The 2011 Edge Annual Question is a doozy. It came out this weekend: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? This is my fourth year doing a kind of mashup. A few hours ago I didn’t think I’d be able to. Reading through the answers, I felt like I was taking a pummeling: one after [...]
Tagged as:
brain,
certainty,
edge annual question,
knowledge,
meaning,
mind,
philosophy,
psychology,
spatiality,
temporality,
truth,
uncertainty
Continuing the series… Trying to understand human motivation and behaviour, a few years ago I finally came across this article: Motivation Reconsidered: The Concept of Competence, by Robert White (1959). According to the current APA abstract: Theories of motivation built upon primary drives cannot account for playful and exploratory behavior. The new motivational concept of “competence” [...]
Tagged as:
autonomy,
competence,
complexity,
emergence,
flow,
intrinsic motivation,
motivation,
positive psychology,
psychology,
temporality,
think21st
Diving in even further over my head, here’s further elaboration of the philosophy I use. To understand why we do things, we have to appreciate why things happen at all. It’s ridiculously simple: things happen because time exists. I’ve found this principle to be a useful heuristic for grounding uncertainty and making random occurrences continuous [...]
Tagged as:
epistemology,
metaphysics,
object bias,
philosophy,
pragmatism,
process,
process philosophy,
reification,
space,
spatiality,
temporality,
think21st,
time
