Cognition Quotes

“It is possible, in principle, that language suddenly appeared fully formed during human evolution without any gradual or intermediate forms. That notion, a linguistic Big Bang, has been championed by linguists such as Noam Chomsky. But it is extremely improbable, biologically speaking, that such a complex characteristic as our capacity for speech just popped out of nowhere. It is more likely that language evolved in several stages in the same way, for instance, as our large brains did or our toolmaking ability.”
― Sverker Johansson, The Dawn of Language: Axes, lies, midwifery and how we came to talk

“People are better than computers when finding patterns in images, but computers are better than people when finding
patterns in numbers.”
― Leland Wilkinson, The Grammar of Graphics. Statistics and Computing.

“The mechanisms that enable and govern our behavior today have been shaped by the ecology and behavior of our ancestors across countless generations; the mind/brain can then be studied as an evolved -computational organ-, or more precisely, a collection of specialized organs that perform various kinds of computations.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“We have different sets of intuitive principles for man-made objects and natural beings, because we are toolmakers and must understand the connection between the shape of objects and their functions. We have social expectations because we need social support. As we shall see, we have moral intuitions because we depend on fair exchange to prosper. In each case, having these cognitive dispositions made our ancestors more successful than others at reproduction, which is precisely why they turned out to be our ancestors.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“Experiments show that even three-year-olds have the intuition that rewards should be proportional to contributions, in places as different as Japanese cities and the camps of Turkana nomads in Kenya. Obviously, it does happen that people take more than their share-but that is universally considered exploitative, and people are eager to avoid or shun individuals who do that.”
― Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

“Our feelings and emotions are our hurdles, hindrances, and those are the hardest things to master in oneself because we are thinking about them and getting impacted and when you do not think about them you are free from such things in your mind. So learning to think what not to think is an ability we need to develop to rise above those things.”
― Aiyaz Uddin

“Islam emphasizes reason; it is the basis upon which humans are held accountable for their choices. It is also the characteristic that elevates the human being above the rest of Allah's creation, if that gift is used appropriately.
Islamic law is designed in such a way as to preserve reason and intellect and to ensure its well-being and freedom. Islam prohibits the use of any substance that may affect the mind negatively or decrease its ability in any way.”
― Aisha Utz, Psychology from the Islamic Perspective

“This collection consists of the following pieces: COGNITIVE SCIENCE 1. The Embodied Cognition View 2. On Flanagan's Ideas On Dreams and Ahead: An Attempt To Locate Dreaming Phenomenon Under The Superclass Of Consciousness 3. "The Pragmatics of Cartoons: The Interaction of Bystander Humorosity vs. Agent-Patient Humorosity." 4. Integrationist School or on 'Rethinking Language'. 5. On Steven Pinker's 'Language Instinct' or Some Remarks on Evolutionary Psycholinguistics 6. On the (Im)Possibility of Psychotherapist Computer Programs: An Investigation within the Realm of Epistemology 7. Thai Language: A Brief Typology. ART NARRATIVES 8. Armenians As Ingroups in William Saroyan's Stories from the Framework of the Theory of Social Representations: A Social Psychological Inquiry. 9. A Critique of The Stories By South East Asian Writing Awardees 10. Mulholland Drive: Another impasse for the American film industry. 11. On 'About Schmidt' 12. On Black spirituals. 13. The possibility of an African American poetry.”
― Ulaş Başar Gezgin, Cognition And Art: Essays On Cognitive Science And Art Narratives

“Why are there individual differences in people?s bodily communication? Which analogies appear to dominate in bodily communication, and in what ways would the metaphorization and metonymization processes operate? In this study, the relationship of bodily communication performance with cognitive and personality variables is investigated. In the experimental setting, the participants are instructed to communicate certain words one by one nonverbally just as in the ?Silent Movie? game. The stability of expectancy ratings, the factor structure of the performance and the frequency of the ways of representations are analyzed. Interrater reliability analysis, third eye analysis and case studies are conducted; the unsuccessful representations are described and finally, structural equation modeling results are presented. The theories and research on personality and cognition, metaphors, metonymies, analogies, bodily representations, mind-reading, pragmatics and relevance are reviewed and after the exposition of the strategies, schemata and scripts employed in the experiments, a model of bodily communication was proposed.”
― Ulaş Başar Gezgin, Silent Movies, Cognition And Communication: Relationship Of Bodily Communication With Cognitive And Personality Variables

“The logical form of life thus opens up the theoretical and practical activities of cognition, or more directly, the logical form of life opens up the space of reasons. Both theoretical and practical cognition take the general form of the judgment of life, beginning as a subjective drive that distinguishes itself from and relates itself to a presupposed objectivity, and in that process, realizes subjective purposes by permeating objectivity with its own rational form. In the case of theoretical cognition, the subjective drive for truth is confronted by the givenness of its presupposed world, and by means of its powers judgment and inference, it renders the world conformable by conceptual comprehension, aided by definitions, divisions, and theorems. In the case of practical cognition, the subjective drive to realize the good is achieved by transforming the external world according to its freely willed action, shaping the world in a way that further the aims of a self-determined, rational life.”
― Karen Ng, Hegel's Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic

“In short, for theoretical cognition, all truth is to be found in the external world, and for practical cognition, no truth is to be found in the external world. This stance of the will, in which the ends of the good reside within the will alone, and external actuality is, in-itself, empty of all worth of the good will, leaving 'two worlds in opposition'. What the unity of theoretical and practical standpoints allows is a reciprocity and mutual tempering of each such that cognition can be brought in relation to the external world while avoiding the extreme vices of both stances: theoretical cognition's meta-awareness of its own activity as practical prevents the self-conception in which all content of truth is found in the givenness of the object; practical cognition's reunification with theoretical cognition prevents the self-conception in which the will alone is the source of all goodness and worth. Theoretical cognition reminds the will that the contingency of the world can be made to conform with cognition's form of activity, that although it is true that there are ineliminable contingencies, this truth is something that cognition can grasp, and most importantly, it is not a fact that disables the activity of cognition in principle. Since theoretical cognition can find truth of self-certainty in the given contingency of the world - most notably, the instinct of reason finds itself in the form of inner purposiveness as such - nothing in principle prevents the will from finding the truth of self-certainty amid practical contingency, except for its faulty conception of itself. Far from a worthless nullity, the actuality confronting the will is already permeated by rational ends, 'an objective world whose inner ground and actual subsistence is the Concept'. That is, the external actuality confronting the will is always already a world shaped by the rationally realized ends of the will itself - ultimately, the world of objective spirit, and more directly, the world of ethical life. The insistence of the will that the good is a mere ought that cannot be realized is thus a misconception of both itself and its world - a misconception that theoretical cognition can help to correct. The unity of theoretical and practical cognition brings forth the absolute Idea, which, once more, returns us to the problem of life.”
― Karen Ng, Hegel's Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic

“Legendary King Midas never knew the feel of silk or a human hand after everything he touched turned to gold. Humans are stuck in a similar Midas-like predicament: we can't directly experience the true texture of reality because everything we touch turns to matter.”
― Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality

“The adoption of conceptual frames and grids put together by the collective efforts of others is the ingenious shortcut to knowledge that our species has carried far beyond anything known among other animals. The human world of ideas is a product of a division of intellectual labor over extended periods, whose fruits are socially shared and cumulative.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“The oldest and most enduring element of the religious phenomena is probably the existence of hidden, mysterious, and powerful forces and agencies in the world around us, which are feared, handled with care, and negotiated with.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“As we have seen, the conceptual frameworks through which we comprehend reality are necessarily partial; and although not all propositions capture truth in equal measure, or are true at all, many of them may incorporate kernels of truth, offer suggestive perspectives, and illuminate reality from neglected angles.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Ideological clashes, antagonism, and fixations are as old as civilization.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“To the extent that psychological mechanisms rely on information acquired through learning, they are vulnerable to maladaptive outcomes owing to the intrinsic limitations of learning processes. Indeed, the massive capacity for individual and social learning required to exploit the cognitive niche may contribute to explain our species' seemingly unique vulnerability to mental disorders.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“The proportion of the brain occupied by the prefrontal cortex is larger in human than in any other species, reflecting our advanced ability to make long-term rational decisions. Unlike most regions of the brain, the prefrontal cortex continues to grow and develop well into the mid-twenties --and so do its cautionary functions.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“After leaving home, people become closer to who they really are.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“Maternal death during childbirth is not unique to humans, although it has long been accepted that humans have a somewhat unique situation of having to fit a large-headed infant through a narrow pelvis. This biological constraint, along with socio-economic and political issues, makes childbirth (except in the case of surrogacy) a potentially dangerous event that women must face if they wish to be evolutionarily successful.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“There is no perception without bias, yet,
Biaslessness oughta be the aim of perception.
We can never be fully free from biases,
But in trying so we shall become less inhuman.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World

“Human life is not a science. The good life isn't a theory to be operationalized, tested, and replicated before it is deemed useful. For better or worse, life must be lived, here and now; and what is valuable about it we often must discern, on the fly, as best we can. The hard-nosed rationality so valued in scientific circles seems oddly imcompetent when facing the human complications of real life.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“The human desire to keep loved ones near, even in death, hardly needs an explanation or justification. Yet very little of this story can be defended as reasonable.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“As if the natural world alone was not sufficiently demoralizing, our ancestors seemed compelled to augment it with supernatural forces designed to intensify its gloom. If religion's primary purpose was comfort against the vagaries of life, we could have wished for much better than the gods and myths we inherited.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Bringing nature into the human social sphere can serve as an effective mechanism for more sustainable, less destructive use of natural resources.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Religion is a way of relating where supernatural agents are active players.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“The -natural- world included the -supernatural-, and religion (as we call it today) was simply the means by which that part of the social world was made accessible.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“People often find religion after grave personal suffering or tragedy. It was no different with our ancestors. The few humans who managed to survive this disaster did so by finding unprecedented ways to expand social cooperation.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Religious ritual was essential to establishing and maintaining never-before-seen levels of social complexity. Furthermore, ritual behavior was the very mechanism by which we acquired our uniquely human capacity for symbolic thought. Thus, religious ritual made us human.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“The wealth of social rituals present among our primate cousins indicates that our hominin ancestors were preadapted for using ritual as a means of social bonding and could call upon a rich repertoire of them in their everyday lives.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved