Incoming Links

• March 13th, 2021

  His use of the concept Symbol here is very different from the use in terms like "symbolic reasoning." A symbol for Vervaeke is not just any linguistic signifier or an algebraic variable. It's more like the kind of use in "the lion is a symbol of strength" or the Christian cross.

  Vervaeke's first example of a Symbol in this sense is the scales of justice. He looks at that Symbol from an embodied cognitive science perspective, claiming that it's not just a nice metaphor. The Symbol identifies justice as involving balance, and we can use the link to the vivid embodied image of the scales to activate our actual capacity for balance. Physical balancing is associated with the brain's cerebellum, and Vervaeke explains that attuning to the Symbol of the scales is a way to light up these neural circuits to bring our learned sense of balancing to bear when making ethical decisions.

• March 29th, 2021

  Symbols gather our cognition, our thoughts and associations, into coherent emblems, full of meaning yet consisting of very little in themselves. Symbols always represent something else. Symbols include beautiful women, flashy cars, fatherly love, financial security, even the idea of youth. Each of these is an arrow on a map, or an array of arrows aligned with each other, a direction to pursue. Each shrinks a cluster of related goals into a single goal we can chase after unambiguously. For Alice, that goal may have been attractiveness, leading to positive regard, at least in childhood and adolescence. By now it was simply self-mastery, that crystalline sense of control—a symbol far more refined, more idealized, than anything she had previously sought. Drugs are also symbolic, in a way that is rarely if ever discussed by the experts. But what they symbolize is likely to evolve and mutate. Symbols develop, and development takes time. *

• Thread on Plateau, Flow, and Symbols

  I think 🍵 tea is also a great example of such a Symbol—it seems universally loved for the qualities it evokes! https://t.co/SpPExQu1sl

• Thread on John Vervaeke, Agnes Callard, and aspirational symbols

  indeed it seems that a crucial aspect of such a software would be that it would help you find, develop, and stabilize “symbols” of potentiality — not in the sense of symbolic formal logic, but in the sense of the scales as the Symbol of justice or the cross as the symbol of Jesus

• 📙 Improvisation

  One may distinguish two kinds of imagination, rather as one may distinguish between habit and effort. There is the imagination that one uses in one’s ordinary perception of the world. This “ordinary” imagination enables one to take for granted those things that one needs to be able to rely on. But there is also the imagination that is inventive and revolutionary, perceiving objects as Symbol of things beyond themselves. This latter, “creative” dimension is described by one Christian philosopher as the ability “to see simultaneously what is and what might yet be for the best, to engage at the same time the most creative of human passions, and consequently to lure into action and to sustain commitment.”4

• 📙 The Biology of Desire

  It took Johnny about four years to shift from normal drinking to serious drinking, as he calls it. During this period, the cues that pointed to the pub, after work or after a game, activated fields of synapses—grown heartier with each repetition—that stood for something different. Alcohol became a Symbol, the core of a network that included a promise of Peace, cessation of stress, relaxation. Neurally and psychologically, it invaded and overtook the companionship network, like crabgrass colonizing a lawn.

  In another sense, anorexics are classic addicts because they relentlessly pursue a Symbol. Symbols gather our cognition, our thoughts and associations, into coherent emblems, full of meaning yet consisting of very little in themselves. Symbols always represent something else. Symbols include beautiful women, flashy cars, fatherly love, financial security, even the idea of youth. Each of these is an arrow on a map, or an array of arrows aligned with each other, a direction to pursue. Each shrinks a cluster of related goals into a single goal we can chase after unambiguously. For Alice, that goal may have been attractiveness, leading to positive regard, at least in childhood and adolescence. By now it was simply self-mastery, that crystalline sense of control—a symbol far more refined, more idealized, than anything she had previously sought. Drugs are also symbolic, in a way that is rarely if ever discussed by the experts. But what they symbolize is likely to evolve and mutate. Symbols develop, and development takes time.

  There is no single brain region or system where symbols are created and activated. But the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a critical player, connecting present experience to the cluster of elements the Symbol stands for.

  That’s how symbols govern our actions, from humanity’s greatest accomplishments—scientific discoveries, symphonies, works of art—to its greatest tragedies—crime, persecution, and, yes, addiction. But the Symbol and the passion don’t always converge instantaneously. They can arise in parallel, then connect, then develop some more, as did Alice’s anorexia, from a child’s pride at self-control to the austere habits that defined her body and mind twenty years later. Both anorexia and addiction rely on neural networks that grow.

• 📙 The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

  And if, deprived of the physical power, one tries to create thoughts instead of children, one is still very much part of humanity. And in my pictures I want to say something consoling, as music does. I want to paint men and women with a touch of the eternal, whose Symbol was once the halo, which we try to convey by the very radiance and vibrancy of our colouring.