There are four paradigms to understand the human experience, they are proximal psychological, interpersonal, causal, and intentional. Understanding each of these is a matter of discerning which of these four perspectives is closer to the truth of our experience. However, each of the four perspectives has its limitations and we must also be cognizant of them. The limitations of each of the four paradigms are:
Proximal Psychological: This is the perspective of what is proximately possible. It’s the position that is most often taken by psychologists. It posits that our experience is governed by an abstract set of rules-this sets is a set that are universal to all of our experience, but one that can be learned and adapted by modifying our behaviors. Accordingly, it is also a perspective that necessitates that one must interpret his or her experience in light of these rules-for instance, that if one experiences pleasure then one will also experience pain. This perspective is essentially psychological in nature.
Interpersonal: It posits that our experience is shaped by interactions with other individuals-again, this set is universal, but also particular to each individual. Consequently, it also requires interpretation in light of the fact that we interact with and are affected by, other people. One may view interaction as something that occurs between person A and person B while in reality it is more complex than that. Interpersonal experience thus also encompasses the aspects of proximal psychological and its components (emotion, motivation, affect, personal distress, etc. ).
Causal: This is the most complex of the four, and also the most troublesome. From the perspective of the causality there are four factors at play during an experience: internal states (or inner experiences), external events (or external stimuli), the body, and consciousness. The internal states refer to our cognitive and emotional states, the external events refer to the external stimulus, and the body refers to our sensations and our bodily actions. While this might seem to be too much to understand, for a complex entity like consciousness, it is quite manageable.
Explorative: This paradigm accepts that experience does indeed occur in the external world, but on a qualitatively different scale from the four other perspectives mentioned. The only difference here is that instead of looking at what happens from an internal perspective, it looks at what happens from an external perspective-and from this vantage point a different set of rules emerge. This also greatly simplifies the task of psychology.
Simultaneous: With this perspective we begin to get a handle on how our physical systems work together and interact. Simultaneous experience – when applied to psychology – posits that the physical boundaries of our bodies give us a rich sense of bodily reality. From this perspective we can see how the four paradigms for experience work together, and see how the experience can be both qualitatively different. It is through understanding the nature of experience that we will gain insight into how to make the most of our bodies.
Distributed: The distribution of body experiences is not a simple bell-and-whistling affair. Rather, there are a multitude of distributed experiences-some physical, some psychological, and some interpersonal or intergenerational. To complicate things further, we often have multiple perspectives at the same time! What seems to be happening one moment may not be occurring in the next, even if our brains are programmed to pay attention to the same patterns. This way of thinking about body experiences is slightly more complicated than the other four paradigms, but not by a significant amount?
It is this combination of complexity and complication that makes the analysis of the four paradigms a difficult one. When a psychologist begins to analyze their own experience and try to understand their mental processes, they can fall prey to a number of fallacies-particularly when they rely on the “common sense” model of consciousness. But as I pointed out during a recent visit to the Center for Cognitive Therapy in New York, it is not the common sense of a single model of the psyche that is the problem, but the variety of models that underlie all of the common sense models.