Zombies in Western Culture

"Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture. The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and its attendant zeitgeists of anxiety, alienation, disconnection and disenfranchisement. They trace the relationship between zombies and the theme of secular apocalypse, demonstrating that the zombie draws its power from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection. Symbolic of a lost Christian worldview, the zombie represents a world that can no longer explain itself, nor provide us with instructions for how to live within it. The concept of 'domicide' or the destruction of home is developed to describe the modern crisis of meaning that the zombie both represents and reflects. This is illustrated using case studies including the relocation of the Anishinaabe of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, and the upheaval of population displacement in the Hellenistic period. Finally, the authors invoke and reformulate symbols of the four horseman of the apocalypse as rhetorical analogues to frame those aspects of contemporary collapse that elucidate the horror of the zombie. Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis is required reading for anyone interested in the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary culture. It will also be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including students and scholars of culture studies, semiotics, philosophy, religious studies, eschatology, anthropology, Jungian studies, and sociology.

Fear of the unknown as a mechanism of the inverse relation between life meaning and psychological distress

Background and Objectives: Although there is accumulating evidence for an inverse relation between life meaning and psychological distress, little is known about the mechanisms of this relation. Using cross-sectional, observational methods, this research examined fear of uncertainty as one potential mechanism. Design and Methods: Study 1 (N = 141) was completed with a convenience sample, a unidimensional measure of life meaning, and general measures of anxiety and depression. Study 2 (N = 152) was completed with a sample prescreened for anxiety, a multidimensional measure of life meaning, and clinical measures of anxiety and depression. Results: The results from both studies generally showed an inverse relation between life meaning and psychological distress. Study 2 further indicated that these relations were stronger for the meaning subscale of perceiving life as coherent/comprehensible than the subscales assessing whether participants’ lives are perceived as purposeful or significant. Mediation analyses in both studies showed indirect effects of life meaning on psychological distress through fear of uncertainty. Conclusions: These findings support and extend previous research by showing that (i) meaning-as-comprehension may be particularly important in regards to psychological distress, and (ii) fear of uncertainty may mediate the inverse relation between meaning and measures of anxiety and depression

Distributed Cognition and the Experience of Presence in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission

Although research on presence in virtual environments has increased in the last few decades due to the rise of immersive technologies, it has not examined how it is achieved in distributed cognitive systems. To this end, we examine the sense of presence on the Martian landscape experienced by scientific team members in the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission (2004–2018). How this was achieved is not obvious because the sensorimotor coupling that typically underlies presence in mundane situations was absent. Nonetheless, we argue that the Three-Level model can provide a framework for exploring how presence was achieved. This account distinguishes between proto-presence, core-presence, and extended-presence, each level dependent on being able to respond effectively to affordances at a particular level of abstraction, operating at different timescales. We maintain that scientists' sense of presence on Mars involved core-presence and extended-presence rather than proto-presence. Extended-presence involved successfully establishing distal intentions (D-intentions) during strategic planning, i.e., long term conceptual goals. Core-presence involved successfully enacting proximal intentions (P-intentions) during tactical planning by carrying out specific actions on a particular target, abstracting away from sensorimotor details. This was made possible by team members “becoming the rover,” which enhanced their ability to identify relevant affordances revealed through images. We argue, however, that because Mars exploration is a collective activity involving shared agency by a distributed cognitive system, the experience of presence was a collective presence of the team through the rover

An Exploratory Study of EmergentLiteracy Intervention for Preschool Childrenwith Language Impairments

This exploratory study measured the efficacy of an emergent literacy intervention program designed to support preschool children who have been identifi ed as having specific language impairments. Specifi cally, the study compares two intervention approaches — an experimental emergent literacy intervention and a traditional intervention based on traditional models of language therapy. It was hypothesized that the explicit emergent literacy approach would result in signifi cant gains in phonological and print awareness skills relative to a less structured traditional intervention approach. Results indicated that children in the emergent literacy intervention experienced greater gains in pre-literacy measures. The results hold important implications for service delivery models aimed at supporting preschool children with language impairments

Naturalizing relevance realization: why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational

The way organismic agents come to know the world, and the way algorithms solve problems, are fundamentally different. The most sensible course of action for an organism does not simply follow from logical rules of inference. Before it can even use such rules, the organism must tackle the problem of relevance. It must turn ill-defined problems into well-defined ones, turn semantics into syntax. This ability to realize relevance is present in all organisms, from bacteria to humans. It lies at the root of organismic agency, cognition, and consciousness, arising from the particular autopoietic, anticipatory, and adaptive organization of living beings. In this article, we show that the process of relevance realization is beyond formalization. It cannot be captured completely by algorithmic approaches. This implies that organismic agency (and hence cognition as well as consciousness) are at heart not computational in nature. Instead, we show how the process of relevance is realized by an adaptive and emergent triadic dialectic (a trialectic), which manifests as a metabolic and ecological-evolutionary co-constructive dynamic. This results in a meliorative process that enables an agent to continuously keep a grip on its arena, its reality. To be alive means to make sense of one’s world. This kind of embodied ecological rationality is a fundamental aspect of life, and a key characteristic that sets it apart from non-living matter

The naturalistic imperative in cognitive science

grantor: University of TorontoThis thesis reviews current progress in cognitive science towards satisfying the naturalistic imperative. Careful attention is paid to distinguishing metaphysical naturalism from methodological naturalism. Following this, methodological naturalism is further clarified as the set of imperatives: analyse, formalise, and mechanise. It is argued that simulation on its own is insufficient for satisfying these imperatives. Instead it must be supplemented and constrained by existing psychological theory which will indicate the relevant features for comparison in any simulation that seeks to be an explanation of human cognition. Therefore, we turn to an examination of current work in cognitive psychology. Specifically, we examine areas where attempts are being made to analyse and formalise cognition in terms of more basic psychological processes. So, the thesis proceeds to examine current work on categorisation and the nature of concepts, memory, problem solving, and inference. It shows how each can be considered a basic process in terms of which the rest of cognition might be analysed and formalised. However, we also discover that in each of these areas the naturalistic imperative is being seriously frustrated by a combination of conceptual and methodological problems. It is further shown that these problems are not independent but stem from a deep problem concerning the relationship between the two central notions of representation and relevance. The thesis argues for a very tight interdependence between the two notions so that whenever one is being used theoretically the other is being presupposed. In turn, it argues that this interdependence is frustrating current attempts to naturalise cognition. What then follows is an examination of attempts to break out of this bind by independently naturalising representation or relevance. These two projects are shown to fail precisely because they cannot break the interdependence between representation and relevance. It is argued that what is behind this representation-relevance problem is a very serious problem in any attempt to naturalise the notion of relevance. Finally, there is a discussion of what follows for philosophy and cognitive science if relevance cannot be completely naturalised.Ph.D

Dialectic into Dialogos and the Pragmatics of No-thingness in a Time of Crisis

Nishitani and Neoplatonism both argue that overcoming the nihilism of non-being requires a confrontation with, and cultivation of, the experience of nothingness. This paper argues that the appreciation of nothingness is best realized in the practice of dialectic into dialogos, as adapted from the Socratic tradition. We argue that dialectic equips the self for the confrontation with nihilism, and is best suited to transforming the privative experience of nothingness into a superlative, collective experience of no-thingness. The practice of dialectic into dialogos exapts the nature of the self as a synthesis of being and non-being, and possibility and necessity, in and through its relationship to others, and to its own otherness within self-transcendence. Dialectic into dialogos can thereby become a central philosophical practice for responding to our contemporary meaning crisis by affording a generative process of meaning-making that can lead to personal and cultural transformation and communion within the culture – renewing communitas for new communities

Rationality and Relevance Realization

Under radical uncertainty, relevance realization, which continuously solves the frame problem by deciding what to zero in on while intelligently ignoring what does not matter, is both the integration of the debate between axiomatic and ecological rationality and is central to the question of bounded rationality. The interdisciplinary rationality question seeks to understand optimal judgment and decision-making under uncertainty, with Herbert Simon’s scissors analogy highlighting how both internal cognitive constraints and the environment limit bounded rationality. Ecological rationality and the axiomatic approach differ in their statistical foundations, each emphasizing different errors of generalization in the bias-variance dilemma: the speed-accuracy and efficiency-robustness trade-offs. Relevance realization solves the frame problem and reconciles the conflict between the statistical requirements of the axiomatic and ecological traditions through the ongoing creation of well-posed small world idealizations—the enactivist "middle way" between realism and idealism. Relevance realization brings forth what is significant through opponent processing of multiple trade-offs amid the ill-posed and radical uncertainty of the natural world. This understanding is analogous to the problem of meaning in AI and relocates the importance of probability theory and the axioms of rationality into a sociocultural tool for insight in small worlds. Enactive and embodied rationality, the pragmatic turn in cognitive science, and precision-weighting in predictive processing further assert the validity of this non-propositional perspective on bounded cognition and rationality

But What Have You Done for Us Lately?: Some Recent Perspectives on Linguistic Nativism

The problem with many contemporary criticisms of Chomsky and linguistic nativism is that they are based upon features of the theory that are no longer germane; aspects that have either been superseded by more adequate proposals, or that have been dropped altogether under the weight of contravening evidence. In this paper, rather than rehashing old debates that are voluminously documented elsewhere, we intend to focus on more recent developments. To this end, we have put a premium on references from the 1990s and the latter half of the 1980s. First, we will describe exactly what is now thought to be innate about language, and why it is thought to be innate rather than learned. Second, we will examine the evidence that many people take to be the greatest challenge to the nativist claim: ape language. Third, we will briefly consider how an innate language organ might have evolved. Fourth we will look at how an organism might communicate without benefit of the innate language structure proposed by Chomsky, and examine a number of cases in which this seems to be happening. Finally we will try to sum up our claims and characterize what we believe will be the most fruitful course of debate for the immediate future

What Kind of Explanation, If Any, Is a Connectionist Net?

Connectionist models of cognition are all the rage these days. They are said to provide better explanations than traditional symbolic computational models in a wide array of cognitive areas, from perception to memory to language to reasoning to motor action. But what does it actually mean to say that they "explain" cognition at all? In what sense do the dozens of nodes and hundreds of connections in a typical connectionist network explain anything? It is the purpose of this paper to explore this question in light of traditional accounts of what it is to be an explanation. We start with an impossibly brief review of some historically important theories of explanation. We then discuss several currently-popular approaches to the question of how connectionist models explain cognition. Third, we describe a theory of causation by philosopher Stephen Yablo that solves some of the problems on which we think many accounts of connectionist explanation founder. Finally, we apply Yablo's theory to these accounts, and show how several important issues surrounding them seem to disappear into thin air in its presence