my mind on books

Four interesting new books coming in August…. First in a slideshow; details below.

Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City by Mark Kingwell (Viking, August 14, 2008)

from the product description:

An exploration of urbanism, personal identity, and how the space we live in shapes us
According to philosopher and cultural critic Mark Kingwell, the transnational global city—New York and Shanghai—is the most significant machine our species has ever produced. And yet, he says, we fail again and again to understand it. How do cities shape us, and how do we shape them? That is the subject of Concrete Reveries, which investigates how we occupy city space and why place is so important to who we are.

Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality by Matthew Ratcliffe (Oxford University Press, August 15,2008)

Product Description

There is a great deal of current philosophical and scientific interest in emotional feelings. However, many of the feelings that people struggle to express in their everyday lives do not appear on standard lists of emotions. For example, there are feelings of unreality, heightened existence, surreality, familiarity, unfamiliarity, estrangement, strangeness, isolation, emptiness, belonging, being at home in the world, being at one with things, significance, insignificance, and the list goes on. Such feelings might be referred to as ‘existential’ because they comprise a changeable sense of being part of a world. Existential feelings have not been systematically explored until now, despite the important role that they play in our lives and the devastating effects that disturbances of existential feeling can have in psychiatric illness.

Feelings of Being is the first ever philosophical account of the nature, role and variety of existential feelings in psychiatric illness and in everyday life. In this book, Matthew Ratcliffe proposes that existential feelings form a distinctive group by virtue of three characteristics: they are bodily feelings, they constitute ways of relating to the world as a whole, and they are responsible for our sense of reality. The book explains how something can be a bodily feeling and, at the same time, a sense of reality and belonging. It then explores the role of changed feeling in psychiatric illness, showing how an account of existential feeling can help us to understand experiential changes that occur in a range of conditions, including depression, circumscribed delusions, depersonalisation and schizophrenia. The book also addresses the contribution made by existential feelings to religious experience and to philosophical thought.

Written in a clear, non-technical style throughout, it will be valuable for philosophers, clinicians, students, and researchers working in a wide range of disciplines.

Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief by David S. Whitley (Prometheus Books, August 26, 2008)

from the product description:

In this fascinating discussion of ancient art and religion, Dr. David S. Whitley–one of the world’s leading experts on cave paintings–guides the reader in an exploration of these intriguing questions, while sharing his firsthand experiences in visiting these exquisite, breath-taking sites.

To grasp what drove these ancient artists to create these masterpieces, and to understand the origin of myth and religion, as Whitley explains, is to appreciate what makes us human. Moreover, he broadens our understanding of the genesis of creativity and myth by proposing a radically new and original theory that weds two seemingly warring camps from separate disciplines.

On the one hand, archaeologists specializing in prehistoric cave paintings have argued that the visionary rituals of shamans led to the creation of this expressive art. They consider shamanism to be the earliest known form of religion. By contrast, evolutionary psychologists view the emergence of religious beliefs as a normal expression of the human mind. In their eyes, the wild and ecstatic trances of shamans were a form of aberrant behavior. Far from being typical representatives of ancient religion, shamans were exceptions to the normal rule of early religion.

Whitley resolves the controversy by interweaving the archaeological evidence with the latest findings of cutting-edge neuroscience. He thereby rewrites our understanding of shamanism and its connection with artistic creativity, myth, and religion.

Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science (Bradford Books) by Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen (MIT Press, August 31, 2008)

Product description:

In Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science, Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen–a cognitive scientist and a logician–argue for the indispensability of modern mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning. Logic and cognition were once closely connected, they write, but were “divorced” in the past century; the psychology of deduction went from being central to the cognitive revolution to being the subject of widespread skepticism about whether human reasoning really happens outside the academy. Stenning and van Lambalgen argue that logic and reasoning have been separated because of a series of unwarranted assumptions about logic.

Stenning and van Lambalgen contend that psychology cannot ignore processes of interpretation in which people, wittingly or unwittingly, frame problems for subsequent reasoning. The authors employ a neurally implementable defeasible logic for modeling part of this framing process, and show how it can be used to guide the design of experiments and interpret results. They draw examples from deductive reasoning, from the child’s development of understandings of mind, from analysis of a psychiatric disorder (autism), and from the search for the evolutionary origins of human higher mental processes.

The picture proposed is one of fast, cheap, automatic but logical processes bringing to bear general knowledge on the interpretation of task, language, and context, thus enabling human reasoners to go beyond the information given. This proposal puts reasoning back at center stage.

I came across this passage from A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman that offers another perspective on “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (See also discussion of Carr’s article at edge’s Reality Club)

Why have we as a nation become more and more illiterate? We blame television and the computer, but they are not causes. They are results of a prior condition that invited them in. They arrived to fill a gap. When imaginative ability declines, other ways to communicate appear. These ways work even though they too are dyslexic in structure: simultaneity of bits, odd juxtapositions, messages that do not move linearly from left to right. Yet television and personal computers communicate.

Evidently, reading does not depend solely on the ordering of words or the ordering of letters in the words. Indeed, poets use dyslexic structures deliberately. Reading depends on the psyche’s capacity to enter imagination. Reading is more like dreaming, which, too, goes on in silence. Our illiteracy reflects our educative process away from the silent grounds of reading: silent study halls and quiet periods, solitary homework, learning by heart, listening through a whole class without interruptions, writing an essay exam in longhand, drawing from nature instead of lab experiments. This long neglect of imaginational conditions that foster reading — Sputnik and the new math; social problems and social relatedness; me-centered motivation; the confusion of information with knowledge, of opinion with judgment, and trivia with sources; communications as messages by telephone calls and answering machines rather than as letter writing in silence; learning to speak up without first having something learned to say; multiple choice and scoring as a test of comprehension — has produced illiteracy. (“Right to Remain Silent” excerpted in A Blue Fire p. 170)

A Chronology for the History of the Book: Printing and the Mind of Man
found via “Bibliophile Bullpen”

It’s not too late to register for the upcoming DIAC conference to be held at UC Berkeley later this week. The conference is sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) and the UC Berkeley School of Information (which I attended back when it was the School of “Library and Information Studies”). A public event is planned for Sunday June 29.

At the dawn of the 21st century humankind faces challenges of profound proportions. The ability of people around the world to discuss, work, make decisions, and take action collaboratively is one of the most important capabilities for addressing these challenges.

Researchers, scholars, activists, advocates, artists, educators, technologists, designers, students, policy-makers, entrepreneurs, journalists and citizens are rising to these challenges in many ways, including devising new communication technologies that build on the opportunities afforded by the Internet and other new (as well as old) media. The interactions between technological and social systems are of special and central importance in this area.

DIAC-08 combines CPSR’s 11th DIAC symposium with the third Conference on Online Deliberation. The joint conference is intended to provide a platform and a forum for highlighting socio-technological opportunities, challenges, and pitfalls in the area of community and civic action. Technology enhanced community action ranges from informal communities of practice to democratic governance of formal organizations to large social movements.

Visit the conference website for details on the program and registration.

These two recent titles seem to go together to describe my way of life these days. ‘Always On’ is a more scholarly examination by a professor of linguistics of the effects of new communication technologies on language, whereas ‘Distracted’ is a journalistic account of the effects of those technologies on attention.

Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World by Naomi S. Baron (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Product description:

In Always On, Naomi S. Baron reveals that online and mobile technologies–including instant messaging, cell phones, multitasking, Facebook, blogs, and wikis–are profoundly influencing how we read and write, speak and listen, but not in the ways we might suppose.
Baron draws on a decade of research to provide an eye-opening look at language in an online and mobile world. She reveals for instance that email, IM, and text messaging have had surprisingly little impact on student writing. Electronic media has magnified the laid-back “whatever” attitude toward formal writing that young people everywhere have embraced, but it is not a cause of it. A more troubling trend, according to Baron, is the myriad ways in which we block incoming IMs, camouflage ourselves on Facebook, and use ring tones or caller ID to screen incoming calls on our mobile phones. Our ability to decide who to talk to, she argues, is likely to be among the most lasting influences that information technology has upon the ways we communicate with one another. Moreover, as more and more people are “always on” one technology or another–whether communicating, working, or just surfing the web or playing games–we have to ask what kind of people do we become, as individuals and as family members or friends, if the relationships we form must increasingly compete for our attention with digital media?
Our 300-year-old written culture is on the verge of redefinition, Baron notes. It’s up to us to determine how and when we use language technologies, and to weigh the personal and social benefits–and costs–of being “always on.” This engaging and lucidly-crafted book gives us the tools for taking on these challenges.

Science Daily article on ‘Always On’

Author Naomi S. Baron’s webpage

Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson, with a foreword by Bill McKibben (Prometheus Books, 2008)

Description from the publisher;

We have oceans of information at our fingertips, yet we seek knowledge in Yahoo headlines glimpsed on the run. We are networked as never before, but we connect with friends and family via email and fleeting face-to-face moments that are rescheduled a dozen times.

Welcome to the land of distraction.

Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion and detachment. Our attention is scattered among the beeps and pings of a push-button world. We are less and less able to pause, reflect, and deeply connect.

Distracted is a gripping exposé of this hyper-mobile, cyber-centric, attention-deficient life. Day by day, we are eroding our capacity for deep attention — the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. The implications for a healthy society are stark.

And yet we can recover our powers of focus through a renaissance of attention. Neuroscience is just now decoding the workings of attention, with its three pillars of focus, awareness, and judgment, and revealing how these skills can be shaped and taught. This is exciting news for all of us living in an age of overload.

In her sweeping quest to unravel the nature of attention and detail its losses, Maggie Jackson introduces us to scientists, cartographers, marketers, educators, wired teens, and even roboticists. She offers us a compelling wake-up call, an adventure story, and reasons for hope.

Pull over, hit the pause button, and prepare for an eye-opening journey. More than ever, we cannot afford to let distraction become the marker of our time.

Author Maggie Jackson’s blog