Intention is central to human life. We plan, we pray, we promise, we change our minds. Yet psychology has never offered a single account that explains how intention actually works in the brain, the body, and daily behavior. The Intention Code Model is a new proposal that aims to fill this gap. This article is a conceptual theoretical paper. It does not report new data. Instead, it presents the model, tests its internal coherence, and shows what it adds to existing theories. The model treats the mind as a library of conditional programs called codes. Each code has the form: if a condition is present, then a specific outcome is expected. Intention is the operator that selects a code and turns it on. Once a code is active, it shapes attention, emotion, hormones, and body state in a process the model calls alignment. The article does four things. It gives the code concept a tight operational definition, maps alignment onto specific brain systems, separates the model from three similar ideas, and compares it with major cognitive frameworks. The article applies the model to religious experience, with speculative claims clearly marked. Three concrete experiments are proposed. Each experiment has measurable outcomes that would support or falsify the model. The article closes by outlining a research agenda that is within reach of current laboratories.
Solitude and loneliness represent two contrasting yet connected dimensions of being alone, shaped less by physical isolation and more by the motivations underlying it. While loneliness is perceived negatively, linked to distress and adverse outcomes, solitude can be a positive source of self-reflection, personal growth, or relaxation. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory, this article examines how the satisfaction and frustration of basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness influence individuals’ experiences of time alone. We argue that solitude is best understood as a self-determined, intrinsically motivated experience in which the individual voluntarily chooses to be alone in ways that support autonomy, competence, or relatedness needs. In contrast, loneliness is conceptualized as a non-self-determined state, extrinsically motivated, imposed, or marked by the thwarting of one or more psychological needs. By framing the experience of being alone through the lens of Self-Determination Theory, we highlight how the psychological processes that accompany it, an individual’s extrinsic versus intrinsic motivational stance, and need satisfaction or frustration, can explain why similar circumstances while being alone may be experienced as either enriching or distressing. Implications for psychological interventions, education, and research are discussed, suggesting that fostering autonomy-supportive environments and strengthening intrinsic motivation can promote beneficial solitude and reduce harmful loneliness. Understanding solitude and loneliness as outcomes of self-determined versus non-self-determined conditions offers a nuanced view of time spent alone, helping to differentiate between healthy and maladaptive forms and guiding strategies to enhance individuals’ psychological well-being.
In data analysis that is based on methods from the generalized linear model, variables are related to each other, and predictions are made in which variables are linked. Issues of discussion concern strength of relation and direction dependence. Relations are of the regression type. In this article, the discussion focuses on type of relation. Based on relevance logic, conjunctive, disjunctive and implicative relations are discussed, in particular with respect to their applicability in data analysis. It is illustrated how these relations can be distinguished from each other in cross-classifications of empirical data. It is also shown how predictions can be made of type of relation instead of variables themselves. Empirical data examples illustrate these predictions. Possible extensions are discussed in which relations of the type ‘if and only if’ are used.
The biosocial problem concerns how biological and sociocultural factors condition human mentality and development. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was framed primarily in terms of the relative influence of nature and nurture: biology ensured stability, whereas culture operated as a transformative force. The rise of cross-cultural, indigenous, culture-inclusive, and global psychologies added another question: whether psychological characteristics presented as universal by mainstream theories are in fact culturally specific. Yet both formulations focused on how biology and culture shape human beings. We argue that the growth of the pace of societal transformations due to changes of their causal forces in the context of neo-structuration require a new formulation of the biosocial problem. Biology and culture remain causally consequential, but their direct conditioning power is increasingly mediated by human agency. Agency becomes an ontologically irreducible causal factor, as human beings not only develop within biological and cultural conditions but also select, recombine, and transform those, thereby reshaping themselves and their technological, cultural, and institutional environments. To reconstruct conceptual resources for this argument, we draw on theories focusing on the transformability of the human in the history of psychology and in contemporary discourse. Soviet theories recognized human plasticity but generally presumed that the direction of transformation was institutionally prescribed, though Rubinstein’s concept of Subjekt and Ananiev’s account of self-determination and individuality offer resources for moving beyond this limitation. We propose a recursive model in which biology and culture condition human development but agentic action transform those, thereby changing subsequent living contexts.
This paper develops a phenomenological account of the therapeutic significance of psychedelic-induced mystical experience, drawing on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The central argument holds that the enduring therapeutic benefits of psychedelics emerge through a radical transformation in the structure of lived experience. Two prominent objections to the therapeutic value of mystical experience are examined and shown to rest on implicit Cartesian assumptions that obscure the embodied, situated character of human experience. Using Merleau-Ponty's concepts of the body-subject and the intentional arc, depression is analysed as a collapse of perceptual attunement and engagement with the world, while psychedelic-induced mystical experience is shown to instantiate the opposite structure, recalibrating the intentional arc and restoring pre-reflective meaning. A phenomenological analysis of the acute mystical experience substantiates this claim, before a final response to the objection that psychedelic experiences are merely hallucinatory, arguing, via Merleau-Ponty's account of perception as irreducible to passive reflection, that such experiences may still disclose meaningful dimensions of the world.
