Tags / 30 quotes from 14 sources
#thinking
A Practical Guide to Mindfulness (Tessa Watt)
Stepping back from ruminating thoughts
If you’re prone to depression, you probably have a tendency to ‘ruminate’ – to get caught up in spirals of obsessive thoughts which are hard to distinguish from facts. Through mindfulness you can learn to stay grounded in the body and to be less caught up in the mind. You can…
The busy monkey mind
When you start to meditate, you may find it shocking how active your mind is. It flits from one thought to another, often without any obvious logic. It may feel like a monkey leaping from tree to tree. You may even think, ‘I was looking for calm, but when I started to meditate…
Adesso basta (Simone Perotti)
Insegnare significa insegnare a pensare
Molti professori credono che insegnare voglia dire trasmettere dei contenuti. Ma questo non basta: insegnare significa innanzitutto (insegnare a) pensare».
Nel silenzio il pensiero è più fine
Sono stato molto tempo da solo. Ho goduto del silenzio, della contemplazione, nella quiete. Ho scoperto che nel silenzio il pensiero è più fine, di una qualità e profondità migliori intendo. La solitudine benefica, cioè vissuta con gioia, facilita la selezione, la…
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
From vague to crisp ideas
During the course of writing this book, many of these ideas became more crisp, while others that started as crisp became more vague and fuzzy. The vague-to-crisp concept (stolen from computer scientist Leonid Perlovsky) plays a central role in this story. After researching and…
Thinking about thinking, human or machine
What I hope is novel is the synthesis of these areas in a particular way that might generate some further thinking about thinking9—whether that thinking is done by humans, machines, or some kind of freakish hybrid.
A principle of intellectual integrity
Identify all of the assumptions upon which you base your theoretical commitments, then state these assumptions as clearly as possible, and finally examine these assumptions as critically as possible. For what it’s worth, I am quite ambivalent about this future. I love…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Thinking as calculation, from Hobbes onwards
The idea that knowledge can be formalized is not new. For centuries the act of thinking has been seen as calculation based on logical reasoning. Newell and Simon’s physical symbol systems hypothesis has its roots in the work of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679).
Bateson: what thinks is a total circuit
“We used to argue whether a machine could think. The answer is, ‘No’. What thinks is a total circuit, including perhaps a computer, a man, and an environment. Similarly, we may ask whether a brain can think, and again the answer will be, ‘No’. What thinks is a brain inside a…
La Formica Zen (italian Edition) ( )
Non saper smettere di pensare
Non essere capaci di smettere di pensare è una afflizione terribile,ma non ce ne rendiamo conto perchè quasi tutti ne soffrono, per cui è considerato normale. Eckhart Tolle
Tu non sei colui che pensa
L’inizio della libertà è la realizzazione che tu non sei”colui che pensa”. Il momento in cui cominci ad osservare colui che pensa, si attiva un livello di coscienza più alto. Incominci a renderti ◊◊◊◊◊◊ conto che esiste un vasto regno di una intelligenza al di là del pensiero,e…
Paul Valéry - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Paul valery prose
His far more ample prose writings, peppered with many aphorisms and bons mots, reveal a conservative and skeptical outlook on human nature, verging on the cynical. However, he never said or wrote anything giving aid or comfort to any form of totalitarianism popular during his…
Philosophy Engines: Technology And Reading/writing/thinking Philosophy
Philosophy engines
The material processes for doing philosophy-speaking, gesturing, writing in alphabetic or ideogrammatic form, or in any symbol system-have a deep effect on more abstract philosophical practices involved in thinking, reasoning, and understanding, and explaining, and it is in…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Brain dominance theory
A great deal of research has been conducted for decades on what has come to be called brain dominance theory. The findings basically indicate that each hemisphere of the brain—left and right—tends to specialize in and preside over different functions, process different kinds of…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Why we think in stereotypes
Human beings think in terms of stereotypes, for good reasons. Without mental short cuts, we simply couldn’t get by. There is just too much information to process, and we often have to be quite crude as to how we filter it. But these generalisations are bound to lead us astray.
Nisbett: how Westerners and East Asians think
recent work of Richard E. Nisbett on the differences between how Westerners (Europeans and North Americans) and East Asians (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) think. Nisbett surveys a wide range of studies and concludes that there are real and important differences in how people…
Rediscovering one's own beliefs
When I sat down to write it, my own beliefs were not held on file, permanently ready for inspection. I often don’t remember my view about something: it is as though I have to think about the subject again in order to find out what I believe.
The Functional Art: An Introduction To Information Graphics And Visualization
Turning thinking principles into seeing principles
Effective analytic designs entail turning thinking principles into seeing principles. So, if the thinking task is to understand causality, the task calls for a design principle: “Show causality.” If a thinking task is to answer a question and compare it with alternatives, the…
The Limits Of The Digital Humanities, By Adam Kirsch | New Republic
The false analogy between the humanities and the sciences: humanistic thinking is creative and it doesn't proceed by experiments
If computers cannot think better than human beings, digital humanists are left with the argument that at least they can think faster—the John Henry argument. In the essay “Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Humanities,” Ramsay and Geoffrey…
Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney)
Piaget's cognitive stages and Erikson's emotional ones
Nonetheless, Piaget’s stages of cognitive development have created our overall view of how children think in their early years, just as Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development have helped us understand how children develop emotionally.
Same stages, different ages
Piaget believed that children all pass through the same stages when developing their thinking skills. The age at which children accomplish these stages of development can vary. Because of this variation, charts outlining Piaget’s stages may also differ slightly.
The egocentric preoperational child
According to Piaget, after the sensorimotor stage, children’s cognitive development enters the preoperational stage, which extends from the second year of life through age seven or eight. The preoperational stage is when children’s thinking differs most from adult thought…
Conservation of number and the spread-out coins
Because preoperational children tend to believe what they see, they do not yet have a firm grasp of qualities belonging to the objects in their world. For example, they confuse “heavy” with “large.” Due to inexperience, most young children would initially be surprised that a…
Ironing the baby: single-focus thinking
Preoperational children also tend to focus on one attribute of an object or person at a time. It is hard for them to think of their mother as their grandma’s daughter, for instance. This single-focus thinking is revealed in children’s conversations, if adults know how to listen…
Preschoolers can't hold several qualities at once
Clearly, the children do not make the connection that an iron might be a good tool to use on clothes or curly hair but not on babies. These children are not cruel or limited, but they are incapable of holding several qualities of an object or situation in their minds…
Wrinkles and irons, one aspect at a time
They are focusing on one aspect of the baby—the baby has wrinkles, and one aspect of the iron—the iron is used to get wrinkles out. The children do not naturally consider at the same time that the iron is hot, hot enough to hurt, and that a baby has skin like theirs that could…
Concrete operations and reversibility
When children enter Piaget’s stage of concrete operations at about age seven, many changes in their thought patterns are visible. At this age (usually from about seven through eleven or twelve) children possess the characteristic of reversibility, which allows them to reverse…
Formal operations and hypothetical thinking
The final stage Piaget outlined is formal operations. This stage begins around age eleven or twelve and is marked by the ability to think logically and in hypothetical terms. According to Piaget, once this stage is reached, young people can wrestle with such questions as “Is it…
Tim Lott – Zen Buddhism And Alan Watts
Zen and science
While it is refreshing that Zen philosophy is supported in many ways by present scientific knowledge, it is also a critique of scientific thought. The scientific tradition requires things up to be cut up — both mentally and physically — into smaller and small pieces to…
Villa Metaphora (Andrea De Carlo)
La solitudine sull'isola e la purezza del silenzio
Per gran parte dei tre mesi e mezzo che ha passato sull’isola è stato praticamente da solo, se si esclude qualche operaio e trasportatore, e ogni tanto Perusato e Lucia in missione di controllo. Ha potuto apprezzare in piena solitudine la purezza della luce e l’intensità del…