On Science of Metaphors and the Nature of Systemic Reasoning

Scientific method is presented not as a means for investigating a true and objective character of universal reality, but as a metaphorical tool applied for mutual co-ordination of experiences. By acknowledging the co-orientational and metaphoric roots of science, religion, arts, and ordinary linguistic communications alike, potential for their fruitful interdependent application becomes apparent. References to the paradigms of constructivism and objectivism are drawn in parallel in outlining the tracks along which the proposed concept of co-creation of experiential qualities is arrived at. Systemic reasoning based on analogies between different levels of complexity of natural systems emanates as an imaginative aspect of creative thinking.     

The context congruency effect is face specific

There is evidence that faces are processed by specialized and independent modules that treat them as global configurations, or wholes (Axelrod and Yovel, 2010, Kanwisher et al., 1997). The holistic nature of face perception has been demonstrated with several experimental paradigms designed to examine whether facial parts interact, or are accessed independently. A recently introduced paradigm (Meinhardt-Injac, Persike, & Meinhardt, 2010) measures the strength of contextual interaction among internal and external facial features in congruent and incongruent target/no-target relationships. For this paradigm it is shown that the context congruency effect is indeed face specific: A strong and asymmetric contextual interaction of the inner and the outer stimulus regions exists for faces, but is absent for watches, which represent a non-facial object class with a comparable inner/outer object structure.     

PHYSICAL SCALE EFFECTS AND PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

Abstract: The scales across which physical properties exist are vast and subtle in their effects on particular systems placed locally on such scales. For example, human experiential access is restricted only to partial segments of the mass density, size, and temperature scales of the universe. I argue that philosophers must learn to appreciate better the effects of physical scales. Specifically, thought experiments in philosophy should be more sensitive to physical scale effects, because the conclusion of a thought experiment may be undermined by unintentionally ignored scale effects, and the changes required to obtain the foreground state of affairs in a thought experiment might require unacknowledged scale‐spanning changes to the contextual background. I discuss four philosophical thought experiments: Putnam's Twin Earth and Brain in a Vat, Searle's Chinese Room, and Chalmers's Zombies Without Qualia. I close by briefly defending the greater interest and importance of physical possibility over logical possibility.     

Contextual mediation of perceptions during hauntings and poltergeist-like experiences: a replication and extension

This study is a replication of the experiment by Lange, Houran, Harte, and Havens (1996 on contextual variables, in which hallucinations appear to be affected by the environmental context. These contextual variables are influential in the reporting of haunting and poltergeist-like episodes. This study extended the previous study by adding new factors of time of day, climactic conditions, and emotional feelings. These were analyzed for a different sample, looking for further congruency between experiential content and the context. The sample (N=8431 were reports found on the Internet and in one book. The Lange, et al. study was replicated in that contextual variables were identified in 99.2% of the reports, the content of the reports was judged to be consistent with the nature of the contextual variables in 58.8% of the reports, and contextual variables were related to the percipients' state of arousal and the modalities of experience.     

Nurturing Spirituality: A rationale for holistic education

In this article I examine the nature of ecological spirituality as it is discovered within the growing field of holistic education. I introduce holistic education and attempt to describe its chief characteristics by reference to the thought of Dewey and Hegel. Dewey was the ultimate progressive, yet his attachment to scientific progress and disregard for inherited wisdom mean that his work is not suitable for holistic education without adaptation. Hegel was the metaphysical philosopher of wholeness, yet his systematic, totalizing view of democracy which so alarmed Karl Popper similarly means that adaptation is again required. I argue that holistic education takes up a position between the two philosophers, experiential yet enculturated, metaphysical yet fluid and processual. I examine the ideas of both writers in relation to four key elements of holistic education and conclude by showing how they could combine to provide a rationale for the future.     

Giving Voice to the Experiential Value of Natural Environments

People value natural environments in many different ways. In addition to the various tangible products and benefits that can be produced from a natural environment, people may also find value in their immediate experience of the environment while they are in it. This experiential value is an important aspect of quality of life for many people, but it is often not taken into account in making decisions about managing natural environments. In part, this is because the experiential value of the environment can be difficult for people to express in words. In this article, I explore how first-person methods from experiential and phenomenological psychology may help in giving voice to the ineffable experiential value of natural environments. Drawing on the work of Charles Lewis, Eugene Gendlin, and Kenneth Shapiro, I illustrate how an initially inarticulate, bodily felt sense of the experiential value of a natural environment can be explicated in a way that both expresses and carries forward the implicit sense of value. Such practices might serve as a basis for an environmental decision-making process that incorporates the hard-to-express experiential values of nature.     

The Arrow of Time and the Cycle of Time: Concepts of Change,Cognition, and Embodiment

In this target article, I explore the thesis that both the natural and human sciences are undergoing—however gradually and reluctantly—a deep and broad paradigm shift. This shift is away from foundational, objectivist, atomist, nondirectional mechanistic category systems and toward interpretational, holistic, relational-dialectical, directional organic category systems. The contextual influence of each of these category systems on understandings of change (development), cognition, and personality is examined both historically and from a contemporary perspective across a wide band of scientific disciplines. The Arrow of Time is a deep metaphor entailing a relational field of both nonclosed cycles (spirals) and direction. The Arrow of Time metaphor emerges from the organic narrative. Within the context of this metaphor, and the broader organic metaphor that forms the wider conceptual context, development is understood as entailing both direction and variation. Within the organic metaphor, cognition and personality are understood as emerging from a fundamentally relational theory of the embodied mind. The Cycle of Time is a deep metaphor of closed cycles that reduce apparent directionality to nothing but variation. The Cycle of Time emerges from the mechanical narrative. Here development is understood as being limited to variation and only variation, and cognition and personality emerge from a theory of the computational mind. Theoretical and methodological implications of each of these broad contextual narratives are discussed.     

What makes people happy? Decoupling the experiential-material continuum

Extant literature suggests that consumers derive more happiness from experiences (e.g., vacations) than from material possessions (e.g., furniture). However, this literature typically pits material against experiential consumption, treating them as a single bipolar construct of their relative dominance: more material or more experiential. This focus on relative dominance leaves unanswered questions regarding how different levels of material and experiential qualities each contribute to happiness. Four preregistered studies (N = 3,288), using hundreds of product categories, measured levels of material and experiential qualities using two unipolar items. These studies investigate recalled, evoked, and anticipated happiness. Results show a more nuanced view of the experiential advantage that is critical for future research and consumer theory: material and experiential qualities both have positive relationships with happiness. Further, there is no inherent trade-off between experiential and material qualities: consumers can enjoy consumption that is high on both (e.g., swimming pools and home improvements).     

The Role of Experience in the Assessment of Human Nature

Abstract

We need to distinguish between different types of experience and different experiential realms when we address the topic of human nature. Special emphasis is put on the hermeneutical dimension of human knowledge. The different experiential realms, which may give rise to natural, cultural and social, psychological and spiritual experiences, are then in turn assessed with regard to in what respect, for what purpose, and to what extent they can be used in order to establish a comprehensive and interdisciplinary justified view of human nature that takes all dimensions of human experience sufficiently into account.     

Integrating experiential-phenomenological methods and neuroscience to study neural mechanisms of pain and consciousness

Understanding the nature of pain at least partly depends on recognizing its inherent first person epistemology and on using a first person experiential and third person experimental approach to study it. This approach may help to understand some of the neural mechanisms of pain and consciousness by integrating experiential-phenomenological methods with those of neuroscience. Examples that approximate this strategy include studies of second pain summation and its relationship to neural activities and brain imaging-psychophysical studies wherein sensory and affective qualities of pain are correlated with cerebral cortical activity. The experiential paradigm of offers the possibility of improved designs and methods for investigating neural mechanisms underlying pain and consciousness.     

Through Multiple Lenses: Implicit Theories of Creativity Among Indian Children and Adults*

This constructivist qualitative enquiry reveals a multiplicity of implicit theories of creativity extant in Indian culture with generic and domain specific usage of indigenous terms. Creativity was dominantly construed as a faculty of the nature of ‘pratibha’, in keeping with Indian philosophical thought, and with reference to the self, with participants invoking the holistic self, cognitive self, experiential/emotional self and physical self to describe creativity. The sense of creativity in these seemingly disparate, self‐based construals, the uncovering of which is the unique contribution of this study, derived from the person's experience of a sense of agency, rather than merely the production of novelty per se. This emphasis on process; novelty being central for some but epiphenomenal for others; the varied meanings of ‘newness’; experiencing creativity as self‐expression, self‐extension, self‐fulfillment and self‐actualization; and equating creativity with the act of learning reflect distinctive elements of implicit theories that have emerged in this study.     

Schooling in western culture promotes context-free processing

Culture has been shown to influence the way people apprehend their physical environment. Cognitive orientation is more holistic in East Asian cultures, which emphasize relationships and connectedness among objects in the field, than in Western cultures, which are more prone to focus exclusively on the object and its attributes. We investigated whether, beyond, or in conjunction with culture, literacy and/or schooling may also have an influence on this cognitive orientation. Using the Framed-Line Test both in Portugal and in Thailand, we compared literate schooled adults with two groups of unschooled adults: one of illiterates and one of ex-illiterates. As in former studies on Western people, Portuguese-schooled literates were more accurate in the absolute task than in the relative task. In contrast, Portuguese illiterates and ex-illiterates were more accurate in the relative task than in the absolute task. Such an effect of schooling was not observed in the Thai groups, all of whom performed better on the relative task. Thus, the capacity to abstract from contextual information does not stem only from passive exposure to the culture or the physical environment of Western countries. Western schooling, as part of or in addition to culture, is a crucial factor.     

Understanding the emergence of modularity in neural systems

Modularity in the human brain remains a controversial issue, with disagreement over the nature of the modules that exist, and why, when, and how they emerge. It is a natural assumption that modularity offers some form of computational advantage, and hence evolution by natural selection has translated those advantages into the kind of modular neural structures familiar to cognitive scientists. However, simulations of the evolution of simplified neural systems have shown that, in many cases, it is actually non-modular architectures that are most efficient. In this paper, the relevant issues are discussed and a series of simulations are presented that reveal crucial dependencies on the details of the learning algorithms and tasks that are being modelled, and the importance of taking into account known physical brain constraints, such as the degree of neural connectivity. A pattern is established which provides one explanation of why modularity should emerge reliably across a range of neural processing tasks.     

Perception naturalised: relocation and the sensible qualities

This paper offers a partial defence of a Sellarsian-inspired form of scientific realism. It defends the relocation strategy that Sellars adopts in his project of reconciling the manifest and scientific images. It concentrates on defending the causal analysis of perception that is essential to his treatment of sensible qualities. One fundamental metaphysical issue in perception theory concerns the nature of the perceptual relation; it is argued that a philosophical exploration of this issue is continuous with the scientific investigation of perceptual processes. Perception, it is argued, can, and should, be naturalised. A challenge for any account of perception arises from the fact that a subject’s experiences are connected with particular objects. We need to supply principled grounds for identifying which external physical object the subject stands in a perceptual relation to when they have an experience. According to the particularity objection presented in the paper, naive realism (or disjunctivism) does not constitute an independently viable theory since, taken on its own, it is unable to answer the objection. In appealing to a ‘direct experiential relation’, it posits a relation that cannot be identified independently of the underlying causal facts. A proper understanding of one central function of perception, as guiding extended patterns of actions, supports a causal analysis of perception. It allows us to draw up a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for perceiving that avoids well-known counterexamples. An analysis of this kind is congruent with the scientific account, according to which experiences are interpreted as inner states: sensible qualities, such as colours, are in the mind (but not as objects of perception). A Sellarsian version of the relocation story is thus vindicated.

     

The role of context in object recognition

In the real world, objects never occur in isolation; they co-vary with other objects and particular environments, providing a rich source of contextual associations to be exploited by the visual system. A natural way of representing the context of an object is in terms of its relationship to other objects. Alternately, recent work has shown that a statistical summary of the scene provides a complementary and effective source of information for contextual inference, which enables humans to quickly guide their attention and eyes to regions of interest in natural scenes. A better understanding of how humans build such scene representations, and of the mechanisms of contextual analysis, will lead to a new generation of computer vision systems.     

Effects of analytical (abstract) versus experiential (concrete) induced rumination of negative self defining memories on schizotypic symptoms

Repetitive thought may have adaptive and functional consequences, depending on, among other things, the interpretation of the content: analytical or abstract (general and decontextualized) and experiential or concrete (specific, contextual and incidental). Studies experimentally manipulating repetitive thought have shown both the constructive consequences of the experiential mode and the dysfunctional consequences of the analytical mode. The aim of the current study is to observe the effect of analytical and experiential rumination of negative self‐defining memories on schizotypic symptoms. A sample of 111 university students were randomly assigned to one of the two experimental conditions of induced rumination, “analytical” or “experimental.” The participants completed a series of questionnaires (anomalous perception of reality, preoccupation and depression) and a negative self‐defining memory was obtained to be used as the content of the induced rumination. Following the rumination induction, participants in the experiential condition significantly decreased their scores on anomalous perception of reality compared with those in the analytical condition. We also observed that post‐induction scores on self‐reported sadness significantly increased in both experimental conditions while scores on self‐reported happiness decreased. Our results show that the concrete/experiential rumination, focused here on negative self‐defining memories, have positive consequences on schizotypic symptoms, such as decreased anomalous perception of reality.     

I, zombie

Certain recent philosophical theories offer the prospect that zombies are possible. These theories argue that experiential contents, or qualia, are nonphysical properties. The arguments are based on the conceivability of alternate worlds in which physical laws and properties remain the same, but in which qualia either differ or are absent altogether. This article maintains that qualia are, on the contrary, physical properties in the world. It is shown how, under the burden of the a posteriori identification of qualia with physical properties, a reasoned choice can be made between the two types of theories which ultimately favors materialism and rejects zombies.     

The Humanizing Brain: An Introduction

The rediscovery of the sacred needs to take into account the neural underpinnings of faith and meaning and also draw on the insights of the emerging discipline of complexity studies, which explore a tendency toward adaptive self-organization that seemingly is inherent in the universe. Both neuroscience and complexity studies contribute to our understanding of the brain's activity as it transforms raw stimuli into recognizable patterns, and thus "humanizes" all our perceptions and understandings. The brain is our physical anchor in the natural environment— and its human capacities orbit us into the emerging world of culture (including religion), which provides a template for the brain's function of making sense of an ambiguous reality. The humanizing brain holds together scientific causality and religious meaning, working both bottom-up (linking the physical and the experiential) and top-down (beginning with the whole of things, or God). These processes we know as "mind" (experienced as intentionality, subjective consciousness, empathy, imagination, memory, adaptability). We maintain that such processes are not only subjective but built into "the way things really are." Thus, they carry the most privileged information about the nature of reality to which we human beings have access. For not only are we humans observers and logicians, but we are embedded in the larger reality; and as we strive to make sense of it all, we become both Homo sapiens and Homo religiosus .     

Examining mental simulations of uncertain events

A great deal of research into the experiential nature of language has demonstrated that our understanding of events is facilitated through mental simulations of the described linguistic input. However, to date little is understood about how contextual uncertainty about the described event might influence the content and strength of these mental representations or the cognitive effort involved. In this article, we report a single experiment in which participants read sentences such as “The old lady [knows/thinks] that the picnic basket is open.” Following a delay of 250 or 1,500 ms, they responded to pictures that varied in the physical form of the target object (matching vs. mismatching). Results revealed an expected facilitation effect for matching images, but more important, they also showed interference effects (longer reaction times) at the shorter interstimulus interval (ISI; 250 ms) following the uncertain verb thinks, as compared with the certain verb knows. At the longer ISI, this effect was no longer present. This suggests that at the short ISI, uncertain conditions required extra time to construct and map a simulation of events onto the available image. Results are discussed in terms of the mechanisms involved in representing possible events and with reference to related literature on perspective taking.     

Traffic crash involvement: experiential driving knowledge and stressful contextual antecedents

Researchers have rarely examined stressful environments and psychological characteristics as predictors of driving behavior in the same study. The authors hypothesized that (a) safer drivers more accurately assess physical and emotional traffic hazards and (b) stress and emotional states elevate crash risk. The hypotheses were evaluated with procedural and declarative tacit driving knowledge tests requiring assessment of emotional and contextual hazards and with accident reports describing crash antecedents, including stressful events and environmental conditions. Analyses identified separate driving knowledge factors corresponding to emotional and contextual hazards that were significantly related to the crash criteria. Accident report analyses show that stress significantly elevates at-fault crash risk. The results demonstrate the importance of experiential knowledge acquired without instruction (procedural or tacit knowledge) and provide safety recommendations.