The Platonic-Freudian Model of Mind: Defining “Self” and “Other” as Psychoinformatic Primitives

Abstract

As “nurtural” (rather than merely natural) kinds of human beings, people are complex and multifaceted. Any complete human science would require a complete theory of persons. Accomplishing the latter is the core objective of the present article. First, a feature list first laid out in [1] is summarized. This list is briefly critiqued. Next, the concept of person engaged with is expanded with the addition of nine novel features. These features follow from “holarchic psychoinformatics” [2], which was first propounded as a step forward from Sood’s analytic treatment of third-force, existential-humanistic psychology. Person is formalized as a function of self and other; they are also granted to be romantic, existential, humanistic, chemical, environmental, hedonic and eudaimonic (happiness-seeking), conservative, and liberal. These are in addition to persons being physical, biological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual. Sood’s holarchic view of persons is enlarged. Psychologically, augmented cognition as an established field of research and practice begets the formal studies of augmented affect, augmented behavior, and augmented motivation. All such interdisciplinary fields are required for the human-computer interactionist’s study of augmented mind, more broadly. Additionally, this article builds on the person-situation interaction framework formalized in [1]. It does so by adding a formalization following from the discussion of psychological situations put forward by Rauthmann, Sherman, and Funder in [3]. The formalization of psychological situations sets them as a function of cues, characteristics, and classes. Further psychological equations that follow from this article’s formalisms of person and situation, when considered along with Sood’s formulae for mind and behavior, are then presented.