By George Lakoff. A copy can be found at academia.edu here. An excerpt: “One can see in scripts the link between frames and narratives.Narratives are frames that tell a story. They have semantic roles,properties of the role, relations among roles, and scenarios. Whatmakes it a narrative-a story-and not just a mere frame? A narrativehas a point to it, a moral. It is about how you should liveyour life-or how you shouldn’t. It has emotional content: eventsthat make you sad or…
Many (all?) cognitive biases are built-in features of the human attention-sensation-perception-memory-cognition chain of sense making processes. It would not be surprising to learn many of these biases have effects that are relevant to questions regarding how natural selection shaped humans for particular embodied functions in a particular environment. Much has been said and written about how the pre-modern environment evolution calibrated us to function within is in many respects quite different from our modern environment.
A new Frontiers in Science ebook here. The blurb: With the rise of laboratory and field experimental economics, the famous prisoner’s dilemma, public good, dictator, ultimatum, and trust games have become the classical paradigms of studying prosocial behavior. Due to the increasing use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) with human subjects playing economic games, the neural basis of prosocial behavior has been uncovered by a large amount of neural…
What is humanity’s situation with respect to surviving long-term with a good quality of life? (Frame the core opportunities and obstacles.) What attributes of our evolved, experientially programmed brains contribute to this situation? (What are the potential leverage points for positive change within our body-brain-mind system?) What courses of research and action (including currently available systems, tools, and practices and current and possible lines of R&D) have the potential to improve our (and the planetary life system’s) near- and long-term…
Jim Rutt interviews him here. The blurb: Meditator and thinker Jared Janes talks with Jim about why he still uses the word ‘spiritual’, altered states vs altered traits, the equation and dynamics of suffering, understanding our own intentions, the confabulating mind, embodied intuition, the value and limits of conceptuality, what the self is and its usefulness, attention and awareness, the pleasure of concentration, metaphysics, and more. Jared Janes is a podcast producer/host (The Jim Rutt Show, Both/And, and Impactful), a management consultant,…
Article by Ezequiel Di Paolo in Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences (2020). The abstract: “The enactive approach provides a perspective on human bodies in their organic, sensorimotor, social, and linguistic dimensions, but many fundamental issues still remain unaddressed. A crucial desideratum for a theory of human bodies is that it be able to account for concrete human becoming. In this article I show that enactive theory possesses resources to achieve this goal. Being an existential structure, human becoming is best approached by…
That is the title of a recent Frontiers ebook located here. This would make an excellent discussion topic as it’s pretty much the sort of things we’ve been investigating. We are Borg. The blurb from the link follows: Although several researchers have questioned the idea that human technology use is rooted in unique “superior” cognitive skills, it still appears that only humans are capable of producing and interacting with complex technologies. Different paradigms and cognitive models of “human-computer interaction” have…
Article by Robert Epstein. He begins by noting the various metaphors we’ve used throughout the ages to describe the workings of our mind/brain: clay infused with spirit; the hydraulic model; springs and gears; and now the information processor (IP). While the author claims we can get to a real model without metaphor, he suggests the embodied model in direct interaction with the world. But that too is a metaphor, for we cannot escape using them to frame our minds, or…
Evan Thompson at San Diego State University on October 7 2019.
I was reminded of the video below, and this longer examination of the ideas therein. Here’s the blurb from the latter: “Divided Brain, Divided World explores the significance of the scientific fact that the two hemispheres of our brains have radically different ‘world views’. It argues that our failure to learn lessons from the crash, our continuing neglect of climate change, and the increase in mental health conditions may stem from a loss of perspective that we urgently need to…