A Recap of Some of the Features of Objective Mental Reality
摘要
This chapter is devoted to assessing the consequences of the discovery of objective mental reality, which are radically transforming our conceptions of the mind (psyche), culture, and scientific knowledge. Personal objective mental reality is an autonomous, intersubjectively structured layer of the individual mind (psyche), containing stable, predominantly verbal representations of the world that are shared among members of a society. It dismantles the dichotomy between the internal and the external, demonstrating that the mind (psyche) does not just reflect the world but actively shapes it as a set of verbally represented entities, along with their relations, connections, and interactions. For psychology, this entails a paradigm shift: a move away from neurocentric reduction in favor of a constructivist approach, centered on the structure of verbal representations, collective concepts, and intersubjective meanings. The mind (psyche) becomes an active mechanism for the shaping of reality, rather than a secondary epiphenomenon accompanying brain activity. Language turns into the “building material” of mental reality. Psychology gains the ability to study the process of forming entities—the basic units of consciousness and culture, including abstract ones (God, freedom, duty, and others). In sociology, objective mental reality explains the mechanisms of socialization, identity, and the stability of cultural norms, uniting the micro- and macro-levels of analysis. For science as a whole, objective mental reality offers a new ontology of knowledge, in which even physical notions are transformed into elements of a symbolically mediated intersubjective reality.