn't a fact at any time about a population or an individual, but that it's a complex system that has multiple feedbacks and relates to the fitness of other creatures and its environment.
right or an ethnic niche yeah like i don't know um maybe i didn't read him actually uh but so so i i think he he did that extrapolation right but maybe we we we we don't have to extrapolate did this kind of thing from what he says, at least in this quote, right? In the sense that it is... Maybe we could just think about it, just what Reza was talking about of the systems, right?
We try to, I think we try to, we tend to mix the totality with each system, right? So if we can just take this gap of scientific method, I think what Hume says can help. But yeah, so the radical empiricist take is really strange. something random that I just wanted to like pop in and say um please don't dunk on me for listening
to Jordan Peterson but um I know you all are like fuck you guys but uh anyway so he uh you know as much as he gets memed on by Zizek um and ContraPoints he's actually like knows his shit when it comes to you know like psychotherapy methodologies and young and you know especially like the big five personality traits um which is actually like basically statistics applied to linguistics of the way that we talk about personality is where the big five came out so the big five is actually kind of scientific it's not like mbti or whatever um so like he he's a psychometrician and he also knows a shit ton about the limbic system and most importantly he's a fantastic lecturer so i just want to recommend everybody listen to his 2017 it's called personality
on YouTube. It's his like 200s level psychology class at University of Toronto. And I've just found that this makes like Freud's like bioenergetic stuff like way more interesting, especially the limbic system class that he teaches, because he talks about like what we know in modern psychology about all like how all of the different drives are mediated through systems in your brain and how they evolved. And he gives like a really engaging overview to it. So, you know, I would just recommend that if you want to like get more out of this class, I've, I like listened to that lecture last month or so. And I've like, the stuff I learned in there has made this stuff like a lot more interesting and cool. And just given like, it really makes it clear, like how
perceptual Freud was of things that science hadn't discovered yet. So I just wanted to let like share this with the class it's it's made my experience really cool reading Freud and you write his name on the chat please yeah um yeah give me a second Jordan B Peterson personality 2017 do to do search on YouTube yeah especially like the limbic system video I think is like the most important for this stuff that we are talking about today um soup like he great lecture i'm just like i was really i listened to him in my car now like he's really good at making like
serotonin interesting okay i'll i'll get off my uh my pedestal box whatever now I think now someone should promote Cicek for balance, I don't know. I would jump in to promote another scholar. Her name is Mervya Emre and she wrote this book called Personality Brokers and it's about the Myers-Briggs. Tess is basically a critique and she makes a very convincing argument of how non-scientific
or too intertwined with, let's say, pop psychology and managerial class self-help. In worlds are they intertwined? for Peterson I yeah I never engaged or read any of his serious psychology stuff but yeah I for once for one I'm not super convinced of the big fives and their scientific basis but yeah I just wanted to drop this reference for balance I'm going to write it in the chat. And sorry for my voice. Thank you, Yerjana.
My apologies. For some reason, suddenly I lost connection. I think it was a modem problem. Surge or something. So we're back. Let's have a three minutes break if someone wants to go to the bathroom or anything and then we come back. Okay. Thank you.
My apologies. Usually this sort of stuff don't happen here, but for some reason it did. We were afraid that your entire computer broke down. Yes, actually, you know, for some reason, every time that I buy a Mac, it's a pure, you know, dud. So I bought a Mac Pro just like a couple of years ago. And then suddenly the keyboard starts to malfunction.
Like half of the keyboard is dead. the screen has started to show these sort of uh you know pink stuff i think i told you uh last session i just said no i cannot work with it uh so i bought a new computer finally uh macbook air it's better okay it's better oh no I will never go back to Windows you broke for a good 10 seconds but yeah you're back so
I can't even imagine what I was talking about. Anyway, let's just go on and if questions arise, then we address them. So I was saying that, yes, so the one in Freud, fluid electric current and the metaphor of this sort of connectionist idea of electric currents that you can't actually, for specific sort of psychic activities or psychic contents, you can't trace them back to localized anatomical
sets of neurons, but rather the idea of nervous system should be understood energetically in the sense that different scales and regions of the nervous systems kind of bring about certain sorts of psychic activities and contents. So within the co-authored work, we have a threefold thesis.
The first one, and of course I'm going to talk about this, how they are actually related to the energetics. So this is a book on hysteria. The first claim that they make, particularly Brewer, is intracerebral tonic excitations. I'm going to explain what they mean. Two is a tendency to keep the excitation at a constant level.
constant level that converge upon zero, right, the lowest degree. And affects as disturbances of dynamic equilibrium within the central nervous system. So these three intracerebral tonic excitation, tendency to keep the excitation as a constant level, possibly at the lowest level, which is zero, and affects as disturbances of the the dynamic equilibrium within the central nervous system are theses undergirded by the rise of the new energetics,
which is also called the economic argument in psychology. Economic precisely because it when it becomes clear that all activities at the level of energetic mechanistic level responsible for dozens of psychic activities can be thought as economic arguments And that's actually quite very interesting. So the physicalist thesis that Freud used to adopt was about, you know, kind of like,
placing back psychic activities to localize accurate descriptions of certain sort of neural activities, anatomical arguments, so to speak. But now we, Freud and Breuer, they try to replace the anatomical arguments for the explanation of psychic activities and contents with energetic, which is also called the economic argument.
Now you see that he's now from a pure old-fashioned physicalist. He has graduated the realm of materialism kind of like Marx. We are talking about economics in terms of the means of labor, work, and production, and what goes into that. Here we have a similar situation, but only that this is not about, you know, economic
proper work and production, but rather about energetic work and production, work in a thermodynamic sense. So, the first one, what is intracerebral excitation? Well, you know, Freud and Brewer say we should not imagine that a conducting cerebral path is like a telephone wire, which is stimulated by electricity only when it functions. Rather,
let us imagine an elaborate electrical system for the transmission of light and motive power, which by a simple switch is to put into operation every bulb, whistle, and motor." You know, the fair example that I made. Even during functional rest, they continue, it requires a certain amount of tension in the whole conducting network, which in turn necessitate an expenditure of a definite sum of energy,
by the dynamo. They continue, likewise, there exists a certain amount of excitation in the alert or wakeful brain, which is resting, but ready to function. Now, to this excitation, Freud and Brewer gives the name of tonic intercerebral excitation. It exists in addition to, number one, the potential energy, which is in the chemical composition of the cells of the brain,
and two, the form of kinetic energy unknown to us, which discharges in the state of excitation of the fiber of a neuron. This tonic or tonic excitation relates to discharge, for example, in a peripheral motor fiber as electric tensions relates to electric current, right? So, There is already a lot packed here in the sense that we're talking about the dynamism
in a connectionist sort of sense rather than a localized, trivial localized certain sort of sense and it also corresponds the first law of thermodynamics namely that the sum of kinetic and potential energies at every moment are constant right so that's the first one that we covered. So now, from this Freudian, Freud-Browa citation,
we can easily see that the theory, at least for the first point that I made, contains two sets of thoughts. One, the neurological idea of an excitation characterized as tonic and localized in the conducting paths of the brain. And the physical concept of a certain amount of energy available for psychic work. A certain amount of energy is constant, right? the name intracerebral tonic excitation as used primarily by Brewer takes the attention away from
the physical meaning of the concept and somehow in an unduly manner stresses the neurological aspect excitation here simply means the state of being in function it is observable by its effects and it's estimated according as greater or smaller so excitation here is very different from affection. You know, affection, as I pointed out, is a kind of disturbance, emotional affection, or affection, or precisely because the system interacts
with another system, affecting one another, you know, confrontations of action, their actions upon one another, that is actually in psychoanalysis or in the energetic terms is called perturbation or disturbances in a dynamic system. Whereas excitation, even though excitation might actually kind of relay the idea of perturbation, but that's not exactly what they mean by excitation. Excitation simply means being in the state of a function. And it's quantitative. It's gradational, moving from greatest excitations to the smallest excitations.
And you can think about this, that for nervous system to be functional, it should be in the state of excitation. right in in the sense that it should have a certain sort of wakefulness alertness and this alertness uh once and broer uh wanted to translate to uh neuro neurophysiological activities uh that even when you are asleep there is a level of excitation that ought to be there for you to dream, for you to wake up from sleep, and so on and so forth.
So we are already in the realm of pure energetics here, right? that there is a certain level of excitation should be maintained for a psychic activity within a specific organism. Now, so with regard to the intracerebral tonic excitation, Brewer's and Freud's theory finally come to this conclusion.
Namely, a certain amount of the energies which the organism produces or uses in its physiochemical economy is available for its psychic functions. They leave the question open whether various forms or just one, and if so, which one of the energies within the organism's body is available for psychic activities. It is simply a certain amount characterized by its use, value only, namely the amount of work that it can actually conduct. It is made clear, however, that they are speaking of the intensity factor of the available energy, the potential, and not of the total amount of energy.
The energy is produced, namely released, by the brain cells during the sleep. When it increases above a certain level, the organism wakes up. It is ready for psychic work, psychic expenditure, so to speak. It begins to perceive, associate, think, and to produce motor interventions. In this way, the store of energy is consumed. When it decreases below a certain level, the organism falls asleep and again, new cycle begins. So it's actually quite really almost uncanny.
Now you think about Freud's idea of a sleep and dream. These are not merely symbolic sort of stuff. To fall asleep and dream. It's a sort of cosmological stuff. because they are part of a cosmological principle that for thus and so a creature who falls asleep and dreams there should be thus and so energetic models that function psychically thoughts before i move forward
you mentioned use value of those excitations use value in the sense of work in the sense of thermodynamic idea of work, right? Work, work. It's not teleological really at this point. Work purely in the thermodynamic sort of sense. You can think about it a waterfall, right? A waterfall is really the fundamental example of thermodynamic principles, turning energy into work, but also dissipating the qualitative
you know, measures of certain sort of energies. Or another example that actually uh, Meyer, uh, points out, you know, we have two, two metals or two objects, and then we, you know, kind of rub them against one another. And this movement creates rubbing against one another creates heat and then heat and the movement become part of a certain sort of causal system that then you have to explain why the movement create dozens of heat energies right
Or, for example, the reverse. Why is that in the 18th century, with the invention of a steam engine, heat produces movement? Sorry, so work is something that converts one energy into another? Another qualitative energy, yes. But also, yes, but also, at the end of the day, work implies a very specific sort of thing.
That yes, energy is constant, the amount of energy, right? It cannot be eliminated. It can be shuffled around. It can be changed and exchanged, but also it implies, and that's the thermodynamic 101, that the idea of work has a shuffling around of different qualities of energy, also means that throughout this sort of exchange or shuffling around of energies, is the quality of energy degrades. So think about this in the psychic.
So we are talking about, let's imagine that Freud is right. There is such a thing as psychic energy. Now, knowing that Freud, you know, is fully buying into the energetic thesis, uh basically thermodynamics um it means that tensions within uh psychic energies can create more tensions or un-tensions pleasures or unpleasures equally and ultimately they create more unpleasures
toward equilibrium precisely because as i said this idea of work shuffling around energies and so on so forth comes naturally with degradation of the specific qualities of energies that we are talking about. So if we are talking about psychic energies, psychic work naturally leads to the annihilation of psychic energy. That is very dark. That's Freud becoming Boltzmann.
Yes, so Samuel. Yeah, I had a question about these three sort of principles you pointed to in the text. the level of intracerebral tonic excitation, the tendency to maintain a constant level of excitation and affects, you pointed out as the three. So would you say those are, would you say those sort of map onto the three distinct neuronal systems that Freud delineated
in his project. One dealing with... Yeah. Go on, please go on. No, yeah. My understanding is that the three systems, one of them deals with purely endogenous levels of endogenous forms of stimulation. Another is... Exogenous, yeah, interactions with stimuli from outside and so on so forth. Yes, I would say that yes, but as I said, threefold idea of neural categories that he used to adopt are now all being subsumed
within the energetic paradigm, economic argument, because precisely because economic argument can simply account for these categories of neurons at a far more fundamental level, right? In terms of basically three laws of thermodynamics. conservation, approach to equilibrium, and increase of entropy. Georgiana, my apologies.
yeah i have a question about this um excitation or functionality of the brain as a kind of excitation uh in relationship with situations where hyper excitation leads to anesthesia like or hypersthesia like how would he why would the hypersensibility of sorts and wakefulness how could this lead to a pathological state where you are hyper?
Yes, so this is what you are bringing on and mentioning is Freud in next phase, when he actually departs from Brewer's idea of hysteria. In that phase, Freud, this is before Beyond Pleasure principle, right? So Freud notices that, look, he really genuinely thought in the early works that, you know, the eros, eros principle, called sexuality, life instincts, namely, leads to more pleasure.
And the unpleasure is basically when life instincts are being toned down. But then within this whole new energetic economy, this new theory that he adopted from Feschner and Helmholtz and Brooke, he thought that that just not look correct, precisely because some unpleasures or unpleasing events can move toward equilibrium. in a psychic entity. And some pleasures might actually disturb the structure
of the psychic entity. So it is not really the sort of bipolarized black and white idea that all pleasures carry life or the eros principle, or all unpleasures carry death drive. or rather it is once we understand it within the system of the energetics, the economic argument that any of these sorts of stimuli, pleasure, pleasure, can contribute negatively or positively to psychic activities. But then if that is the case then,
as I'm going to talk about, then probably death drive is very real. Because then we are beholden not only to the conservation of energy for psychic activities, but more importantly, tendency toward pure and complete quietude, which Barbara Lowe before Freud calls nirvana, principle, absolute annihilation on a cosmological level, which is already has its own stamp on the psyche of every and each of individuals who are part of a cosmological formula,
a cosmological scenario. And that's when Freud becomes fundamentally a philosopher, a speculative philosopher. You might not agree with him, but nevertheless, you cannot deny that in adopting, you know, kind of physical, physical, physiobiological or psychophysical principles, he connects psychic activities, which are of a self, back to the cosmological realm. And what is it
if not another instance of the greatest Copernican revolutions, the greatest humiliations right so you're saying that all this let's say dark intensity that or hyperactivity that is producing energy in a way like in a pathological state let's say overthinking it produces energy even if it's a dark kind of energy produces work it produces work it produces work. It produces work. So you're saying in his later phase he managed to integrate even this kind of... Yes, it produces... You see, when we are talking about expenditure
of energy, so according to the first law, all energy, amount of energy, quantity of energy is always constant. You can't eliminate energy in principle. But the thing is that true work, which is that of the psychic work, psychic activities, some of these energies change their quality from a certain form to another. But also, as they change their form, ultimately they also get degraded in terms of qualities of energy, which is what?
Second, most damning law of thermodynamics. Entropy rising. Death. Thanatos. The strudel is at hand. Thank you. Denise? Yeah, hi. When you were reading this Freud's description on, yeah, I guess, hysteria and energetic economy, I mean, maybe this is going to be a very silly comment, but it made me think immediately of this novel by Dostoyevsky, El Idiota, the idiot. Yes, yes, yes, of course.
There is like a super beautiful phrase that has kept with me for years about, I think is a main character describing, because I think the main character, which is a prince, he has epilepsy, right? I think. And he describes the moment before the seizure. And I don't know why, like I was thinking a lot about that while you were reading this, because it describes so beautifully this moment of being hyper aware of, I guess, its own body and like knowing that this like moment of ecstasy or kind of like an orgasmic moment is coming. I've never had cocaine, but usually neuroscientists say that if you have a cocaine,
that's how wakefulness looks like. Yeah. Moment of pure alertness, right? And the thing is that why actually, this is a Schopenhauerian story, why do you need alertness? Why life needs organisms needs to be alert, hyper-wakeful, always under vigilance. Well, obviously, precisely because to, you know, preserve the quality of their psychic energies. but as they work and this quality of psychic energy translates to other qualities of other sorts of energies
according to this basic thesis the quality of energy starts to degrade not only that but a tendency toward equilibrium arises and that will be what Schopenhauer calls the unconscious of will and representings, right? Behind every life instinct, there is an impulse for murder, for death. And he has a great example in the will and representation of Bulldog Ants of Australia.
where these ants, if you cut them in half, the tail starts to sting the head, and the jaw of the head starts to bite the tail. And Schopenhauer says that usually if you do that, the battle between this dying ant between the tail and the head lasts for almost 30 minutes until one of them is being dragged by the other one. And that's Schopenhauer calls the unconscious of life instinct,
namely the will. And Freud is ultimately, fundamentally Schopenhauerian. His difference from Schopenhauer is that whereas Schopenhauer thinks that life instinct and death drive are of two sides of the same coin, Freud thinks that that is not really the case but that drive or death drive actually is the very conclusion for something to be vital
to be alive So you would say Dostoevsky is more Schopenhauer-ish or Freudian? Well, I mean, it depends on what sort of phase of Dostoevsky we are talking about. I mean, I think in Demons, it's much more Freudian. Okay. Thanks. Absolutely. Sarah? I would like to know how this theory of energetics relate to the theory of repression. Yeah, we will get absolutely we get back to this, but a very quick response.
repression is when what you might call to be the unconscious namely the distribution of energies in the psychic architectonics or architecture work against the fair economic distribution of energy in the psychic functions that's usually called repression we will absolutely get it uh get to this uh when we are uh like probably two or three
sessions but yes from an energetic uh perspective that will be the formula for repression thank you my apologies uh enda uh was i first or was ravine first i can't remember it doesn't matter okay cool um yeah so i was just curious so when it comes to like this economy of psychic energy um is is freud relying on the thermodynamic dynamic laws themselves as the organizational principle or is it actually the kind of stuff that we know freud for as as being what accounts with that kind of organizational principle. Generally, from a historical perspective, we don't have any sort of evidence that Freud ever understood correctly
the laws of thermodynamics. Right. Yet he knows Feschner's principle of stability or law of constancy. And in so far as law of constancy, as I'm going to discuss, is a tripatriate regime of having all the three laws at the same synchronic way that makes Freud an unconscious doctor of thermodynamics. But no, I mean, Freud really didn't want to uh getting the integrity of thermodynamics yeah i mean he completely understood the law of uh
conservation of force or energy by way of helmholtz but he really didn't understand increase of entropy and law of approach to equilibrium properly but have i understood correctly that what freud is trying to do here is like construct with psychoanalysis like a new special science on like you know on the foundation of theoretical universal unifying principle yes which is which is basically thermodynamics yes absolutely okay oh but what yes and then i'm trying to ask maybe like yeah is you know what we know freud for being the kind of symbolic stuff that he's often now castigated for like you know um as pseudoscientific or whatever you know maybe
Every rod looks like a penis and so on and so forth. Right. I guess, do we not still have to deal with this as Freud trying to inscribe a sort of semantification through the symbolic register? This doesn't come from the energetic backgrounds. As I said, you see, as I said, there is a tension in all of Freud's work, particularly as he gets matured and he completely understands the aeroginics. there is an asymmetry, I wouldn't call it incompatibility, sorry if I used this word earlier on, an asymmetry between the interpretive or hermeneutic
valence of psychoanalysis and the energetic explanatory, causally explanatory dimension of psychoanalysis, which is given to him by way of energetics and economic argument. as I said I don't think that some people at least not me some other people think that he didn't manage to seamlessly bridge the hermeneutic interpretive semantic side to that of the mechanistic energetic or economic side obviously I think there is a grain of truth the critics of Freud
that, you know, the sort of symbolic interpretations are not being resolved in this tension between energetics and semantic side. And you see Jung being such a shetty CIA agent tries to simply say that, well, you know, energetics is irrelevant and it goes for the semantic symbolic dimension. But I absolutely think that if we are actually talking about Freud and Lacan or any sort of other psychoanalyst,
the energetic side, and that's why I'm putting so much emphasis on this, the energetic side is absolutely indispensable, because otherwise Freud would be goddamn fucking you. Raviv? Yeah, I was just wondering if we could touch again on this. this idea of like the relationship between energy as a physical principle and like this idea of psychic energy right because were you saying that the the difficulty in formulating like a psychic energy as in principle is that you can't quantify
it and you can't really do yes you can you can't quantify it and that's the whole point i mean well, I mean, it is not really the fault of Freud, but as I said, you know, from 60s in the 19th century onwards, there is this extremely, you know, kind of a strong debate about how we can quantify energy, right, or force in the Helmholtzian way. So obviously, Freud has that, you know that is merely at the whim of science to decide how we can quantify energy but also a different form of the dilemma in the sense that freud just doesn't give a fuck
yeah about how to quantify a psychic energy because psychic energy is subsumed within the quantification of energy as a principle as a as a worldview as a yeah this is what i wanted to ask about because it seems i was thinking about last week and you were talking about this idea of like investigating like a black box or something and it is kind of like the idea of what freud and brow are doing here not so much that they're like oh we're measuring some energy and we're taking data on this as more as what they're doing is they have some kind of like black box and it seems to behave similarly to things that are controlled by energy and so they formulate this
principle yes yes very correctly yes and and if that's the case then there's not really there doesn't need to be a necessary connection between physical energy and psychic energy in order to make this a useful conception right because like other than other than the simple facts or the hypothesis that postulates the the postulate of psychic energy what is this postulate of psychic energy for freud is that all the dozens of psychic energies are subsumable under laws of thermodynamics right right right well right because i was thinking he probably didn't have any way of saying this is the connection this is how chemical energy in the
body is transformed into it used to be it used to be his obsession but uh he relinquished that obsession because uh because actually this is not tenable uh and this is why that uh people who say that you know Freud is Helmholtzian are kind of wrong particularly that article that epistemological foundations they are wrong this is just historically wrong because for Freud that is not really the main issue here the main issue here is that yes Helmholtz and the the
is ilk create a paradigm for unification of psychological activities, biological activities, chemical activities, and physical ones. Yet it is not an issue for Freud that how and what sort of sense uh we can uh basically talk about psychic energies right so long as psychic energies are in a general broad sort of sense uh are being assimilated within the general
dynamic systems and their thermodynamic principles simple as that yeah so so then when you're talking about like this application of the second law where all psychic activity is going to tend towards relinquishing energy and you use this phrase like the degradation of energy yeah the quality of energy quality of energy yeah yeah so i was i was curious as you quantity of energy is always constant the quality of energy through work degrades right so this work can be either psychic or physical or chemical and so and the and the idea here that really what uh unifies psychic uh to biological and biological chemical and chemical to the physical
is really the work right because i i was really quickly like just to make a physical analogy right is what you're saying like if you have like some kind of engine or something right and you you you can at least bound like the amount of energy lost by making it an efficient energy like engine but the idea is you're taking chemical energy turning it into a different quality of energy right like mechanical energy is that what you mean by quality or is it yes yes absolutely changing the form of energy yeah so so then what you're saying is kind of like this death drive is sort of due to like a psychical equivalent of like heat loss or something is that
sort of yes yes yes absolutely heat i mean not heat as an energy being lost but that heat is being transformed to a different quality of energy that cannot perform what he does for movement right right yeah i know it's not like physical energy i'm just trying to use it the same thing can be said about uh psychic energy so psychic energy during psychic work is being transformed from one form or quality of energy to another form of or quality of energy and throughout this process it becomes transformed
to a certain sort of quantity of the same constant quantity of energy but it just is the case that the quality there's been quality of energy or form of energy that has been produced can no longer go back and translate to psychic energy and it can be said not only for psychology or psychic energy but also for all realms biology chemistry and physics and that's the principle of nirvana death derived right sorry i know i've been talking about but the one the last thing i wanted to mention is like is there a relation here between like
this idea of psychic energy as something that can be studied rigorously and scientifically and like i don't know people make a connection between freud and like idealism for instance is that is that like would you say freud is purely materialist uh i wouldn't call him idealist even by stretch um I think it's really coming from the vein of materialism. But even in materialism, I mean, it's not a sort of, you know, kind of like a cookie-cutter materialism that some sort of philosophers are advocating today. But we should understand that materialism in the 19th century, yes, it has elements
of idealism. just that it's just like a kind of like a mature idealism right yeah corroborating uh you know uh like mental powers with principles of reality right yeah so like and then that's like kind of the similarity with marx right he's taking idealism yes yes yes and darwin as well yes uh particularly marks I would say. Okay, thank you. Because of the economic nature of their arguments. So number two with regard to Freud Brewer, you know energetic
picture is the tendency to preserve intracerebral excitation at a constant level. Now, this is directly coming from Feschner, Gustav Feschner, the law of constancy, or the principle of stability, so to speak. But of course, the principle of stability, as I'm going to talk about, even though it is literally about this, point, the tendency to preserve intracerebral excitation at the constant level, but also it implicitly carries with it two other components, namely the first one and third one that I'm going
to talk about, which basically can be corresponded with three laws of thermodynamics, like conservation approach to equilibrium and increasing entropy. So the second one, which is a tendency to preserve, you know, you can say that any engine or any system which shows a restoration of certain level of energy, force or configuration, so on and so forth, can be described in teleological terms or tele-economic terms. A system of this kind becomes a unified whole.
Its actions are related to the level in question as disturbing or restoring. Within the whole, they have a function which is determinable. It works as if the preservation of level were a goal. you know, in Freud Brewer's scheme, then psychic work consumes excess of energy. Teleologically, one may say that psychic work has a function of consuming excess energy, of equalizing potentials or that the organism has a tendency
to keep the energy on a certain level. And this level can be thought in terms of the lowest level or possibly, ideally, for any sort of system, asymptotically verging upon zero. So Freud and Brewer prefer the term of consumption of energy, rather than the word discharge, which has a very teleological connotation. and i'm going to uh this is the word i mean
our chairman siri can actually pronounce this for us aaron i'm talking about you german siri sorry i gotta ask the what do you want me to pronounce That word that I put in the chat box. The previous one? Oh, abfur. Abfur, then. Lead away from. Is it also trashing and discarding and shedding? Or replacement? Abfur, then. I don't think that one has such a wide connotation. I guess rejection.
rejection or like discharge is what it's saying that's a noun that's the problem all these basic verbs have like very specialized yes so anyway uh so uh that so then um the tendency to preserve uh tonic excitation at the constant level is not merely a teleological translation of the law of dissipation of energy, according to which potentials, wherever they exist, will become equalized. To Freud and Brewer, this tendency is a need of the organism, similar to others, for example,
to the tendency to preserve the level of the water content in blood. When the potential energy falls below the optimum level, it is not the concern of this principle to bring it up again. This is done ultimately by brain cells, according to his serionic thesis, as part of their life routine. This part of their theory in terms of today refers to molar, namely macro behavior of the total organism. It thinks of mind, let's say, as of a molar doing away with an accumulation of microtensions or tensions among different forms of energies.
So another way to think about the second point here is that, according to the law, first law, the energy should be constant and then even though energy is constant, we can have perturbations, disturbances, unpleasure pleasures which decrease or increase the level of energy in a system named an organism a psychic entity and the idea of the psychic entity is simple as that that it should have
certain sort of mechanisms at hand available to it such that it can decrease the level of excitation by simply discharging it discharging the amount of energy the amount of of excitation of the function that is happening, or by avoiding it fully. So there are two sorts of mechanisms that are in place, at least two mechanisms, for any sort of psychic entity to remain in pure psychic stability, in a dynamic sort of way.
I'm not talking about in a static way of stability, but in a dynamic way. One, discharge, and the other one, abreaction, avoidance, and mitigation. Third point of the early energetic Freud and Brewer is affects and conversion. In this scenario, energetic economic argument view, affects are usually being thought as perturbations or disturbances of the dynamic equilibrium within the nervous system,
but also between the nervous system and the outside environment. So we have then to picture the nervous system as consisting of several regions or areas. To each of these areas or regions correspond certain complex perceptions, ideas, motor patterns, so on and so forth. If a certain amount of energy occupies one of them, the complex is functioning. In the wakeful working brain, the energy is not equally distributed. It is as if the available amount of energy was never sufficient to permit a number of
different activities at the same time. Therefore, it shifts from one area to another, creating and subsequently equalizing potentials between them. A state of dynamic equilibrium is achieved when no major potentials exist between the areas and no obstacle hinders the passage of energy from one region to another, thus ensuring a speedy equalization, tendency to art equilibrium. And so it becomes obvious that in his work on dreams, Freud thinks that
the best phase within which we can kind of measure in a psychoanalytic term not in a physical sense the disturbances meaning the intrusions of the unconscious within memory traces and ideas and motivations is within dream why precisely because in a sleep mode
majority of those extraneous, exogenous factors of excitations have succumbed to exist. Within the state of wakefulness, it is really hard to gauge what is actually going on, because the system has a dynamic interaction in a pure, vigilant, alert state or mode with its own environment. So you have to let the system to cool down going on a standby. And then in the standby mode, you start to see the spikes, you know, in disturbances.
And those spikes in disturbances are the signs of certain sort of unconscious perturbations for certain sets of motivations, emotions, and so on and so forth. So now you see that the whole idea of a dream interpretation of Freud is actually an engineering dynamic system problem. let the system cool down go to the state of sleep and then gauge what is actually disturbing the system because when the system is
purely active when we are awake there is a whole lot of things going on that might actually compromise the measuring or the gauging of the unconscious dynamics in their intrusion their disturbances upon the whole architecture of the psyche thoughts so is the idea that what's what's there in the psychic energy is somehow
it's like a residue where a mal malfunction or yeah yeah you see the psychic energy the the problem is the measurement of the psychic energy right um in the sense that we want to see essentially, you know, in a dynamic system analysis, right? So for a dynamic system analysis, you do not want to model this dynamic system as a fully charged system that is in a synchronic interaction with its environment, but rather you want to create an ideal model of the dynamic
system where uh and that would be our selves in a sleep right where you can measure or gauge spikes in disturbances so affects even though they should be gauged uh in real time within the system and environment from an energetic perspective that is not possible from an economic thermodynamic sort of way you need the system cool down and then measure the spikes of disturbances
namely the unconscious intrusions upon the psychic architecture and that's by all means a very very canonical uh sort of modeling uh you know psychoanalytic interpretations on uh thermodynamic analysis of a dynamic system but it's a it's a system that should be trending toward equilibrium but doesn't because there's a there's been a disequilibrium from the outside that hasn't been yes right so so so you want so you essentially you want to um
understanding all sorts of disequilibrium endogenous or exogenous when system is at rest when it's supposed to be at the state of inertia you see we can only uh so of course of course helen holds and uh brooke had this idea and that kind of impressed Freud that even in the beginning that you need to study neural excitations or simulations while at the state of ideal, at the very least,
ideal inertia. Because only at the state of inertia is that when you can actually see what changes the path for the course of a system and these are things in the memory or in the yes yes and this is the the memory and um consciousness exclude each other so we can only examine the memory or what's the there's like the perceptive, basically perceptive inscription, right, is what it is? Yes, yes. And I mean, think about it with the tongue, sleep of tongue, you know, that is essentially is a kind of
of a divergence from the inertial regime by way of certain sort of disturbances in memory traces or motivations that more often than not a spike into the realm of you know conscious activities. Yes, we are a little short on time. I think we should move forward and first hour and join in the session. Sure, sure. So, what's the best way to
move forward? I mean, should we get the last two questions? Yes, yes. Let's hear them and close. Okay. Please, Sarah. Do you think that this is, it may seem like a stupid question, but maybe this is one of the reasons that in schizophrenic and bipolar disorders, when the person is inside a psychotic state, the person just stopped just quit sleeping because then the contents of the unconscious start to appear
without this I don't know because there is a brain activation that is I don't know maybe the energy is too high for some reasons I don't know how to say I mean so the thing is that you see from a thermodynamic point of view when you know kind of there are spikes these spikes give us a certain sort of what you might call to be forensic profile of certain sort of disturbances why precisely because for freud such as spikes should be
studied against the background of the principle of stability in terms of energetics, right? And it is only against the backdrop of the principle of constancy or stability that we can say that certain sort of spikes in psychic energies show certain signs of hysteria or neurosis. In fact, it is not just a spike. It can be also kind of a rapid decrease of psychic energy.
So, you know, kind of like what you might call to be a surprising or unexpected, unexpected in the basically sense of the whole energetic economy of the system, certain sort of unexpected decrease or increase. are symptomatic, symptoms of certain sort of stuff that are going on within the regime of the, you know, psychic object. But do you think there is a relation of this lack of sleeping with the spikes in those cases, especially in mania and schizophrenia?
because in those cases, the person just quit sleeping for some reasons. We have examples of monkeys that start to hallucinate when they stop to sleep at all, when you restrict them to sleep, because of this unconscious state that the contents just come when you are sleeping. No, I mean, Freud doesn't want to say that the unconscious is only calm when you are sleeping, but he wants to say that the unconscious, as being under the horizon of energetic fields
with regard to the psychic activities, it can be best to be gauged within the field of, you know, minimum alertness, which is usually asleep. Precisely because when someone is awake, it is really hard to say, you know, to make a connection between certain sort of spikes of energy or decrease in energy and certain sort of unconscious motives, wishes, and emotions. But it thinks that in sleep, precisely because the amount of energy
tends to be at the lowest level, almost approaching asymptomatically stability or constancy, I love Feschner, it is very easy to kind of gauge a spike at that level when everything tends to be constant, stable. So it is actually very interesting that Freud suggests that during the sleep and by way of dreams, then we can actually gauge fluctuations from the baseline, which is, you know, psychic activities being on the most minimal fluctuation.
At that point, you can see fluctuations far more easily than when someone is awake. when basically the whole system is, you know, primed to interact in the most wakeful, alert, and vigilant sense with its environment. Thank you. So I really like this interpretation of dreaming, but I have two questions about it. And the first is part of what happens in dreaming, of course, is the ego is suspended and therefore that form of self-censorship is relaxed.
But since the ego is a critical mechanism for maintaining equilibrium, isn't that actually, isn't that a kind of disequilibrium or potential for disequilibrium that enters into dreaming? I think that's somewhat complicates your reading. Yes. Yes, I think you are completely right. Well, I mean, answer the first question is that Freud quite specifically says that ego is suspended in a very sort of very particular It's not as if it just falls to sleep and it takes its...
It's just that ego literally comes to the minimal lowest activity. Right? It's not as if it disappears all of a sudden, but it comes to the lowest energetic activity. And that creates an opportunity to see the disturbances that ego tried in vain to suppress during wakeful estates. That makes perfect sense. Thank you. And my second question was the relationship between what you're calling spikes and the interpretation of dreams as wish fulfillment.
Is this reading teleology back into energetics, or does this take us back to Inda's question about semantics? I think that it's unfortunately both of them, and it is still not clear to what extent Freud is successful to kind of blend these together. But obviously, you know, interpretation of dream is a first work where Freud explicitly makes psychoanalysis as if it was constituted by two forms of dilemmas.
the mechanistic energetic dimension and the hermeneutic dimension. It's just not really obvious how the causal explanatory regime, as I said earlier, it can be seamlessly put together with the hermeneutic. But yes, absolutely, interpretation of dream is the first time that Freud goes on and gives psychoanalysis a new job for it to be a sub- by way of introduction of semantic hermeneutics dimension.
Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. My apologies if I was not sufficient. My answer was not sufficient. So yes, Akshat? So again, I think I'm not sure if I keep interrupting and asking questions that are somewhat redundant since they're like based largely upon the methodology and not actually upon the applications of the methodology so when you uh talked about like you just gave us a very elegant description
about why we should study the brain while it's sleeping right because it's a shut-off engine essentially and in order to develop um a perfect model we need to have it at an ideal state in which we can study it so um i think maybe because of my like background in physics my mind immediately goes to fluids and laminar flows and turbulence so essentially what you're proposing here is is is an inversion. In this case, consciousness is turbulence. And the state of unconsciousness is the easy to study laminar flow, right? But again, because you're losing the...
No, no, no, actually... Eye map of the engine. There is a twist here. There is a twist here. You see, so yes, the state of consciousness is what you would call to be a you know uh turbulent or uh fluid dynamics uh and it is not as if the unconscious is laminar but rather that the consciousness becomes laminar in the state of a sleep and then you can see these you know kind of vortices created by the unconscious in the laminar flow so easily oh okay
uh that actually clarifies it like a lot thank you reza um one like a second part of that question that is perhaps that is now a little redundant would be that one of as an engineer one of your first immediate responses to someone telling you that we need to test it in an ideal state is okay but what about the non-ideal state about stress testing and pushing it to the point Yes, unfortunately, you see, there is no such a thing as a model that is not made in the
vein of an ideal state, right? And I would say that thermodynamics is a good example of it. It's just about ideal systems, right? But then you apply this model against principles of reality and then you see how the parameters of idealizations of the model structures should be changed but all models literally require a certain amount of idealization because otherwise you wouldn't be able to create the model even the model of chaotic dynamics right it's an idealized form it's just that in its application the furniture of the world that
we begin to realize that thus and so fidelity criteria of the model to reality should be perhaps enhanced some of them repaired and so on so forth but otherwise we are basically stuck with that sort of idealization program mathematical physics is part of that i'm sorry we have to to end uh you guys can move this to discord if you want but uh thank you reza it was a great absolutely thank you all panelists uh we'll see each other next week absolutely thank you so much everyone thank you thank you ciao bye bye bye