Vernazzani, A. (2023). “How Artworks Modify Our Perception of the World” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22, pp. 417-438. (2) One challenge against any theory of imagistic thinking is that images allegedly lack a logical structure and hence “cannot be…
The police use a negative framing, but there is something positive in this potential for catharsis that can help so many see past the doom and gloom. It can turn an outpouring of pain into a bottling of strength because…
In his book Thinking with images, Kozak starts from the assumption that any theory of thinking must face three challenges: the epistemological, the semantical, and the metaphysical. So, the book can be seen as an intent to develop a theory…
The term “coincidence” covers a wide range of phenomena, from the cosmic (in a total solar eclipse, the disc of the moon and the disc of the sun, by sheer chance, appear to have precisely the same diameter) to the…
In his Thinking in Images (Bloomsbury 2023), Piotr Kozak defends the view that thinking in images in possible. The main arguments against the idea that one can think in images are two-fold. The first argument is that images are only…
Bennett, M., Hacker, P. (2003). Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Oxford: Blackwell. Pylyshyn, Z. W. (2002). Mental Imagery: In search of a theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25, 157-182. Let me start with a couple of examples. Look at the night…
Now, in addition to these issues I want to highlight a new one. As AIs, like ChatGPT, become more ubiquitous, people might commit a fallacy that we can call The-AI-Knows-Something Fallacy: Anything that the AI tells you must be true…
It is very difficult to define consciousness. Sam Harris (quoting the philosopher Thomas Nagel) says that a creature is conscious if there is “something that it is like” to be this creature. It doesn’t seem that rocks have the complexity…
As has been demonstrated in the search for laws of human behavior in psychology, the way we think about ourselves can occlude self-understanding. Indeed, the choice of a description or a metaphor depends on what one is trying to explain…
The ethical quandary at the core of how we represent the mind in practical uses of psychology is the technology of agency. The biomedical and psychodynamic (i.e., discursive) approaches are “two different ways to identify, understand, and respond to mental…
Unlike reductionism, the use of expansionary analytic forms like the multi-level analysis employed in the new mechanical philosophy seems to admit the interlevel complexity of mind. For example, there is evidence that adversity caused by socioeconomic factors constrains genetic variations…
In the paper, we argue that the received views on how we (should) ascribe responsibility to individuals and collectives map poorly onto networks of these ‘Collective Minds’. The intimately collective nature of direct multiple-brain interfaces, for instance, where human minds…
The unifying theories of biology are cell theory, evolution theory, genes, and homeostasis.[vii] Placing psychology in correspondence with biology allows the entailment of principles like probability, ecology, and a broader range of spatial and temporal scales. The key principles of…
An interlude follows in which I consider how aspects of psychology can be conceived of as superstitious rituals which draw their authority from the epistemic dominance of science. I position the various uses of psychology within an epistemic landscape of…
