chihiro
起承転結
kishōtenketsu
being, unfolding, reflection, enlighten
the significance of plot without conflict
still eating oranges 2012
stilleatingoranges.tumblr.com/post/25153960313/the-significance-of-plot-without-conflict
kishōtenketsu
t.b. mckenzie 2013
magickless.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/kishotenketsu.html
iron man 3 reimagined
t.b. mckenzie 2013
magickless.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/kishotenketsu-part-2-trouble-with-iron.html
dissecting totoro with kishōtenketsu
t.b. mckenzie 2014
magickless.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/dissecting-totoro-with-kishotenketsu.html
how history gets things wrong: the neuroscience of our addiction to stories
alex rosenberg 2018
“What narrative history gets wrong are its explanations of what happened.”
“The same science that reveals why we view the world through the lens of narrative also shows that the lens not only distorts what we see but is the source of illusions we can neither shake nor even correct for most of the time. As we’ll see, however, all narratives are wrong—wrong in the same way and for the same reason.”
“Our minds are hardwired to impose the theory of mind on chronologies—to make them into narrative histories—and to find pleasure in doing so (Gopnik, 2000). We humans are very much the products of a natural selection process that has made us seek out such histories and conduct our affairs by employing them.”
the problem with “infinite regress” is that it is only a problem in logic, not in reality.
“In consolidation, the hippocampal neural circuits send “sharp wave ripples” (SWRs) to regions of the neocortex. It really shouldn’t be a surprise that neuroscientists have found that an SWR duplicates the pattern of theta wave firing in the hippocampus. The surprise is that the pattern is compressed 10 times or more, from the second it took when it first occurred into milliseconds (Kay et al., 2016). The sharp wave ripple stimulates neural circuits in the much larger neocortex to take on the same pattern and theta wave firing rate that the place cell neural circuits did.”
“the behaviorists may yet have the last laugh because it turns out that the “whole-animal” conditioning they discovered and thought was enough to explain human and nonhuman animal behavior really does explain it. But it does so only when it operates on the neural circuits of the brain, all of which appear to be built by classical or operant conditioning. Behaviorism is vindicated in the brain by a process roughly the same as the one Eric Kandel discovered builds synapses in the hippocampus.”
“Neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists have explained pretty well why we all, not just politicians and historians, treat stories as knowledge. And in the absence of any other way of explaining and predicting human actions, it’s also obvious why stories would be taken as the best, or even the only, guide to policy, as Kissinger does.
But neuroscientists and their colleagues in related disciplines not only tell us why we love stories, why we remember them better than anything else, why we think or, rather, why we feel they are the easiest routes to understanding (much easier than science). Neuroscience also shows us the limits on the reliable use of stories to guide our own choices. It shows us why narrative history’s stories are always wrong, and where they go wrong, and how their errors pile up in ways that make the stories it tells so often a disastrous guide to both the future and how to cope with it.”
“Once language emerged, mind reading inevitably got mistaken for the operation of a theory of mind. Alas, that theory commits us to a quite false account of the nature and causes of human behavior, which then infects every corner of human civilization, culture, law, art, and literature. The theory is the cornerstone of the cult of reason, deliberation, distinctive human agency, free will, moral responsibility, the praiseworthiness and blameworthiness assigned by religions, law courts, and by all people who treat their fellow humans as driven by beliefs that can be evaluated for truth or falsity and by desires that can be evaluated for moral worth.
Neuroscience tells us this is all a mistake. To the extent our culture and institutions take narrative history seriously and treat its stories as knowledge, they’re all built on sand, or at least on foundations that won’t really support the superstructures erected on them. Modern human culture may be the best we can do, or at least the best we could have done while driven by an ability that was adapted to the environment of hunter-gatherers living in small groups with a minimal division of labor. It’s easy to trace the failures of most of our political, economic, social, and cultural institutions to their dependence on a blunt instrument, mind reading, and its rationalization into a false theory, the theory of mind.”
“If we’re to give up the theory of mind completely, we’ll need at least three things. One of them we already have: an explanation of why and exactly how the theory goes wrong. A second thing we’ll need is a replacement theory, one that not only avoids the theory of mind’s mistakes, but that also improves on its predictions and applications in at least some important domains. A third, and perhaps most important, thing we’ll need is to profoundly change our attitudes toward narrative.”
“And many neuroscientists are also reluctant to admit to the general public that neuroscience shows both the factual falsity and the practical limitations of the theory of mind. It’s hard enough to get people or their representatives in government to appreciate, honor, and pay for applied research in the sciences, much less basic or fundamental research, especially when its findings and conclusions drawn from them undermine their values, challenge their cherished beliefs, and force them to rethink their worldviews. With the creationist backlash against Darwinian biology firmly in mind, perhaps the best strategy for neuroscientists, however false, wrong, or groundless they have found the theory of mind to be, is to handle that theory with kid gloves, leaving people’s fundamental values, cherished beliefs, and worldviews untouched or only lightly touched, by it.”
“the impact of neuroscience’s revelations about human psychology on our thinking is going to be a lot more powerful and a lot harder to deal with, but also much harder to notice—at least at first—than the impact of Darwinian revelations has been.”
“To at least loosen the grip of the theory of mind, to loosen the grip of narrative explanations and stories with plots, we need an approach to how we think that trades the pleasures of satisfying our curiosity for the benefits of reliability in prediction and of more effective improvement of the human condition, or at least more effective avoidance of the catastrophes that have punctuated human history until now.
The trouble with the explanation advanced in the last few paragraphs is obvious: it helps itself to the theory of mind to explain why neuroscientists are reluctant to give up that very theory. Using the theory of mind seems to be a merry-go-round we just can’t get off.”
the way that can be described is not the way
“Recall that Darwin revealed the causal mechanism, the “machine behind the curtain,” that produced in us the illusion of purpose in nature—blind variation and natural selection. Perhaps he should have called natural selection “environmental filtration” instead to emphasize the passivity of the process, its complete freedom from even the suggestion of purposeful “selection.” But it’s too late to change the name of the theory, even though calling it something like the “theory of environmental filtration would have made Diamond’s reliance on it to drive the process Guns, Germs, and Steel describes much clearer.”
“some of the questions have no answers and, more important, need none because they rest on mistaken presuppositions. A great deal of our historical curiosity is driven by Homo sapiens’ long love affair with the theory of mind. Not only does it drive our curiosity; it also seduces us into thinking its answers to the questions it gets us to ask can help us cope with our future, or even with the future of the world itself.”
“The best answer to the question of why the peace held and whether the Congress of Vienna had anything to do with why is probably to be found in “evolutionary game theory,” which identifies the conditions under which stable equilibria emerge among strategies that interact with one another. Identifying the strategies in the policy of each of the European powers and showing that each produced the highest payoff in light of the strategies the other powers adopted—year by year—would explain the persistence of the equilibrium through the nineteenth century. It would explain the Concert of Europe. And it would do so without recourse to anyone’s belief-desire pairings. All we need assume is that some process of natural selection is operating in human affairs that produces the appearance of purposes, ends, goals, aims, and, in this case, a peaceful stable equilibrium. Evolutionary game theory would also lead us to expect that, at some point, the equilibrium would break down. It would warn us that “arms races” are the principal causes of such breakdowns. In describing an arms race, evolutionary game theory posits the persistence of continual random mutation in behavior that eventually produces a novel strategy among one or more players in the equilibrium, a new strategy that, being more advantageous than any other strategy to that player, at least in the short run, is selected for. History, however, whether natural or human, is never driven by adaptive selection in the long run. The Darwinian process can “look ahead” no further than the next exogenous environmental change or novel variation in response to it. The novel strategy, in breaking out of the equilibrium, destabilizes and destroys it, and changes circumstances in ways that in turn select for further novel variant strategies by others to counter each novel strategy. Whence the label “arms race.” But, in human history, the arms race is no mere metaphor.”
“Evolutionary game theory may even provide a basis on which to design institutions that preserve peace in the future by obstructing or limiting arms races—both metaphorical and literal.”
“First, evolutionary outcomes in nature are often “robust” and sometimes convergent. That is, Darwinian natural selection is a strong force and it operates on such a large amount of persistent mutation that it can shape the same adaptive outcome repeatedly and from widely different starting points. Living in the ocean constrains the mammals that came to live there to adopt many of the same solutions to “design problems” that the fish adopted before them. In human cultural evolution, the rate of mutation—the appearance of novel behaviors, institutions, technologies—is much more rapid. A Darwinian process starting from different points but driven by a serious environmental threat or opportunity will exploit the slightest variations to move in the direction of the same adaptive outcome. If the emergence of the concert of Europe in the nineteenth century was like this—an outcome fated by environmental constraints, then the Congress of Vienna was by no means indispensable. If it hadn’t happened, some other set of events would have driven Europe to the same outcome. Sometimes, there really is such a thing as “historical inevitability.”
“Second, there are many processes of natural selection going on in nature all the time, at different levels of organization. Darwinian processes at the level of genes, cells, organisms, kin groups or whole populations are all going on simultaneously, producing outcomes that aggregate the results of all these processes. The same is happening in human affairs: with the right data, we can trace out the selective environment in Vienna that resulted even in the social outcomes—who danced and slept with whom—as well as in the political outcomes that might have aggregated the effect of these social processes together with economic and military ones. Even if the Congress of Vienna wasn’t a necessary condition for the Concert of Europe, it was itself still part of a Darwinian process. We know this because so many of its features show the appearance of purpose, and there is only one way the appearance of purpose can arise—the Darwinian way.
Third, it’s unlikely but possible that the Congress of Vienna may have been more like the comet that crashed into Earth 65 million years ago and suddenly changed everything, killing off the dinosaurs and ushering in the age of mammals. It’s certain that some historical events play this role, especially unpredictable technological or economic events: the invention of the stirrup, the emergence of nuclear weapons, and the stock market crash of 1929 may figure in evolutionary processes in this way. Think of the impact of the crash and subsequent economic depression on political outcomes in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany in the decade that followed. Then there are surprise attacks, political assassinations, unique, unpredicted, unpredictable events that disrupt equilibria or accelerate and shift evolutionary change. Kaiser Wilhelm sent Lenin through Germany and Sweden to St. Petersburg in the spring of 1917, just before the U.S. entry into World War One. The effects of this single act by the kaiser on the rest of the twentieth century were considerable. There was strong selection for such an act. The Germans were casting about for stratagems that would force the new Russian republic out of the war. But the evolutionary effect of Lenin’s return to Russia on the rest of the twentieth century was rather more like the cometary impact on the Earth 65 million years previous.”
“We know, and Darwin knew, that all variations are chancy and most variations (mutations) are harmful, and that many advantageous mutations are eliminated by random forces before they can make an evolutionary contribution.”
“Even Jared Diamond is not immune to the theory’s charms, leaving at least a little room for narrative explanations in his Guns, Germs, and Steel. Most people, including Diamond, will explain the occasional historical contingencies that his theory requires by invoking the theory of mind. Why did the eunuchs at the Chinese court lose to the Mandarins? Why did Ferdinand and Isabella agree to fund Columbus’s expedition even when four other sovereigns had refused to? The answer must be something about what the principals believed and wanted. How do we know? Here’s the last paragraph of Diamond’s book:
Successful methodologies for analyzing historical problems have been worked out in several fields. As a result, the histories of dinosaurs, nebulas, and glaciers are generally acknowledged to belong to fields of science rather than the humanities. But introspection gives us far more insight into the ways of other humans than into those of the dinosaurs. I am optimistic that historical studies of human societies can be pursued as scientifically as studies of dinosaurs—and with profit to our own society today, by teaching us what shaped the modern world, and what might shape its future. (p. 425: emphasis added)
What is Diamond telling us here? That once successful methodologies for studying some domain are worked out, the domain is taken away from the humanities and becomes the preserve of science? It’s clear from the immediately preceding paragraphs that Diamond’s “successful methodologies” are those which employ the experimental method either in the lab or by identifying “natural experiments”—“comparing systems differing in the presence or absence (or in the strong or weak effect) of some putative causal factor” (p. 424). You’d think Diamond was going to go on in this last paragraph to tell us that, once we discover the right methodology, we’ll be able to take the history of humans away from the humanities and make it the subject of explanations tested and confirmed by empirical science. But no. Suddenly, in a sentence that doesn’t fit in anywhere in the 425 pages that come before it, he switches directions completely and gives pride of place to “introspection,” of all things, as a source of knowledge about humans.”
“It calls to mind the change Darwin made to his sixth and final edition of On the Origin of Species in an attempt to avoid further controversy. In the five previous editions, after some 500 pages of perhaps the most powerful argument ever crafted for the effective absence of God from the workings of evolution, Darwin ended with a beautiful peroration on natural selection:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Then, in 1872, twenty-three years after the first edition, Darwin inserted the words “by the Creator” after “breathed” in “having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one.”
Diamond’s about-face amounts to a cop-out of the same magnitude as Darwin’s. He knows full well that introspection can never operate or be tested by controlled or natural experiments. He knows that in the millennia before Guns, Germs, and Steel, historians had been offering answers to his very questions by using their powers of introspection, with spectacularly unreliable results for our future guidance.
As he writes in the very last sentence of his book—just after invoking “introspection”—Diamond is optimistic about the scientific study of human history and its potential to guide and ameliorate the human condition. But such study will require him and the rest of us to turn our backs on introspection, give up the theory of mind, and consign narrative explanation to the creative arts.”
“Teleological “thinking” about—divining purposes in—the past was narrative history’s bane for as long as it was its raison d’être. Darwin banished purpose from biology just as rigorously for humans as he did for other animals. But no one noticed. Academic historians sought with great success to drive teleology out of their discipline, though not for the right reasons. They rejected the notion that history was going anywhere because they rejected the Christian, Muslim, Marxian, capitalist, racial, patriarchal, and nationalist eschatologies that identified history’s end, goal, or purpose.”
“Most people, especially those who drag narrative history into politics, didn’t get the message. National narratives especially move people by giving meaning to the chronicle of their history. People mistake the emotions such narratives foster for understanding.”
women who run with the wolves
clarissa pinkola estés 1992
modern myth and how it hides a deeper picture
the hero with a thousand faces
joseph campbell 1949
ancient myth and the structure of stories as a way of communicating and understanding
NB he believes in freudian psychology
the good guy/bad guy myth
pop culture today is obsessed with the battle between good and evil. traditional folktales never were. what changed?
catherine nichols 2018
aeon.co/essays/why-is-pop-culture-obsessed-with-battles-between-good-and-evil
evil in modern myth and ritual
richard stivers 1982 0820306185
imagining influences our attitudes
forming attitudes via neural activity supporting affective episodic simulations
roland g. benoit et al. 2019
doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09961-w
our attitudes can be influenced not only by what we actually experience but also by what we imagine. Furthermore, they believe the phenomenon is based on activity in a particular location in the front of our brains, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
Participants in their study were first asked to name people that they like very much and also people they don't like at all. In addition, they were asked to provide a list of places that they considered to be neutral. Later, when the participants were lying in the MRI scanner, they were asked to vividly imagine how they would spend time with a much-liked person at one of the neutral places. "So I might imagine myself with my daughter in the elevator of our institute, where she wildly pushes all the buttons. Eventually, we arrive at the roof top terrace, where we get out to enjoy the view," describes first author Roland Benoit, who heads the research group 'Adaptive Memory'.
After the MRI scanning, he and his colleagues were able to determine that the attitudes of the participants towards the places had changed: the previously neutral places that had been imagined with liked people were now regarded more positive than at the beginning of the study. The authors first observed this effect with study participants in Cambridge, MA, and then successfully replicated this effect in Leipzig, Germany. "Merely imagining interacting with a much-liked person at a neutral place can transfer the emotional value of the person to this place. And we don't even have to actually experience the episode in reality," is how co-author Daniel Schacter sums it up.
Using MRI data, the researchers were able to show how this mechanism works in the brain. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex plays an important role in this process. This is where information about individual persons and places from our environment is stored, as the authors assumed. But this region also evaluates how important individual people and places are for us. "We propose that this region bundles together representations of our environment by binding together information from the entire brain that form an overall picture," Roland Benoit explains.
"For example, there would be a representation with information about my daughter -- what she looks like, how her voice sounds, how she reacts in certain situations. The idea now is that these representations also include an evaluation -- for example, how important my daughter is to me and how much I love her."
Indeed, when the participants thought of a person that they liked more strongly, the scientists saw signs of greater activity in that region. "Now, when I imagine my daughter in the elevator, both her representation and that of the elevator become active in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This, in turn, can connect these representations -- the positive value of the person can thus transfer to the previously neutral location."
Why are the researchers interested in this phenomenon? They want to better understand the human ability to experience hypothetical events through imagination and how we learn from imagined events much in the same way as from actual experiences. This mechanism can potentially augment future-oriented decisions and also help avoiding risks. According to Benoit, it will be important to also understand the consequences of negative thoughts: "In our study, we show how positive imaginings can lead to a more positive evaluation of our environment. I wonder how this mechanism influences people who tend to dwell on negative thoughts about their future, such as people who suffer from depression. Does such rumination lead to a devaluation of aspects of their life that are actually neutral or even positive?" This could be the next interesting research question for his team.
abstract Humans have the adaptive capacity for imagining hypothetical episodes. Such episodic simulation is based on a neural network that includes the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). This network draws on existing knowledge (e.g., of familiar people and places) to construct imaginary events (e.g., meeting with the person at that place). Here, we test the hypothesis that a simulation changes attitudes towards its constituent elements. In two experiments, we demonstrate how imagining meeting liked versus disliked people (unconditioned stimuli, UCS) at initially neutral places (conditioned stimuli, CS) changes the value of these places. We further provide evidence that the vmPFC codes for representations of those elements (i.e., of individual people and places). Critically, attitude changes induced by the liked UCS are based on a transfer of positive affective value between the representations (i.e., from the UCS to the CS). Thereby, we reveal how mere imaginings shape attitudes towards elements (i.e., places) from our real-life environment.
the myth of mental illness
thomas szasz 1974 9780061771224
to read next
when the world screamed
arthur conan doyle
possible hominin footprints from the late miocene (c. 5.7 ma) of crete?
gerard d. gierlińskia et al. 2017
doi.org/10.1016/j.pgeola.2017.07.006
bad news has wings: dread risk mediates social amplification in risk communication
robert d. jagiello, thomas t. hills 2018
doi.org/10.1111/risa.13117
we go to sleep and drown our sorrows in consumption
roberto unger 2011
the-future-of-the-left-interview-2011-10-14-the-european.pdf
Change the arrangements of finance in relation to production so that finance is in the service of production. Tax and regulate to discourage finance that does not contribute to production.
Use public capital for venture capital funds.
Broaden economic opportunity by supporting small and medium enterprise. Reject government regulation and state controlled models. Support cooperation between government and firms, and cooperation and competition among firms.
Education. A system of schools to meet needs of a vibrant and flexible economy. Vocational schools that teach general concepts and flexibility, not job-specific skills.
need to re-imagine social institutions before attempting to revise them. This calls for a program, or programmatic thought. In building this program, however, we must not entertain complete revolutionary overhaul, lest we be plagued by three false assumptions:
Typological fallacy: the fallacy that there is closed list of institutional alternatives in history, such as "feudalism" or "capitalism". There is not a natural form of society, only the specific result of the piecemeal institutional changes, political movements, and cultural reforms (as well as the accidents and coincidences of history) that came before it.
Indivisibility fallacy: most subscribers to revolutionary Leftism wrongly believe that institutional structures must stand and fall together. However, structures can be reformed piecemeal.
Determinism fallacy: the fallacy that uncontrollable and little understood law-like forces drive the historical succession of institutional systems. However, there is no natural flow of history. We make ourselves and our world, and can do so in any way we choose.
once upon an algorithm: how stories explain computing
martin erwig 2017
the un-discovered islands: an archipelago of myths and mysteries, phantoms and fakes
malachy tallack & katie scott 2017
the death of truth: notes on falsehood in the age of trump
michiko kakutani 2018
how to fracture a fairy tale
jane yolen 2018
pandora's jar
natalie haynes 2020 unread
33 myths of the system a brief, free, guide to the entire unworld
darren allen 2018
http://expressiveegg.org/portfolio/33-myths-of-the-system/
too ranty and author dog—whistles extremist views; maybe his next book will propose some solutions rather than just railing at straw men
katabasis
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katabasis#Trip_into_the_underworld