Cognitive Construct Quotes

We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc.

That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.' ... And so on.

But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least -two- sets of interactions in time. ...

Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behaviour in relationship with other things and with the speaker.

It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions). ~ Gregory Bateson

They were and are children of privilege ... the privilege taught, learned, and imbibed, in a "liberal arts education" is the privilege to indict. These children have, in the main, never worked, learned to obey, command, construct, amend, or complete - to actually contribute to the society. They have learned to be shrill, and that their indictment, on the economy, on sex, on race, on the environment, though based on no experience other than hearsay, must trump any discourse, let alone opposition. It occurred to me that I had seen this behavior elsewhere, where it was called developmental difficulty. ~ David Mamet

Gender isn't simply some faucet that we can turn on and off in order to appease other people, whether they be heterosexist bigots or queerer-than-thou hipsters. How about this: Let's stop pretending that we have all the answers, because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient.

Instead of trying to fictionalize gender, let's talk about the moments in life when gender feels all too real. Because gender doesn't feel like drag when you're a young trans child begging your parents not to cut your hair or not to force you to wear that dress. And gender doesn't feel like a performance when, for the first time in your life, you feel safe and empowered enough to express yourself in ways that resonate with you, rather than remaining closeted for the benefit of others. And gender doesn't feel like a construct when you finally find that special person whose body, personality, identity, and energy feels like a perfect fit with yours. Let's stop trying to deconstruct gender into nonexistence, and instead start celebrating it as inexplicable, varied, profound, and intricate. ~ Julia Serano

Of all funny things, truth is the funniest. ~ Neel Burton

Ultimately, of course, you must decide for yourself whether the subjective psychological effects created by your evolved cognitive biases reflect an objective reality, perhaps as evidence that God designed your mind to be so receptive to Him. Or, just maybe, you will come to acknowledge that, like the rest of us, you are a hopeless pawn in one of natural selection's most successful hoaxes ever-and smile at the sheer ingenuity involved in pulling it off, at the very thought of such mindless cleverness. One can still enjoy the illusion of God, after all, without believing Him to be real. ~ Jesse Bering

Every time I write about life, I must kill and eat the actual event. I mean to say that my words are scavengers who need to devour lifeless substance if they are to survive as non-fiction. The event is dead, it ceased to be as soon as it happened. The closest I can come to resurrecting the past is to feed my memories to a ravenous swarm of sentences, punctuation and paragraphs. They chew up and digest the things I remember, producing a waste product I think of as an honest account. Reality suffers a second death through this process. False memories, both organic and manufactured, erase the genuine article in order to reassemble the factors into a serviceable construct. True story. ~ Alex Bosworth

The human brain is a marvel. A mere 20 watts of energy are required to power the 22 billion neurons in a brain that's roughly the size of a grapefruit. To field a conventional computer with comparable cognitive capacity would require gigawatts of electricity and a machine the size of a football field. ~ John E. Kelly III

We can make life in the computer. Granted, it's limited, but we have learned what it takes in order to actually construct it. ~ Chris Adami

this interpretation of certain Mesopotamian cultic functionaries has been vigorously criticized as a scholarly construct, overly reliant on nineteenth-century assumptions about "fertility cult" in the ancient Near East. While the vast textual evidence from cuneiform tablets reveals a bewilderingly large variety of female cultic personnel, some of whom are regularly mentioned alongside prostitutes or in contexts that hint of sexuality, they offer no clear-cut example of a "cultic prostitute," and it is likely that this conceptual category simply does not correspond to the more nuanced and complex roles of Mesopotamian women in relation to their goddesses.20 ~ Jennifer Larson

In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called "The Aetiology of Hysteria." However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.
Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the "Oedipus complex," which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women's and children's reports of mistreatment by men.
Once abuse was denied in this way, the st ~ Lundy Bancroft

Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became "geniuses" (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole. - FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE ~ Robert Greene

Sound public finances are the essential foundation on which to construct a better-balanced economy from the wreckage of Labour's boom and bust. But it is economic growth that will create the jobs and the prosperity for the future and enable us to pay down Labour's debt. ~ Philip Hammond

I realise that a certain school of thought says that who we are is something we construct for ourselves. We build our self out of what we think we remember. ~ Deirdre Madden

What is a flower? A giant sexual organ in its Sunday best. The truth has been known for a long time, yet, over-aged adolescents that we are, we persist in speaking sentimental drives about the delicacy of flowers. We construct idiotic phrases like "So-and-so is in the flower of his youth", which is as absurd as saying "in the vagina of his youth". ~ Amelie Nothomb

When people want to be rid of Heaven it is logical to start by creating an atmosphere in which spiritual things appear out of place; in order to be able to declare successfully that God is unreal they have to construct around man a false reality, a reality that is inevitably inhuman because only the inhuman can exclude God. What is involved is a falsification of the imagination and so its destruction. ~ Frithjof Schuon

I tend to write first drafts that are incredibly cognitive, very rational, very boring. They come off as justification. Like, 'This is my idea and here's all the reasons that it's right.' It doesn't make for very compelling reading. ~ Donald Miller

He next made arrangements to patent his bridge, and to construct at Rotherham the large model of it exhibited on Paddington Green, London. ~ Thomas Paine

What it was he had chiefly gained: a fascination with the complexity of the intellectual bastions which men could construct to withstand the tides of disbelief. His own disbelief had remained unshaken. ~ P.D. James

The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists ... Keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females, too, until the social construct known as the white race is destroyed. Not deconstructed, but destroyed. ~ Noel Ignatiev

Mathic architects were helpless when it came to walls. Pillars they could do. Arches they were fine with. Vaults, which were just three-dimensional arches, they knew everything about. But ask them to construct a simple wall and they would go to pieces. Where anyone else in the world would construct a wall, they'd fill in the space with a system of arches and tracery. When people complained about wind, vermin, and other things that would be kept out of a normal building by walls, they might be troubled to fill up a vacancy with a stained-glass window. But we hadn't got round to putting all of those in yet. On a windy and rainy day it made buildings like this hellish. But on a day like this one it was fine because you could always see. As we scaled the flights of the southwestern tower we had views down into the Mynster, and out over the concent. ~ Neal Stephenson

My idea here is that, inasmuch as certain cognitive tasks and principles are tied to nature's laws, these tasks and principles are indifferent to language, culture, gender, or the particular mode of information that is provided. ~ Edward Tufte

No construct on earth will stand, that does not stand for the least among them, as their advocate and humble servant. ~ Bryant McGill

The social psychologist Tom Gilovich studies the cognitive mechanisms of strange beliefs. His simple formulation is that when we want to believe something, we ask ourselves, "Can I believe it?"28 Then (as Kuhn and Perkins found), we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe. We have a justification, in case anyone asks. In contrast, when we don't want to believe something, we ask ourselves, "Must I believe it?" Then we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it. ~ Jonathan Haidt

A lot of evidence shows that most of our cognitive processing is unconscious - phenomenal experience is just a very small slice or partition of a much larger space in which mental processing takes place. ~ Thomas Metzinger

The past is a construct of the mind. The heart wants to live in the present. It is there one should seek the truth about who he is. ~ Total Recall Movie

It just seems like right now we're in a place where people are being witch-hunted for expressing an opinion. Even if it's a lousy opinion or a shitty opinion, and comics I don't think can ever fall into the trap of any groups that want to censor what a person says or thinks or punish a person for expressing what they think. Anything you say about a social issue is going to offend half the country. I don't care how nicely you say it, I don't care how well you construct the joke, simply by stating the opinion, you are for something and anti something else. ~ Jim Norton

The Hell of Regret He who wins the race cannot run with the pack. And once you get out you can't come back, because caged lions don't mate with free ones! If ever you are going to win, you
must forsake the social construct of the cage and all the cage dwellers. ~ T.D. Jakes

(T)here were always vacancies in the construct of life: blank spaces occupied by the unseen guest, the absent friend. ~ Stephanie Kallos

The central importance of entering worlds other than our own lies in the fact that the experience leads us to understand that our own world is also a cultural construct. By experiencing other worlds, then, we see our own for what it is and are thereby enabled also to see fleetingly what the real world, the one between our own cultural construct and those other worlds, must in fact be like. ~ Walter Goldscmidt

I don't think I would have been a writer if I hadn't been a mother. I wanted to construct something that contained some of these feelings that I had, some of these discoveries or revelations. ~ Carol Shields

I don't know if what I'm seeing are worms, or where they come from, or what they might be if they're not worms, or whether I want them to be worms or not, or what I have to believe about this woman if they aren't worms, or about the world or human bodies or this disease if they are. ~ Leslie Jamison

Language is one of the more complex human cognitive functions," Narly Golestani, Group Leader of the university's Brain and Language Lab, tells me during a recent visit. "There's been a lot of work on bilingualism. Interpretation goes one step beyond that because the two languages are active simultaneously. And not just in one modality, because you have perception and production at the same time. So the brain regions involved go to an extremely high level, beyond language"["In other words: inside the lives and minds of real-time translators," Mosaic, November 18, 2014]. ~ Geoff Watts

In a play, you know where you start and end and all the stops you have to do, but in television, you can't construct this carefully planned out arc for your character. You often get a script and you're shooting it two days later, and you don't know what's going to happen next. It's one of the harder things that I've done. ~ Caitlin Fitzgerald

We have given teens more money, so they can construct their own social and material worlds more easily. We have given them more time to spend among themselves - and less time in the company of adults. We have given them e-mail and beepers and, most of all, cellular phones, so that they can fill in all the dead spots in their day - dead spots that might once have been filled with the voices of adults - with the voices of their peers. That is a world ruled by the logic of word of mouth, by the contagious messages that teens pass among themselves. Columbine is now the most prominent epidemic of isolation among teenagers. It will not be the last. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

From the social cognitive perspective, it is mainly perceived inefficacy to cope with potentially aversive events that makes them fearsome. To the extent that people believe they can prevent, terminate, or lessen the severity of aversive events, they have little reason to be perturbed by them. But if they believe they are unable to manage threats safely, they have much cause for apprehension ~ Albert Bandura

However, a good life consists of more than simply the totality of enjoyable experiences. It must also have a meaningful pattern, a trajectory of growth that results in the development of increasing emotional, cognitive, and social complexity. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Just as we may, through an appalled realization that we were unaware of what was going on in the mind of one we thought we knew, come to wonder how we ever know what another person is thinking or feeling, so too we may, having on some occasion wanted badly to understand and having clearly failed, come to wonder how we ever manage to understand, and how we know that we have succeeded. ~ Patrick Wilson

One of the differences between real documentaries and reality television, besides the artificial construct of reality television, is that the people who are recruited to be on those shows, and the people who are interested in going on those shows, basically want to be famous. Or maybe they can win a million dollars or something. ~ Steve James

Whether or not science can be applied to that mental construct [i.e. the designed entity] is a matter of availability. If there is body of scientific knowledge that can be applied, then it would be foolish not to exploit it. However, if there is none, it does not mean that the thing cannot be designed, made, and used safely. ~ Henry Petroski

If any atom of your body was gradually replaced by a new one, would you still be the same person? Or, to put it another way, if all the atoms in your body were gradually thrown out of your body, and then all these atoms were assembled in the new system to construct an artificial devise -- a 'humanoid robot', what would distinguish you, at an earlier time, from this robot, at a later time? To understand your personal identity over time, think over these questions above. ~ Elmar Hussein

A source of white light-many colors mixed together-emits photons in a chaotic manner: the angle of the amplitude changes abruptly and irregularly in fits and starts. But when we construct a monochromatic source, we are making a device that has been carefully arranged so that the amplitude for a photon to be emitted at a certain time is easily calculated: it changes its angle at a constant speed, like a stopwatch hand. (Actually, this arrow turns at the same speed as the imaginary stopwatch we used before, but in the opposite direction-see Fig. 67.) ~ Richard Feynman

That's all very well as an abstract moral principle, Avril, a coffee-table theoretical construct, but there's no denying the sheer gratuitous pleasure to be derived from seeing members of the ruling class in pain and torment. ~ Irvine Welsh