David Bohm: Thought as a System

David Bohm a physicist that worked with Einstein developed a philosophy of thought that considers human thought an interrelated system. From Thought as a System: “What I mean by “thought” is the whole thing – thought, felt, the body, the whole society sharing thoughts – it’s all one process. It is essential for me not […]

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The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

“The Stuff of Thought” explores the duality of human cognition: the modesty of its construction and the majesty of its constructive power. Pinker weaves this paradox from a series of opposing theories. Philosophical realists, for instance, think perception comes from reality. Idealists think it’s all in our heads. Pinker says it comes from reality but […]

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Nonduality and either/or thinking

“Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought…The sense-experiences are the given subject-matter. But the theory that shall interpret them is manmande…hypothetical, never completely final, subject to question and doubt.” – Albert Einstein. “The world we have made as a result of the […]

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Languages are complex dynamic systems

Gloria Capelli, a teacher and researcher at the University of Pisa has an interesting post on language: “…languages are complex dynamic systems within which different types of structures act as organizers in order to make it possible for cognition to handle the immense amount of information involved in the communicative process. Within this view…words act […]

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(Possible) cycle of consciousness

Diagram: “The Cycle of Life” by Toru Sato. Summary of “A (potential) Cycle of Consciousness pt.1″ (summarizing a blog posting from May) We begin life without consciousness of the “self” and we move to a point where we once again discover how interconnected we are to everything and everyone else in the world. This awareness […]

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The age of machine-mediated empiricism

Traditional human-based empiricism as we knew it through many years ended with the advent of technology. It shifted and became a hybrid of linear mechanics and phenomenology. Today it is another type of hybrid it, is a hybrid of human phenomenology and digital phenomenology. Since science leads our concept of reality and science uses quite […]

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Non-conscious and Lower levels of cognition ?

Every once in a while a science sub-divides into another science and becomes more specialized. 10, 20 years go by, research is done, papers are written, dissertations are bound and PhD’s go out the door. But sooner or later there is another wave of research that points to how that specialized branch of knowledge is […]

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Explaining Complexity

Folks at Cognitive Edge have some interesting presentation slides on the topic of complexity in dynamic systems. I think they may be helpful as teaching tools. If you decide to read these keep in mind one point: humans are already operating within a system that is far from balance (the natural system).  Any man-designed system […]

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Robert Wright, Complexity and Intelligence (video link)

“Author Robert Wright argues that history has an arrow: That humans have continued to evolve — if not biologically, than culturally and technologically — toward greater complexity and intelligence. He also explains the concept behind his book, “Nonzero”: That life is a nonzero sum game, where there can be more than one winner, and that […]

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Horizontal and Vertical Thinking

“Howard Gardner has written about two types of ” extraordinairy minds” that he calls ” Masters” and ” Makers”. Masters are the Vertical thinking experts, they keep the system running and try to advance the knowledge base of their specialty. We literally have armies of them and though some are more adept than others, all […]

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