Fallible and Illusionary Reasoning Instincts

Though conceptualizing is of course integral to survival, some of our interpretive tendencies can lead us astray. Everyone knows something about sensory fallibilities, such as those of vision called ‘optical illusions’: our sight enhances the contrast of boundaries between light and dark, distorts lines and shapes depending on their surroundings, and awareness of depth can easily be fooled by the interplay of shadows. Just … Continue reading Fallible and Illusionary Reasoning Instincts →

Quantitative Inferential Reasoning

Number intuition is evident throughout the animal kingdom, with most organisms seeming to count, demonstrated by their movements, vocalizations, and additional sounds. Animals have a sense of proportion, for their sound production swells, recedes or otherwise modulates with continuity that signifies the integrating of relativities: pressure, volume, speed and the like. Human conceptualizations and grammatical constructions also proportion, consisting of hybrid structures … Continue reading Quantitative Inferential Reasoning →

The Origins of a Modern Philosophical Dilemma in Antiquity’s Theorizing

So conflict between the wholly mechanistic vs. nondeterministic view of emotion's causality stares us in the face, a paradox that stalls scientific theorizing and especially institutional integration until concepts are sifted and sorted, deductive choices based on comparison and contrast are made, and our image of reality submerged within the facts, including uncertainties as well as … Continue reading The Origins of a Modern Philosophical Dilemma in Antiquity’s Theorizing →

An Introductory Analysis of Behavior and Social Theory

1. The Roots of Behavior There are two opposite means of conditioning behaviors: negative and positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement provokes anxiety and fear, stimulating the amygdala and associated brain regions in conjunction with release of the neurotransmitters adrenaline, glutamate and GABA, a neural event that triggers the hippocampus and additional brain subregions to translate the … Continue reading An Introductory Analysis of Behavior and Social Theory →

Humanity and the Evolutionary Phenomenology of Preanthromorphic Cognition

The period from hominid evolution to human civilization is unprecedented in Earth’s history. Fossil records reveal that the majority of our planet’s past has been comprised of equilibriums lasting from tens to hundreds of millions of years, during which the composition and distribution of species remained extremely static. Primates have been around for 50 million … Continue reading Humanity and the Evolutionary Phenomenology of Preanthromorphic Cognition →