Discontinuities
Discontinuities
Love, Art, Mind
About the Book
In this the "Knowledge" Age, we gorge on fragmented factual and artistic information. But are we experiencing commensurate personal growth? In Cognitive Productivity Beaudoin discussed how to develop ourselves and solve problems with the knowledge we "consume". But what about art?
Discontinuities illustrates the challenge, possibility and necessity of striving for integrated understanding of the world and of ourselves through the art of others. This book presents variations on the theme of learning about ourselves and each other by responding deeply to art in all its forms—story, visual art, music, etc. Through essays, epistles, stories, visual art, puzzles, and more, this book begins to unfurl a new framework for more deeply being transformed by the art we experience.
With contributions from National Teaching Award recipient Prof. Claude Lamontagne, visual artist and Buddhist scholar Lam Wong, sculptor and geneticist, History professor, Dr. Laura Nys, photographer, Andrea Paterson, and painter and psychotherapist Arash Kameli. Hands cover art by Laura Redmond.
While unique in form and content, this book is inspired by Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind, Dorothy Tennov's Love and Limerence, Warren McCulloch's Embodiments of Mind, Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind, Aaron Sloman's notion of discontinuities in the space of possible minds, other works in affective/cognitive science, novels by Paul Auster, Milan Kundera and others, Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations, Lizst's Piano Concerto No. 2, Willa Cather's The Troll Garden, E.C. Escher, songs of Jacques Brel, and who knows what else?
See CogZest, http://cogzest.com/tag/art/ and https://cogzest.com/projects/learning-from-fiction/
About the Author
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Contributing Authors and Artists
- 1:√ Meta-painting & Science of the Human Mind: An Epistolary Response to Lam Wong’s 21 Elements
- — Preface to the letter
- — A letter
- — Attentively developing expertise through time
- — N-ary relations in art and meta machinery
- — Perception: The construction of conjectures
- — Rational faith and love in the dark
- — Language of cognitive-affective mind
- — Perturbance: Loss of control of mental processing of motivators
- — Attachment, acceptance, love and happiness
- — Universality of affect
- — Using visual art to improve ourselves
- — Consciousness, the great integrator (or integration)
- — High art
- — To the tune of Kevin Shield’s Goodbye
- 2:An honest criticism of critical “theory” and its equally problematic company
- 3:Evolutionary raison-d’être of art
- — The evolution of human consciousness
- — Consciousness and the human connectome
- — From Generalized languages through gesture to public language
- — The goodness paradox and moral psychology
- — Social signaling and status games
- — The mating mind
- — Artists and audience as agents
- — Boyd’s stated evolutionary origins (purposes) of art
- — The critical importance of attention and mental perturbance
- 4:Story-editing
- 5:Remembering and applying knowledge: easier said than done
- 6:Evaluating art with a CUP’A information (evaluation)
- 7:√ The Status Game
- — Overview
- — Book’s thesis
- — Story-telling and heroism
- — Should we be ashamed of playing status games?
- — Status games gone wrong: Culture wars and humiliation
- — Assessing and improving upon status theory
- — An extra positive
- — The Genius on Cleveland street
- — Mirth Motivates Thinking: The HDA Theory of Humor
- — Surprise and the Incongruous
- — The Unpredicted Hilariousness of Recurrent Male Fantasy
- — Fantasy Themes
- — The Mating Mind and Vanity
- — Keeping it Simple – John Cleese on Taboo
- — A Funny Transfer Problem
- — Signed
- 8:√ The Tree of Knowledge, by Henry James
- 9:√ Lovers, Intellectual Loneliness, and an Enigma
- — Helen Fisher’s Take on Selecting a Mate
- — Two Aims of Science, and Kinds of Thinking (Crude Divisions)
- — To Search for a Meta-effective Mate?
- — Intellectual Obsession and Tenacity (Particular Thinking Dispositions)
- — Thinking Dispositions (Generally)
- — Rationalists vs. Mystics (Thinking Dispositions, Thinking Tools and Beliefs)
- — A Mentor, Teacher, Coach and Lover?
- — Humor and Sex
- — History
- — Some Personal Reflections and a Decision
- — Romantic Attraction
- — What’s the Point?
- 10:Her
- 11:√ ACT in Three Acts
- 12:√ Šárka and the Creator–Chanson énigmatique by “Jo Malo”
- 13:√ On The Relationship-building Proclivities of Human Nature
- — Aubé’s commitment theory of human nature
- — Robert Heinlein’s “Our Noble, Essential Decency”
- — de Waal’s book
- 14:How to think broadly and deeply about emotions.
- 15:√ Attention! Have you lost it?
- ——Psychology was underprepared for covid-19
- ——Our recent paper on perturbance
- ——Sketch of a motive-processing architecture
- 16:√ Feeling Guilty
- — Harnessing Feelings of Guilt with Non-Fiction and Fiction: Deliberately Seeking to Transfer Knowledge
- — Cognitive Productivity and the Problem of Transfer
- — A Tiny List of Handy Strategies for Dealing with Situations That Might Generate Guilt
- — Why This Post?
- 17:√ Experiencing and Analyzing Emotions on a Perturbing Election Night
- — Intensity of emotions in terms of Ortony, Clore & Collins (1988)
- — The Affective Impact of Uncertainty
- — Panksepp’s theory of emotions
- — Michel Aubé’s Commitment Theory of Emotion
- — The perturbance theory of emotion
- — Defence: Intellectualization
- — Defence: Displacement activities and motivational redirection
- — Coda
- — References
- — Subsequent notes
- 18:√ Jo Malo’s playlist
- 19:(How) Can music really move us?
- 20:Affect: moods, “emotions” and attitudes?
- 21:√ The Garden Lodge — by Willa Cather
- 22:√ Letter from Pierre Curie to Marie Sklodowska
- — Pierre follows up
- 23:√ Madeleine by Laura Nys
- 24:√ University Teaching Requires Lovingly Opposing the Student: Claude Lamontagne’s Rationalist Reflexions
- 25:√ Betroffenheit
- 26:√ Monsieur Lazhar
- 27:√ Motherhood and the Imaginal Journey — by Andrea Paterson
- — PART 1: IMAGINAL DISCS
- — PART II: THE MOTHER SELF
- — PART III: The Underworld
- 28:√ Dear Jocelyn
- 29:Caffeine
- 30:And now for something different (reprised)
- 31:√ Jacques Brel Wrote as He Lived
- 32:√ Art and Fear - by Dr. Al Sather
- 33:Sleep and Creativity
- 34:√ How mySleepButton’s Visual Hammer (Icon) Was Designed to Drive Home Its Verbal Nail
- — Finding an Artist to Create our Visual Hammer
- — Client-Designer Interactions
- — Iconifying the Cognitive Shuffle
- — The Upshot
- 35:√ CogSci Apps®
- 36:√ CogZest’s brain-embedded dolphin
- 37:Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus: on the Purpose of Art by Claude Lamontagne
- — Introduction
- — The ‘purpose of Art’ revelation
- — TO BE CONTINUED (to a maximum of 10 pages in all):
- XI:Coda
- XII:Answers to challenges and truzzles
- XIII:Afterwords
- XIV:Backmatter
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