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Category: meaning

The evolutionary and present significance of reading

The evolutionary and present significance of reading

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In her new book, Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, author Maryanne Wolf explores how reading affects the brain and mind. What different effects result from consuming digital media rather than print media and long forms rather than tweets, posts, and other microcontent? In her excellent recent article, she says, Will new readers develop the more time-demanding cognitive processes nurtured by print-based mediums as they absorb and acquire new cognitive capacities emphasized by digital media? For example, will…

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Saturday Subjective

Saturday Subjective

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For something a little different to start your weekend, here is a glimpse into one man’s subjective world. He asks himself what consciousness is. He observes, “Life is fear,” yet his mind has found a way to peace. What is the adaptive significance of magical thinking? What is the value of cozying up to ambiguity? CUCLI from Xavier Marrades on Vimeo.  

Should quantum anomalies make us rethink reality?

Should quantum anomalies make us rethink reality?

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Indeed we should according to this recent Scientific American article. One thing I learned from Dennett in his new book is that according to him the scientific image uncovers an objective, underlying reality, while the manifest image is corrupted by our personal ontology. Not so according to quantum mechanics, which operates on the premise that our scientific results themselves are tied to our perceptions and constructed categories, not “a purely objective world out there.” There is a paradigm shift in…

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Damasio on consciousness

Damasio on consciousness

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From the introduction to Chapter 9 of his new book The Strange Order of Things. “The term ‘consciousness’ applies to the very natural but distinctive kind of mental state described by the above [subjective] traits. The mental state allows its owner to be the private experiencer of the world around and, just as important, to experience aspects of his or her own being. For practical purposes, the universe of knowledge, current and past, that can be conjured up in a…

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Persuasion: Do you want to be effective or just feel righteous?

Persuasion: Do you want to be effective or just feel righteous?

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A recent article in The Atlantic reports fascinating research on the relative effectiveness of typical and moral-framing based approaches to persuading people of an opposing political orientation to see value in alternative positions. The upshot is that there are verifiably effective methods for getting around entrenched, reflexive opposition.

Seeing my blindfold

Seeing my blindfold

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I’ve found some thought-provoking answers on the Q&A social media site, Quora. Follow the link to a perceptive and helpful answer to, “Can a person be able to objectively identify exactly when and how their thinking processes are being affected by cognitive biases?” The author provides some practical (if exhausting) recommendations that, if even partly followed by a third-to-half of people (my guestimate), would possibly collapse the adversarial culture in our country.

The real problem of consciousness

The real problem of consciousness

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See this article. A few excerpts: “A new picture is taking shape in which conscious experience is seen as deeply grounded in how brains and bodies work together to maintain physiological integrity – to stay alive.” “The brain is locked inside a bony skull. All it receives are ambiguous and noisy sensory signals that are only indirectly related to objects in the world. Perception must therefore be a process of inference, in which indeterminate sensory signals are combined with prior…

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Wild systems theory (WST) – context and relationships make reality meaningful

Wild systems theory (WST) – context and relationships make reality meaningful

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Edward has posted some great thoughts and resources on embodied cognition (EC). I stumbled on some interesting information on a line of thinking within the EC literature. I find contextualist, connectivist approaches compelling in their ability to address complex-systems such as life and (possibly) consciousness. Wild systems theory (WST) “conceptualizes organisms as multi-scale self-sustaining embodiments of the phylogenetic, cultural, social, and developmental contexts in which they emerged and in which they sustain themselves. Such self-sustaining embodiments of context are naturally and necessarily…

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