I heard a researcher on the effect of certain SSRIs discussing how they work. They said that patients on SSRIs are more like to interpret ambiguous social stimuli neutrally or positively, e.g. shrugging off someone passing them in a corridor and not saying hello, rather than taking offence. Over time, these altered reactions, cumulatively, improve mood, but only in about 60% of patients. I obviously have no reason to doubt her data, findings, or conclusions. What was interesting about this discussion was that the researcher referred to such reactions to stimuli (essentially the combination of perception and interpretation) as ‘neurologically originated’. In other words, what one sees, what one believes, what one thinks, how one interprets such things, what one infers, what one deduces, what one concludes (and the concomitant emotions and mood), in their view, are essentially non-rational: they are simply the product of a biological chain reaction. Such reactions do not produce falsehood or truth and have no origin at all in the individual’s agency, and human beings are effectively a combination of results. We are not really thinking; we are merely the containers of chemical reactions. Thinking is an illusion, a poetic fiction.
This might be the case, but, if rational thought is neurologically originated and observations or conclusions of rational thinking are therefore also merely the end-effects of chains of chemical reactions, they are neither true nor false, any more than the clotting of the blood is true or false or a burp or hiccough is true or false. It is simply one more rearrangement of atoms. If this is true, however, the researcher’s observations are themselves neither true nor false; if one fed the researcher a chemical, they might draw different conclusions, which would be no more true or false than the original conclusions, because biology and neurology are not concerned with truth or falsehood but cause and effect. The argument cuts off the branch it is sitting on. If the researcher is right, nothing the researcher says is either right or wrong, either, any more than the perceptions of the person passing in the corridor: everything is neurologically originated and non-mental in nature.
There is an alternative theory. The notion that we are human beings, not machines, that we can think, that our observations either accord or do not accord with objective reality, and that are our inferences are either true or false.
If this is the case, the person who habitually interprets incoming stimuli negatively without rational licence to do so is doing so not because they are neurologically conditioned to as an original cause but because they have trained their neurology to do this. Their reactions might be automatic, but they are a trained automatism. In other words, upstream of the neurological conditioning is a set of decisions for which the individual is responsible, and the automated process can be halted and reconfigured at any point. Thinking is automatic only in the way that a mixer runs automatically only because it has been switched on and has not been switched off.
This means that the solution is to retrain the brain by reframing perceptions and interpretation using metacognition.
I would support this view, because it is testable: we can change how we interpret situations, and those altered interpretations result in altered automated patterns of reaction.
This also allows the researcher’s inferences to be valid, because they are not neurologically originated but are mentally originated and are encoded in the neurology by the operations of the mind.
It turns out that neurology is not the source but the channel, and human agency is the source.
This lets back in will and reason as ontologically valid entities: i.e., they both exist.
It also means I do not need a chemical to change how I feel.