• The Earnest

  • The Earnest – Image Schemas and Mental Space Theory

    • IMAGE SCHEMAS

    • MarkJohnson_TheBodyintheMind_1987_Preface File
    • MarkJohnson_TheBodyintheMind_1987_Constraints on Reasoning File
    • Paper: Mandler and Pagán on Defining Image Schemas 2014 File

    • MENTAL SPACE THEORY

    • GillesFauconnier_MentalSpaces_1985_1994_Foreword File
    • GillesFauconnier_MentalSpaces_1985_Spacebuilders File
    • GillesFauconnier_Mappings in Thought and Language_1997 File

    • CONCEPTUAL SPACES

    • PeterGärdenfors_TheGeometryofMeaning_2014_Conceptual Spaces File
    • PeterGaerdenfors_Geometry of Meaning_2014_Modelling Meanings in Robots File

    • GLOBAL WORKSPACE THEORY – BAARS

    • BernardBaars_TheaterofConsciousness_1997_Theater Metaphor and Diagramming File

  • The Earnest: States of the Art in Neuroscience

  • Your Assignments

    • Assignment 1: Visualize a passage from the stream of consciousness

      interpretation – step 1) Read the following section of William James’s famous “The Stream of Thought” chapter from The Principles of Psychology 1890 2) visualize a particular passage.

      The Text: The portion I want all of you to read for this assignment begins in the middle of Section 3 of the chapter, with the sentence:

      “As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first …” …through until the end of Section 3, ending with the sentence: “Between all their substantive elements there is ‘transitive’ consciousness, and the words and images are ‘fringed,’ and not as discrete as to a careless view they seem.”

      As a reading assignment for our discussion in class, please read also the rest of the chapter from that portion to the end. We will continue with the first half of the chapter later. The chapter as a whole counts as one of our main required readings.

      The text can be found on our course page in a web version. I strongly recommend finding a physical copy or at least a print-out to read from. My page numbers are from the 1950 Dover edition of the Principles, Volume 1, pp243-71.

      Assignment size: your work and thought on this assignment should be equivalent to a thoughtfully written, 1-page “response paper” in response to the reading. You task: to visualize a particular passage.

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    ADVANCED QUESTIONS for CLOSER STUDIES

    Methods:

    • procedure (1) structural descriptions into graphics

       e.g. abstraction

    • procedure (2) models from metaphors via abduction

         e.g. the word in its universe

    Problems:

    the phenomenological situation

    The basic challenge for any attempt to visualize mind: develop a visualization scheme for the basic terms and relations of phenomenological theory, e.g. using above procedure; recommended text Don Ihde Experiential Phenomenology; sample solutions from the Neurognostics project.

    the object – ontological interlude

    Fundamental challenge to this project, giving material form to an immaterial “thing”, how to picture a thought; strategies for “dematerializing” the visualization scheme, and for representing indeterminacy, uncertainty, changeability, vagueness and relativity.

    the act of reading

                transfer

                reference

                consistency-building

                impact

    Useful test case for attempting a “comprehensive” visualization of mental processes; the act of reading involves all of conscious experience within the narrowed frame of a fully text-focussed intentionality; demonstrates this comprehensiveness according to four vectors or dimensions of the reading process.

    the imagewater – interlude on mediality

    Fundamental challenge part 2: representing the environment of thought and meaning; further strategies for materializing the immaterial indeterminately; speculations on what kind of stuff the “mind stuff” might really be.

    the wandering viewpoint

    the tubular loom

    Sample solutions to the challenge of a comprehensive visualization based on reading: the first applying procedure 1 to Wolfgang Iser’s The Act of Reading, the second applying procedure 2 to the recurrent literary metaphor (e.g. Ezra Pound) of the mind as a loom on which the text is woven in reading.

    Dismissal:            concluding caveats

                                   destructions for use

    Healthy reminders of the essential impossibility of this undertaking; of the ultimate arbitrariness and partiality of any thinking of thought in a medium other than thought

    Additional Resources