Archive for category cognitive science
Mind Games: Drawing spandrels into the conversation
Posted by Jay Morgan in applied cognition, cognitive science, meditations on February 6th, 2010
A game of drawing conceptual spandrels*:
There’s a mind game like to play: I weave extra hints or messages or humor or sometimes oblique concepts into the statements I make; and, then, see who picks up on them. You score points by volleying a similar extra layer of meaning. Style points are awarded for the flavor of the volley: Is it thematically, stylistically, or structurally similar? Does it extend, engage the woven thread? Did it oppose or mock it? Did it trump or topple the original?
It’s always been odd to go through the day rarely meeting other people who play the game. Much less, finding people who are interested in it. Sometimes those who play a little will catch on and go a few rounds with you. Sometimes you meet players who are too different in style, structure, content for it to be a complete game.
This is my favorite sport. And, yet, there’s no league for it. It’s all pick-up games. In some places, you get labeled a witch for talking and thinking with such powerful cleverness.
* I borrow Stephen Jay Gould‘s biology term “spandrels” for it’s ingenuity and uniqueness. Read the rest of this entry »
Something akin to My Treatise on Mental Spaces
Posted by Jay Morgan in applied cognition, cognitive science, User Experience on November 13th, 2009
That each practice, craft, art, emotion, occupation, trait, or other aspect of existence is a mental space.
That each mental space is multi-dimensional itself.
That humans encounter mental spaces by realizing and understanding them.
To describe how a human encounters a mental space:
- At first, we have no awareness, understanding of the mental space.
- Then, they realize it as uni-dimensional. Geometrically this is a point, dot in the mental space.
- This encounter creates an event horizon, behind which there are new possibilities within the event horizon that present further access to the dimensions of that mental space.
- Gradually and progressively our capacity for realization and understanding increases. That is, our capacity for experiencing more dimensions in that mental space increases.
- So, we begin to realize and understand a mental space dimension by dimension.
- Readiness, fitness, experience, will, motivation, ability, or other characteristics contribute to and define the capacity for experiencing more.
That this encounter is a mental or cognitive singularity. (As opposed to a mathematical, algebraic, technological, etc., singularity.)
- Not all cognitive singularities are devastating, say, as one might interpret a singularity Kurzweil discusses.
- Cognitive singularities vary in capacity and intensity.
- The maturity of cognitive singularities could be indexed, measured.
That the entirety of mental spaces I would call a “chromatic latticework” of mental spaces.
- The chromatic lattice’s fabric is described by the dimensionality of three kinds of mental spaces:
- Intra-mental spaces: those regarding one’s own mentality.
- Inter-mental spaces: those regarding mental spaces shared between interacting individuals.
- Extra-mental spaces: those regarding social, cultural, and that span multiple individuals. These exist beyond individuals, regardless of their awareness of them.
- The entirety of these spaces describes human knowledge.
- Are there a-, pre-, or para-cognitive spaces?
< End of Part 1 >