The Subjective Stance

Yeah, I know, I am being a bit tongue in cheek. At least I didn’t descend into talking about watching TV as a meditative practice. There is a serious purpose here though; which is to pay attention to how knowledge is embodied. I see embodiment as an intermediate stage of understanding knowing, between two extremes – the first where we think of knowledge as a property of our brains and the other knowledge is seen as an abstract logical entity. So, for example, if you look at the way in which you surf the internet (and some derivative features, such as your bookmarks), paying attention to the websites you visit and so on, you practice a way of knowing. These practices elicit a knowledge that is part of your extended mind, one that can rarely be articulated in any explicit manner but that you can demonstrate implicitly via the clicks you make you’re your mouse. This gave me the idea that contemplative practice should be like this too - the purpose of meditative practice is to draw out an...

Sooner or later, one gets the feeling that introspection does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. Answers to questions like "Who am I?" are far from apparent from a cursory inspection of our own consciousness. On the other hand, the unexamined life is not worth living. So we need to be a bit more sophisticated in exploring our own inner geography, for which, a map of the psychic cosmos would come handy. Now, a good atlas of the earth gives us different kinds of information: data about cities and countries details the spatial distribution of human inhabitation and political boundaries, contours of the earth's surface show us the distribution of mountain tops and oceans trenches and maps of minerals and vegetation give us the distribution of natural and organic substances. What would be a corresponding map of the inner world? What would make it easier for the explorer of the psyche to find his or her way through the jungle? As a bibliophile, the first thought that com...

Starting this week, I am going to start writing blog entries that outline my research ideas, both for people to comment and make suggestions, but also to explore the possibility that the internet is a useful medium to conduct research. Let me know if you have any thoughts about this matter. Recently, I have been thinking a lot about beliefs and how they are embodied . Beliefs, like other mental states, are rather complex – they are a combination of cognitive, emotional and social elements. Like any other mental state which involves intentionality , it is rather hard to model the actual intention or emotion behind a belief. It is a lot easier to see the behavior or action that a person commits than to model the intention that resulted in the action. However, human beings tend to interpret actions as intentional events committed within an interpretive context (often shared by the parties in question). For example, suppose you cancelled a meeting with a friend at the last moment you might...