239 research outputs found

    Apperceptive patterning: Artefaction, extensional beliefs and cognitive scaffolding

    Get PDF
    In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog)

    Compounding in Namagowab and English: (exploring meaning creation in compounds)

    Get PDF
    This essay investigates compounding in Namagowab and English, which belong to two widely divergent groups of languages, the Khoesan and Indo-European, respectively. The first motive is to investigate how and why new words are created from existing ones. The reading and data interpretation seeks an understanding of word formation and an overview of semantic compositionality, structure and productivity, within the broad context of cognitive, lexicalist and distributed morphology paradigms. This coupled with history reading about the languages and its people, is used to speculate about why compounds feature in lexical creation. Compounding is prevalent in both languages and their distance in terms of phylogenetic relationships should allow limited generalizing about these processes of formation. Word lists taken from dictionaries in both languages were analyzed by entering the words in Excel spreadsheets so that various attributes of these words, such as word type, compound class (Noun, Verb, Preposition, Adjective and Adverb) and constituent class could be counted, and described with formulae, and compound and constituent meaning analyzed. The conclusion was that socio historical factors such as language contact, and aspects of cognition such as memory and transparency, account for compounding in a language in addition to typology

    The possibility conditions of narrative identity.

    Get PDF
    The focus of this dissertation is narrative identity theory, i.e. the proposition that our sense of self is structured like a story. The imputed advantage of narrativity identity is that it enables great coherence and guidance to our complex lives composed of multiple and often conflicting inner impulses and social demands. The manner in which this is accomplished is that narrativity functions metaphorically as a tacit, formative operation, which transfers the intelligibility inherent in the familiar domain of stories to the more elusive domain of personal identity. Narrativity is an epistemically efficient kind of discourse which can synthesize a multitude of elements into a unity called plot. A plot gives unity to the whole of a story and confers significance to its parts. Both narrativity and metaphoricity are the more recognizable products of an underlying mechanism both share, i.e. productive imagination. This faculty pervasively and continually configures the whole field of our experience, accentuating the relevant structures of our physical, social or inner, affective-mental environment (context) and projects the path through this environment towards a physical destiny, social accomplishment or resolution (direction). With the tools of classic Husserlian phenomenology and its radicalization in Heideggerian existential hermeneutics the main concepts of narrativity, metaphoricity and productive imagination can be further clarified and connected. This will enable a discussion about the question whether the ontological status of narrative identity can be construed such that either 1) personal identity merely has narrative cognition available as a pervasive, tacit tool to cope with life, or 2) whether our personal identity is nothing but the product of the productive The focus of this dissertation is narrative identity theory, i.e. the proposition that our sense of self is structured like a story. The imputed advantage of narrativity identity is that it enables great coherence and guidance to our complex lives composed of multiple and often conflicting inner impulses and social demands. The manner in which this is accomplished is that narrativity functions metaphorically as a tacit, formative operation, which transfers the intelligibility inherent in the familiar domain of stories to the more elusive domain of personal identity. Narrativity is an epistemically efficient kind of discourse which can synthesize a multitude of elements into a unity called plot. A plot gives unity to the whole of a story and confers significance to its parts. Both narrativity and metaphoricity are the more recognizable products of an underlying mechanism both share, i.e. productive imagination. This faculty pervasively and continually configures the whole field of our experience, accentuating the relevant structures of our physical, social or inner, affective-mental environment (context) and projects the path through this environment towards a physical destiny, social accomplishment or resolution (direction). With the tools of classic Husserlian phenomenology and its radicalization in Heideggerian existential hermeneutics the main concepts of narrativity, metaphoricity and productive imagination can be further clarified and connected. This will enable a discussion about the question whether the ontological status of narrative identity can be construed such that either 1) personal identity merely has narrative cognition available as a pervasive, tacit tool to cope with life, or 2) whether our personal identity is nothing but the product of the productive The focus of this dissertation is narrative identity theory, i.e. the proposition that our sense of self is structured like a story. The imputed advantage of narrativity identity is that it enables great coherence and guidance to our complex lives composed of multiple and often conflicting inner impulses and social demands. The manner in which this is accomplished is that narrativity functions metaphorically as a tacit, formative operation, which transfers the intelligibility inherent in the familiar domain of stories to the more elusive domain of personal identity. Narrativity is an epistemically efficient kind of discourse which can synthesize a multitude of elements into a unity called plot. A plot gives unity to the whole of a story and confers significance to its parts. Both narrativity and metaphoricity are the more recognizable products of an underlying mechanism both share, i.e. productive imagination. This faculty pervasively and continually configures the whole field of our experience, accentuating the relevant structures of our physical, social or inner, affective-mental environment (context) and projects the path through this environment towards a physical destiny, social accomplishment or resolution (direction). With the tools of classic Husserlian phenomenology and its radicalization in Heideggerian existential hermeneutics the main concepts of narrativity, metaphoricity and productive imagination can be further clarified and connected. This will enable a discussion about the question whether the ontological status of narrative identity can be construed such that either 1) personal identity merely has narrative cognition available as a pervasive, tacit tool to cope with life, or 2) whether our personamagination operating through narrativityl identity is nothing but the product of the productiv

    Control of a navigationg rational agent by natural language

    Full text link

    Toward a Unified Theory of Cognition: A Kantian Analysis

    Get PDF
    The goal of this paper is to provide classroom teachers a more unified theory of cognition. The current cognitive theories of information processing, schema theory, and constructivism exhibit limitations and a lack of cohesion that make their implications for teachers unclear. This paper will be presented in five sections. 1) The first describes problems with current cognitive theories and the need for a unified theory of cognition 2) The second provides a review of the literature of current cognitive theories. 3) The third section consists of research in the history of cognitive theory both in philosophy and psychology. 4) The fourth describes how a fresh look at the philosophy of Immanuel Kant can provide a more unified cognitive theory to educational psychology. 5) Finally, the paper offers specific implications for instruction under these headings: Teachers should describe the concept to be taught as a rule. Teachers should introduce the concept rule by experience or by example. Teachers should use the concept rule as a framework for effective questioning. Teachers should describe the rule with abstract language only after students have understood the rule

    A Hilbert Space Geometric Representation of Shared Awareness and Joint Decision Making

    Get PDF
    Two people in the same situation may ascribe very different meanings to their experiences. They will form different awareness, reacting differently to shared information. Various factors can give rise to this behavior. These factors include, but are not limited to, prior knowledge, training, biases, cultural factors, social factors, team vs. individual context, time, resources, and technology. At the individual level, the differences in attaining separate actions by accessing shared information may not be considered as an anomaly from the perspective of rational decision-making. But for group behavior, reacting differently to the shared information can give rise to conflicts and deviations from an expected behavior, and are categorized as an anomaly or irrational behavior. The lack of proper recognition of the reasons for differences can even impede the shared action towards attaining a common objective. The manifestation of differences becomes noticeable in complex situations. The shared awareness approaches that originate from available situational awareness models fail to recognize the reasons of an unexpected decision in these situations. One reason for this is that in complex situations, incompatible events can become dominant. Human information processing is sensitive to the compatibility of the events. This, and various other human psychological characteristics, require models to be developed that include comprehensive formalisms for both compatible and incompatible events in complex situations. Quantum probability provides a geometrical probabilistic formalism to study the decision and the dynamic cognitive systems in complex situations. The event representation in Hilbert space provides the necessary foundation to represent an individual\u27s knowledge of a situation. Hilbert space allows representing awareness as a superposition of indefinite states. These states form a complete N-dimensional Hilbert space. Within the space generated, events are represented as a subspace. By using these characteristics of Hilbert space and quantum geometrical probabilities, this study introduces a representation of self and other-than-self in a situation. An area of awareness with the possibility of projection onto the same event allows representing shared awareness geometrically. This formalism provides a coherent explanation of shared awareness for both compatible and incompatible events. Also, by using the superposition principles, the dissertation introduces spooky action at a distance concept in studying shared awareness

    Time, Space and Agency: A Dynamical Approach to Narrative in New-Media Artwork

    Get PDF
    This thesis proposes a dynamical approach to narrative creation as found in the so-called new-media art field. It focuses on catastrophic models in order to conceptualise, analyse, and create narrative forms with multiple media and diverse formats. It deals with the transmedial nature of story and the phenomena that make it so. In that respect it treats narrative as a basic mechanism for understanding the real world and communicate meaningful artistic forms. The dynamical models proposed here are applied on current and long-standing narrative inquiries by the author, and their effectiveness in constructing multimedia narratives is investigated. The results are presented in the practical aspect of this research which focuses mainly on using the proposed modelling narrative techniques in order to compose and effectively communicate, through contemporary art practices and the use of 3D game engine platforms, narrative forms framed in the new-media art field

    Meaning versus Grammar

    Get PDF
    This volume investigates the complicated relationship between grammar, computation, and meaning in natural languages. It details conditions under which meaning-driven processing of natural language is feasible, discusses an operational and accessible implementation of the grammatical cycle for Dutch, and offers analyses of a number of further conjectures about constituency and entailment in natural language
    corecore