Category: Psychology

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Psychology

Vanishing Point: Self-ish

The self is commonly understood as something one has: a centre of experience, a point of view, a continuous “me” that persists through time. Psychological models tend to formalise this intuition by treating the self as a representational structure—narrative continuity, minimal experiential core, or predictive model—through which coherence can be maintained. This move is not […]

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Complexity cybernetics environment freedom humanity imagination mathematics Philosophy Psychology

Unity

If unity is assumed, then the only coherent approach is to work backwards from it. This is not about sentiment or abstraction but about logical necessity: if there is unity, then every relation already participates in it, and our task is to discern how those connections reproduce the whole. Unity is not an optional conclusion […]

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Psychology

Intersecting Sets and Ineliminable Absence

Exploring the intersection of psychoanalysis, negative theology, and the distributed nature of semantics presents a fascinating and complex intellectual challenge. Here’s how these fields might intersect and provide deep insights: The intersection of these disciplines invites us to consider the profound complexity of existence, where understanding is not just about what is present and known, […]

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Psychology

Epistemological Emptiness

Buddhist psychology can be uniquely insightful. The animist turn in Shinto casts nature (and all who sail in her) as something of and with an agency, an experience. If everything has experience, then in some sense nothing does but this is a rhetorical trick because negation, uncertainty, nothing, absence and potentiality are endemic to bio-logic. […]

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Psychology

The neurochemical vulnerability of ultranationalist machismo

Gullibility has no bounds, particularly when tightly coupled with ultranationalist machismo. The ease and simplicity with which the human dopamine reward system is coopted for nefarious political purposes in really no surprise. A little more than disinformation, the pre-existing sociopsychological symmetries in human behaviour represent templates upon and into which nationalism and imperialist brutality are […]

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Psychology

War: Psychology and Deterrence

Context: Psychology and Deterrence “(…)deterrence strategies often backfire by aggravating a nation’s sense of insecurity, thereby calling forth the very behavior they seek to prevent.” This kind of feedback loop is really quite foundational in the analysis of complex systems, of which strategic standoffs are a salient (and topical) instance. Something which I haven’t (yet) […]

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Psychology

The Masks We Wear

A brief thought for today but based indirectly on a peculiar montage and vintage vignette of Lacanian mirrors and Zen voids. We all wear masks. To be a person, an individual, a subjective experience in the world is to adopt a role, a pattern or perceived or expected and normative self hood. Underneath it all, […]

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Psychology

Russia, the War, May 9 and a Narrative of Insecurity

There is a core property of human experience that aligns with the reflexive self-validation of narrative cognition. Whatever facts might exist in the world, the structure and cadence of the conversation (and, clearly, of interpreted conflict) has a tendency for better and for worse to exploit behavioural and psychological instinct as bias towards pattern recognition. […]

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Psychology

Collective Psychosis

On the topic of untenable belief systems, unsubstantiated conspiracies, intransigent disinformation and ideological absurdity – I was watching a lecture from Gresham College today in which psychosis was posited as the default mental state. If the default state of human mental life is in fact some kind of dissociative discontinuity and stochastic chaos, this might […]

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creativity

Creative Cognitive Semantics

From the article: “participants with higher creative activities and achievements had semantic memory networks that were less segregated and more efficient”. So, creative utility is a function of a globally-distributed semantic potential (as memory, encoding, storage). The more semantic combinatorial possibility, the greater the potential creative “depth” of a cognitive system. If “creative cognition involves […]

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Alien Anthropology history Philosophy politics Psychology

Making Monsters

As an authoritarian regime always and implicitly depends for self-validation upon the presence of external and internal threats, where it does not find them it will manufacture them. This is a narcissistic pathology, writ large. The essential and interior psychological surface as self-definition of an individual (or organisational system as political abstraction of nation) is […]

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creativity ignorance imagination

On the value of not stealing ideas…

…and yet the persistent absence of intellectual creativity is a necessary condition for its acquired significance and perceived value. A principle of scarcity in economics resonates. That said, I’m not certain that the boundary conditions between intellectual theft and ethical practice in any autonomously self-propagating sociotechnical (information) system has been, or perhaps ever could be, […]