Dr. Alexander Wendt examines the implications of consciousness science for the social sciences.

photo by: David Ohmer
I was introduced to the power of interdisciplinary thinking when I found myself way over my head in a graduate course in cognitive psychology. I had gone back to school at the University of Arizona to pursue a PhD in this new, cool thing called “Artificial Intelligence.” Once there, I met a wonderful classmate from Norway with a similar interest. Oystein was a lot smarter than me, and a much better programmer, so I was willing to follow his lead when he suggested we take a graduate course in cognitive psychology.  After a week I was lost and ready to throw in the towel, but everything changed when  Oystein brilliantly turned the discussion toward the latest advances in computer architecture and the possible implications for cognitive psychology.  As it turned out, the professor and his graduate students were very aware that their models were largely based on computer models, so they were eager to find out how advances in computer science might effect them. The course was a breeze from then on.

The lesson stayed with me, it's okay to borrow models from other fields, but it's a good idea to reassess how you've applied them when those interdisciplinary models change. Today on Skeptiko we look at a paradigm busting interdisciplinary approach to the social sciences by way of Dr. Alexander Wendt from the Ohio State University and his new book, Quantum Mind and the Social Sciences:

Alex Tsakiris: Why is consciousness important to Social Science?

Dr. Alexander Wendt: Well, not everybody would say that it is. I think most of my colleagues ignore consciousness or just take it for granted and would say that it doesn’t necessarily add anything to the kind of explanations that social scientists typically develop. On the other hand I do think that it is implicit in almost all explanations social scientists come up with...

Alex Tsakiris: What are some of the ways in which these assumptions about consciousness are implicit in the assumptions we’re making when we look at political groups or the social sciences in general?

Dr. Alexander Wendt: The key argument that I make is that... anything that has to do with the mind; that has to do with intentional phenomena--beliefs, desires, even the unconscious... imply consciousness. And in the social world, if you think about the kinds of things social scientists are interested in like states for example in my own field of International Relations, these are collective intentional phenomena. These are collective states of mind. They have no material existence out there. You can’t see them from space or anything. So they’re all implicated or dependent upon us being conscious as well. To put it in a different way, if human beings were just robots with no consciousness I don’t think we would have intentional states of mind. We wouldn’t have minds at all. And there wouldn’t be states. There wouldn’t be churches or corporations or anything like that.

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Click here for Dr. Alexander Wendt's Website