PhilosophicsIn support of my new book, I'm building a glossary.
This segment is brought to you by the number 42 and…
#Affordance #Salience #Valence #book #video #philosophy #psychology #encounter #mediation #language #ontology #promotion #Elmo #meow #monograph
News Flash: Fish Are Not Arboreal by Nature
🦈 https://philosophics.blog/2026/02/06/fish-are-not-arboreal-by-nature/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social
Those who know me know I am no fan of psychology as a discipline. A fundamental reason is the categorical misunderstanding of cognitive and precognitive functions.
#philosophy #psychology #ontology #selfhelp #mentalhealth #wellness #beliefs #salience #limits #architecture #society #culture #growth #suppression #repression #expression #regulation #reengineering #cognition #blog #podcast #communication
🦈 https://philosophics.blog/2026/02/06/fish-are-not-arboreal-by-nature/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social
Those who know me know I am no fan of psychology as a discipline. A fundamental reason is the categorical misunderstanding of cognitive and precognitive functions.
#philosophy #psychology #ontology #selfhelp #mentalhealth #wellness #beliefs #salience #limits #architecture #society #culture #growth #suppression #repression #expression #regulation #reengineering #cognition #blog #podcast #communication
PLOS Biology#Visual #salience generation involves center-surround dynamics, but what performs these computations? This study shows that the #SuperiorColliculus encodes center-surround dynamics under isolated conditions, and provides insights into the circuit implementation
@PLOSBiology plos.io/4n7RpsA
@PLOSBiology plos.io/4n7RpsA
Muro deGrizecoWhat matters? What must we chase?
What disappears? What do we forget?
What is salient?
Trying to teach my younger kid, who once was running the cat ragged, by running the laser pointer dot all over the floor...
"Remember, the cat can't *not* chase the dot.
Highly evolved to chase and pounce, evolved to detect, catch, and kill the critters in fast furtive motion, our kitty has no choice!
So let up, and let this poor little carnivore's brain rest some!"
"Huh, what language is that?"
asked a coworker, seeing a letter in Esperanto that I was writing.
"It's the middle language, but hang on minute, I'm busy right now!"
Later, I tried to explain.
But after a moment saw that his interest had quickly faded away, his eyes went dull disinterested.
Candles blown out!
That's not surprising, that's typical, and not just about this artificial language, but about anything, really, from most people!
Disinterest.
PsyPostScientists find brain network is doubled in size in depressed people https://www.psypost.org/scientists-find-brain-network-is-doubled-in-size-in-depressed-people/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #depressionawareness #mentalhealth #brainimaging #neuroscience #salience
Matt WillemsenWhat Your Brain Is Doing When You’re Not Doing Anything
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-your-brain-is-doing-when-youre-not-doing-anything-20240205/ #brain #psychology #default #mode #activity #salience #network #frontoparietal #depechemode
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-your-brain-is-doing-when-youre-not-doing-anything-20240205/ #brain #psychology #default #mode #activity #salience #network #frontoparietal #depechemode
a prestonThis week I'm thinking a lot about the relationship between propaganda/the media's framing and language around certain events, and how it influences our salience structures.
Philosopher Elizabeth Camp has done some great work on the notion of a "perspective", which is a bundle of dispositions to take on a particular conceptual framing, to see some things as significant and other things as insignificant or outliers, to see certain things as possible and certain things as impossible, all of which reinforce each other.
Philosopher Paulina Sliwa has done some excellent recent work extending the idea of 'perspectives' into the domain of moral inquiry (Here's something forthcoming in PPR: https://philpapers.org/rec/SLIMSO). Jessie Munton has also done work on the role of salience structures in prejudice.
But one thing that is interesting about perspectives (in this technical sense) and salience structures is that they are going to be heavily influenced by our social environment and need to communicate, collaborate, and plan with others. That's really cool, but: It means that propaganda and media manipulation are about more than simply getting us to believe things that aren't true. Its about getting us to adopt conceptual frameworks that encourage certain explanations of phenomenon, make certain actions available as solutions, and also make certain problems seem significant in ways that others seem like necessary evils. It also results in unequal distributions of empathy, even where our beliefs would strongly reject such unequal distributions.
None of this is particularly new or shocking, but I think the work by Camp and Sliwa might be providing a direction to think more precisely and analytically about these things than analytic philosophers have been able to before.
Felix Groß-WohlgemuthMy first paper has been published. Together with Carmen Walenta-Bergmann (birdsite: @CarmenWB), we looked into the congruence of different social policy issues between parties and voters. We developed a congruence measurement and found that the congruence in Austria actually increases and that family policy follows a different path than other social policies.
Representing Society? Development of Austrian Party-Voter Issue Salience in Social Policy | Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft
In representative democracies citizens hand over responsibility to parties, which represent their interests in policy-making. Current socioeconomic and political developments might foster declining quality of representation. We analyse the state of substantive representation of social policy issues in Austria and ask: How do voters and parties assess the importance of different social policy issues? How does the fit of voters’ and parties’ issue salience develop over time? Comparing the supply and demand side of social policy issue saliences between 2009 and 2019, we unexpectedly find convergence. Austrian parties and voters show more similar relative importance of social policy areas over time. Variations in issue saliences are partly explained by the material and sociocultural values of disaggregated social policy areas.