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kortanekev

Immanuel Kant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • the agreement between reality and the concepts we use to conceive it arises not because our mental concepts have come to passively mirror reality, but because reality must conform to the human mind's active concepts to be conceivable and at all possible for us to experience. Kant thus regarded the basic categories of the human mind as the transcendental "condition of possibility" for any experience.[6]
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    Kant, german philosopher, argues that reality must conform to the mind, rather than the mind conform to reality, for us to begin to understand it. Interesting way to think about our perception.   (Evie, 9/23/16) 
kushnerha

Aphantasia: A life without mental images - BBC News - 0 views

  • Most people can readily conjure images inside their head - known as their mind's eye. But this year scientists have described a condition, aphantasia, in which some people are unable to visualise mental images.
  • Our memories are often tied up in images, think back to a wedding or first day at school. As a result, Niel admits, some aspects of his memory are "terrible", but he is very good at remembering facts. And, like others with aphantasia, he struggles to recognise faces.Yet he does not see aphantasia as a disability, but simply a different way of experiencing life.
  • "When I think about my fiancee there is no image, but I am definitely thinking about her, I know today she has her hair up at the back, she's brunette."But I'm not describing an image I am looking at, I'm remembering features about her, that's the strangest thing and maybe that is a source of some regret."The response from his mates is a very sympathetic: "You're weird."
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  • One person who took part in a study into aphantasia said he had started to feel "isolated" and "alone" after discovering that other people could see images in their heads. Being unable to reminisce about his mother years after her death led to him being "extremely distraught".
  • Adam Zeman, a professor of cognitive and behavioural neurology, wants to compare the lives and experiences of people with aphantasia and its polar-opposite hyperphantasia.His team, based at the University of Exeter, coined the term aphantasia this year
  • How we imagine is clearly very subjective - one person's vivid scene could be another's grainy picture.But Prof Zeman is certain that aphantasia is real. People often report being able to dream in pictures, and there have been reported cases of people losing the ability to think in images after a brain injury. He is adamant that aphantasia is "not a disorder" and says it may affect up to one in 50 people.
caelengrubb

How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories | Reviews |... - 1 views

  • In this book, Rosenberg elaborates further such arguments to take issue with historical narratives and, more generally, with the way in which we most pervasively make sense of people's actions and motivations through narratives.
  • His main contention is that such narratives are always wrong or, to put it differently, that they can't possibly be right.
  • Rosenberg argues that neuroscience itself, our only reliable method to study psychological capacities, shows that theory of mind's posits do not exist
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  • The reason is that the best available evidence on how the brain works shows that the brain does not deal with the kind of things that beliefs and desires are supposed to trade with: contents.
  • When we believe or desire, something is believed or desired: that I have bread, that it rains, that the Parliament passes the bill, etc. Beliefs and desires are about something.
  • . After being presented with the assassin and the crime, the book moves on to explain why, even if always wrong, narratives in general, and historical narratives in particular, are so compelling for us. Even if we have no claim to truth or correctness for our narratives, narratives seem to be highly convincing in moving us to act
  • Furthermore, we cannot but think in terms of them. Rosenberg's explanation for this 'addiction to stories' is that it has been entrenched in us by evolutionary processes that took place over the last million years of natural history
  • Narrative explanations emerged out of Darwinian processes of natural selection -- or "environmental filtration", in the less purposive parlance Rosenberg prefers -- that allowed our ancestors to coordinate efforts, collaborate and flourish, moving from the bottom to the top of the Pleistocene's food chain. Rosenberg argues that while the basic mechanisms of mindreading pervasive in the animal kingdom, based on mutual tracking and monitoring of animals' behavior, are a sound method for getting agents to coordinate behavior, these mechanisms' more recent successor, the theory of mind, crafted by the use of co-evolved languages, turned those mindreading abilities into a theory with empirical hypothesis about agents' beliefs and desires but no facts to match them.
  • The error historians allegedly make lies in mistaking stories for real explanations, surmising that behind our behavior there are purposes, rational motivations.
  • Historians -- in particular narrative historians -- make a pervasive use of folk psychological explanations, i.e., explanations that describe events in terms of the beliefs and desires of historical agents, including individuals and groups.
  • In order for folk psychological and historical narratives to be right there have to be facts of the matter about what sentences in such explanation refer to that make them true.
  • Folk psychological explanations of actions in terms of platitudes about beliefs and desires pairings evolved in natural history closely related to mind-reading mechanisms that allowed our ancestors to deal with cooperation and coordination problems.
  • There are no interpretative mechanisms in the brain (at any level of description) that can vindicate the attribution of contents to beliefs and desires.
  • There are no facts of the matter that allow us to select belief/desire pairings as those actually operating 'behind' an agent's behavior.
  • Folk psychological explanations do not track any facts and thus can't be correct.
manhefnawi

Nabokov's Synesthetic Alphabet: From the Weathered Wood of A to the Thundercloud of Z -... - 0 views

  • Metaphorical thinking is the wellspring of the human imagination — that virtuosic cognitive pivot of describing what a thing is through something it is not. “Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept,” Nietzsche proclaimed in his meditation on metaphor and reality.
  • Some of our mightiest metaphors draw on color to describe our perceptual and psychoemotional reality
  • unmistakable color in their mind’s eye
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  • Synesthesia is a neurological crossing of the senses
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