The first thing that should be noted is that any theory of a massively parallel system simply must be abstracted in order for humans to be able to understand it. Take, for example, anything that tries to describe the behavior of a large population of people: economics, sociology, political science, etc. We always create high-level abstract concepts (describing the behavior of groups of people rather than the fine details of every single individual).
Keeping that in mind, psychology is intentionally high-level and uses abstract concepts, which have an as-of-yet unclear correspondence to the lower level descriptions of the brain we have from neuroscience. This relation is analogous to that between high-level descriptions of large populations, and actions of individuals.
The answer then, in my opinion, is to keep working towards bridging the gap between the lowest level which we have a near-deterministic understanding of (we know how individual neurons work and a little about how they are connected in the brain), and the higher level intuitive descriptions of mind which are descriptive but not predictive. The massive parallelism required by the low level theories is NOT ignored, so far as I know, by neuroscientists and neuropsychologists, which makes me a bit confused as to why you think further emphasizing the role of parallelism is necessary.
Unless of course, you are criticizing the intuitive, “folk psychology” understanding of the mind. That, however, is arguably instilled in us evolutionarily (Dennett has argued for this).
The first thing that should be noted is that any theory of a massively parallel system simply must be abstracted in order for humans to be able to understand it. Take, for example, anything that tries to describe the behavior of a large population of people: economics, sociology, political science, etc. We always create high-level abstract concepts (describing the behavior of groups of people rather than the fine details of every single individual).
Keeping that in mind, psychology is intentionally high-level and uses abstract concepts, which have an as-of-yet unclear correspondence to the lower level descriptions of the brain we have from neuroscience. This relation is analogous to that between high-level descriptions of large populations, and actions of individuals.
The answer then, in my opinion, is to keep working towards bridging the gap between the lowest level which we have a near-deterministic understanding of (we know how individual neurons work and a little about how they are connected in the brain), and the higher level intuitive descriptions of mind which are descriptive but not predictive. The massive parallelism required by the low level theories is NOT ignored, so far as I know, by neuroscientists and neuropsychologists, which makes me a bit confused as to why you think further emphasizing the role of parallelism is necessary.
Unless of course, you are criticizing the intuitive, “folk psychology” understanding of the mind. That, however, is arguably instilled in us evolutionarily (Dennett has argued for this).