Infinite Minds: A Philosophical Cosmology

Book Information Infinite Minds: A Philosophical Cosmology. Infinite Minds: A Philosophical Cosmology John Leslie Oxford Clarendon Press 2001 xii + 234 £25 By John Leslie. Clarendon Press. Oxford. Pp. xii + 234. £25,     

Development and Preliminary Evaluation of Family Minds: A Mentalization-based Psychoeducation Program for Foster Parents

Mentalization-based interventions show promise in improving mental health outcomes for children and parents through increasing a family's reflective functioning, or ability to mentalize. Mentalizing involves the ability to understand behavior in relation to mental states, such as thoughts and feelings, and typically develops within the context of secure attachment relationships. One area not given much consideration when training foster parents is their capacity to mentalize. This study evaluated Family Minds, a newly developed psychoeducational intervention for foster parents, designed to increase their ability to mentalize. The current paper reports on the development and preliminary empirical evaluation of Family Minds in a quasi-experimental study where 102 foster parents received either Family Minds or a typical foster parenting class, which served as a control group. Results indicate that parents who received Family Minds significantly increased their levels of reflective functioning as assessed with the Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire and a new Five-Minute Speech Sample procedure coded using the Reflective Functioning Scale, and revealed a tendency to show decreased levels of parenting stress on the Parenting Stress Index, while the control group showed no such improvements. These findings support the hypothesis that a short-term psychoeducational intervention may improve foster parents' ability to mentalize themselves and their children. These skills are very beneficial for foster parents, as they frequently deal with children who come into their home with challenging behaviors, attachment issues, and negative internal working models of relationships. This type of intervention has the potential to lower placement breakdowns and improve the mental health of foster children.     

On Knowing Our Own Minds

Book reviewed in this article:
Crispin Wright, Barry C. Smith and Cynthia Macdonald, Knowing Our Own Minds     

A European view

A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis by Lewis Aron (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1996)     

Making too many enemies: Hutto and Myin’s attack on computationalism†

We analyse Hutto & Myin's three arguments against computationalism [Hutto, D., E. Myin, A. Peeters, and F. Zahnoun. Forthcoming. “The Cognitive Basis of Computation: Putting Computation In Its Place.” In The Routledge Handbook of the Computational Mind, edited by M. Sprevak, and M. Colombo. London: Routledge.; Hutto, D., and E. Myin. 2012. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Hutto, D., and E. Myin. 2017. Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press]. The Hard Problem of Content targets computationalism that relies on semantic notion of computation, claiming that it cannot account for the natural origins of content. The Intentionality Problem is targeted against computationalism using non-semantic accounts of computation, arguing that it fails in explaining intentionality. The Abstraction Problem claims that causal interaction between concrete physical processes and abstract computational properties is problematic. We argue that these arguments are flawed and are not enough to rule out computationalism.     

Analysis as a mutual endeavor—what does it look like?

A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis by Lewis Aron (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1996)     

Reviews

Book reviews in this article: Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. By Jerome Bruner . Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? By Gary Habermas and Antony Flew .     

An autobiographical segment from a cognitive‐developmental psychologist working on creativity

Gardner, Howard. To Open Minds: Chinese Clues to the Dilemma of Contemporary Education. New York: Basic Books, 1989, X + 326 pp., $21.95 hardcover, ISBN 0–465–08630–6     

Reviews

Nagel, Thomas Other Minds: Critical Essays 1969–1994
Genova, Judith Wittgenstein: A Way of Seeing
Hagberg, G.L. Art as Language
Swinburne, Richard The Christian God
Padget, Alan G. (Ed) Reason and the Christian Religion     

A growth mindset intervention to improve mental health in adolescents during COVID-19

COVID-19 poses a considerable threat to adolescent mental health. We investigated depression rates in teens from pre to post-COVID. We also explored if leveraging a growth mindset intervention (“Healthy Minds”) could improve adolescent mental health outcomes during the pandemic, especially for adolescents experiencing the most distress. In Study 1, we recruited youth from schools in a rural southern community (N = 239) and used a pre-post design. In Study 2, we recruited an online sample (N = 833) and used a longitudinal randomized control trial design to test the effectiveness of Healthy Minds. Across both studies, there is evidence of higher rates of depression in youth during COVID-19, relative to pre-pandemic numbers. In Study 1, the intervention effectively changed psychological and behavioral processes related to mental health, especially for adolescents experiencing greater COVID-19 stress. However, in Study 2, the intervention failed to impact depression rates or symptoms at follow-up.     

Reviews

Pierre Jacob, What Minds Can Do: Intentionality in a Non-Intentional World
J.J.C. Smart and J.J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism
Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut (eds), Why We are Not Nietzscheans
Thomas Nagel, The Last Word     

Andromeda Freed From Her Chains

Minds for the Making: The Role of Science in American Education, 1750–1990, by Scott L. Montgomery, New York: The Guilford Press, 1994, pb, $18.95.     

“心学”源流考

说到"心学",人们马上会联想到"陆王心学",其实,"陆王心学"的说法是很晚才有的。在宋代,"心学"最常见、最典型的是指与"十六字心传"相关的传心之学。本文拟先考察 "心学"的原初意义,然后再看其在后代的演变。一在汉语中,"心学"这一概念产生得比较晚,它大概首先是南北朝时在翻译佛教经典中使用的,其中的例子有: "当学三学:谓增上戒学,增上心学,增上慧学。"(《解脱论道》卷一,见《大正藏》卷三十二,四〇〇上) 在佛教语境中,心学一般与禅定相关,意味着摒除杂念、专心致志、观悟四谛。本文所考察的心学是儒家的概念,与上述佛教的心学不同。虽然如此,它还是与佛教有关     

The Politics and Ethics of Introductions to the New Testament

Book reviewed in this essay: Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, (ed.) Teaching Asian America: Diversity and the Problem of Community Ellen T. Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine Lynne Celli Sarasin, Learning Style Perspectives: Impact in the Classroom     

Undermind

David Albert and Barry Loewer have proposed a new interpretation of quantum mechanics which they call the Many Minds interpretation, according to which there are infinitely many minds associated with a given (physical) state of a brain. This interpretation is related to the family of many worlds interpretations insofar as it assumes strictly unitary (Schrödinger) time-evolution of quantum-mechanical systems (no reduction of the wave-packet). The Many Minds interpretation itself is principally motivated by an argument which purports to show that the assumption of unitary evolution, along with some common sense assumptions about mental states (specifically, beliefs) leads to a certain nonphysicalism, in which there is a many-to-one correspondence between minds and brains. In this paper, I critically examine this motivating argument, and show that it depends on a mistaken assumption regarding the correspondence between projection operators and yes/no questions.Thanks to David Albert, Arthur Fine, Martin Jones, and the two anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier version of this paper, and thanks to Jeremy Butterfield, Rob Clifton, Meir Hemmo and David Malament for comments on a revised version. Special thanks to Arthur for several helpful discussions.     

Reviews

Books reviewed: Mark Edmundson. Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference. James Downton, Jr. Awakening Minds: The Power of Creativity in Teaching. Elizabeth J. Tisdell. Exploring Spirituality and Culture in Adult and Higher Education.     

Adapting the Unique Minds Program: Exploring the Feasibility of a Multiple Family Intervention for Children with Learning Disabilities in the Context of Spain

The Unique Minds Program (Stern, Unique Minds Program, 1999) addresses the socio‐emotional needs of children with learning disabilities (LD) and their families. Children and their parents work together in a multiple family group to learn more about LD and themselves as people with the capacity to solve problems in a collaborative way, including problems in family school relationships. This article reports the cultural adaptation of the program for use in Spain and findings from a feasibility study involving three multiple family groups and a total of 15 children and 15 mothers, using a pre‐post design. This Spanish adaptation of the program is called “Mentes Únicas”. Standardized outcome measures indicated an overall statistically significant decrease in children's self‐rated maladjustment and relationship difficulties by the end of the program. Improvements were endorsed by most mothers, although they were not always recognized by the children's teachers. The program had a high level of acceptability: Mothers and children felt safe, understood, and helped throughout the sessions. The efficacy of the adapted intervention for the context of Spain remains to be tested in a more rigorous study.     

Alter Egos: Notes on the basic Processes of specular Identification

Although identity is always dependant on observing minds, identification in physics and biology remains merely external, avoiding therefore the more serious problems of identity which arise in the presence of observed minds. Minds are defined in this paper as specular machines, i.e. systems capable of crossed self‐representations. Specularity is introduced as the primary condition of any objective identification, and self‐identification is presented as the core of specularity. Elementary illustrations are given of the role of specularity in both sociology and psychopathology.     

The tipping point of animacy. How, when, and where we perceive life in a face

Faces capture humans' attention; yet, beyond aesthetic appreciation, it is presumably not the face itself that interests people but the mind behind it. Minds think, feel, and act in ways that have direct consequences for well-being, but despite their importance, how minds are perceived in faces is not well understood. We investigated this mechanism by presenting participants with morphed images created from animate (human) and inanimate (mannequin) faces. Life and mind were perceived to "appear" at a consistent location on the morph continuum, close to the human endpoint. This location constituted a categorical boundary, as evidenced by increased sensitivity to differences in image pairs that straddled this tipping point. Additionally, the impression of life was gleaned from the eyes more than from other facial features. These results suggest that human beings are highly attuned to specific facial cues, carried largely in the eyes, that gate the categorical perception of life.