Life as itinerary: tourism, personal narratives and gratification in a culture of the continuous present.

It is argued that the proliferation of personal communications technology is effecting a change in the condition of life. Usage of these devices sequesters personal time and removes delay, with negative consequences for gratification. The ‘culture of the continuous present’ draws an analogy with the present tense in the English language: the simple present, ‘I do’, gives ground to a continuous present, ‘I am doing’, wherein the mind is engaged and unavailable for reverie, anticipation and recollection. Life, it is suggested, is analogous with a journey, punctuated by ‘landmark’ experiences by which individuals construct personal narratives and thereby make sense of their lives. Gratification in life thrives on anticipation and thus depends on delay, but is threatened by a growing culture of instant gratification. The proliferation of ‘happiness’ surveys may be secondary evidence of this problem. Tourism is largely insulated from these changes: trips are the subject of daydreams, and require planning; they are long in duration, and recorded photographically; are remembered long afterwards; and are thus powerful contributors to personal narratives. Tourism, therefore, enjoys augmented salience in a culture in which gratification is otherwise compromised

Self-Deception as Affective Coping. An Empirical Perspective on Philosophical Issues

In the philosophical literature, self-deception is mainly approached through the analysis of paradoxes. Yet, it is agreed that self-deception is motivated by protection from distress. In this paper, we argue, with the help of findings from cognitive neuroscience and psychology, that self-deception is a type of affective coping. First, we criticize the main solutions to the paradoxes of self-deception. We then present a new approach to self-deception. Self-deception, we argue, involves three appraisals of the distressing evidence: (a) appraisal of the strength of evidence as uncertain, (b) low coping potential and (c) negative anticipation along the lines of Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis. At the same time, desire impacts the treatment of flattering evidence via dopamine. Our main proposal is that self-deception involves emotional mechanisms provoking a preference for immediate reward despite possible long-term negative repercussions. In the last part, we use this emotional model to revisit the philosophical paradoxes

Nonseparability of Shared Intentionality

According to recent studies in developmental psychology and neuroscience, symbolic language is essentially intersubjective. Empathetically relating to others renders possible the acquisition of linguistic constructs. Intersubjectivity develops in early ontogenetic life when interactions between mother and infant mutually shape their relatedness. Empirical findings suggest that the shared attention and intention involved in those interactions is sustained as it becomes internalized and embodied. Symbolic language is derivative and emerges from shared intentionality. In this paper, we present a formalization of shared intentionality based upon a quantum approach. From a phenomenological viewpoint, we investigate the nonseparable, dynamic and sustainable nature of social cognition and evaluate the appropriateness of quantum interaction for modelling intersubjectivity

Decision-making and strategic thinking through analogies

When faced with a complex scenario, how does understanding arise in one’s mind? How does one integrate disparate cues into a global, meaningful whole? Consider the chess game: how do humans avoid the combinatorial explosion? How are abstract ideas represented? The purpose of this paper is to propose a new computational model of human chess intuition and intelligence. We suggest that analogies and abstract roles are crucial to solving these landmark problems. We present a proof-of-concept model, in the form of a computational architecture, which may be able to account for many crucial aspects of human intuition, such as (i) concentration of attention to relevant aspects, (ii) \ud how humans may avoid the combinatorial explosion, (iii) perception of similarity at a strategic level, and (iv) a state of meaningful anticipation over how a global scenario \ud may evolve

Protention and retention in biological systems

This paper proposes an abstract mathematical frame for describing some features of cognitive and biological time. We focus here on the so called "extended present" as a result of protentional and retentional activities (memory and anticipation). Memory, as retention, is treated in some physical theories (relaxation phenomena, which will inspire our approach), while protention (or anticipation) seems outside the scope of physics. We then suggest a simple functional representation of biological protention. This allows us to introduce the abstract notion of "biological inertia".Comment: This paper was made possible only as part of an extended collaboration with Francis Bailly (see references), a dear friend and "ma\^itre \'a penser", who contributed to the key ideas. Francis passed away in february 2008: we continue here our inspiring discussions and joint wor

Human behavior as origin of traffic phases

It is shown that the desire for smooth and comfortable driving is directly responsible for the occurrence of complex spatio-temporal structures (``synchronized traffic'') in highway traffic. This desire goes beyond the avoidance of accidents which so far has been the main focus of microscopic modeling and which is mainly responsible for the other two phases observed empirically, free flow and wide moving jams. These features have been incorporated into a microscopic model based on stochastic cellular automata and the results of computer simulations are compared with empirical data. The simple structure of the model allows for very fast implementations of realistic networks. The level of agreement with the empirical findings opens new perspectives for reliable traffic forecasts.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, colour figures with reduced resolutio

Effect of on- and off-ramps in cellular automata models for traffic flow

We present results on the modeling of on- and off-ramps in cellular automata for traffic flow, especially the Nagel-Schreckenberg model. We study two different types of on-ramps that cause qualitatively the same effects. In a certain density regime one observes plateau formation in the fundamental diagram. The plateau value depends on the input-rate of cars at the on-ramp. The on-ramp acts as a local perturbation that separates the system into two regimes: A regime of free flow and another one where only jammed states exist. This phase separation is the reason for the plateau formation and implies a behaviour analogous to that of stationary defects. This analogy allows to perform very fast simulations of complex traffic networks with a large number of on- and off-ramps because one can parametrise on-ramps in an exceedingly easy way.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Int. J. Mod. Phys.

Coping with creeping catastrophes: national political systems and the challenge of slow-moving policy problems

No abstract available