spacer
Down the Rabbit Hole
Posted by Joseph Riggio on Tuesday, July 18, 2006Exploring the layers and depths of “cognitive resourcing” ...
Hey everyone!
[WELCOME TO THE NEW WEBSITE RELEASE: Finally ... the “heavy lifting,” as a colleague of mine has said, is done and we are on our way with a new website featuring a “new look and feel” - as well as a dramtically redefined mission and interface. When you’re ready take a look around and get a sense of what we’re up to ... you’ll also notice that we still have a-ways to go ... but I wanted to get this up and out to you all ASAP!]
Now onto today’s comments ...
In developing our new website I’ve had to think long and hard about many things - most centering around what I wanted this site to be representing and how it would serve the community who gathers here. This meant that there were some issues rising up to the service very quickly: “What would the interface look and feel like?” ... “Does the site adequately represent me, my work and my working style?” ... “Is the information here relevant and useful to this community?” ... these thoughts were near the top of my list for instance.
However, there was one specific question which overrode all others from my point of view ... and we’re really talking about the world according to me:
This question is: “What is the essential work I do?”
This question dominated all others because this site re-design was all about building a resouce center in regard to what I do. So ... the answer came to me slowly, the easiest way to frame my area of expertise and practice would be: “I am a cognitive scientist.” Now I’d be curious to hear how true (or not) this rings for those of you who know me and my work.
Specifically, the reason I suggest this title ... “cognitive scientist” ... is because virtually everything I do at some point comes back to reference some aspect of our cognitive acts and the behaviors they generate in the world. These acts are for me, as anyone who knows the slightest bit about my work would agree, “ontologically situated” - meaning that for me cognition functions on the ground of our being. Who we are more than any other single factor determines not only what, but how, we cognitively process things. Our entire experience is a function of this processing. What we perceive, what we know, what we believe and ultimately what we do ... are all grounded in who we are.
So then the next level would have to be that I am an “ontologically-organized cognitive scientist” not just any old cognitive scientist.
The next point we want to address is that the specifics of what we consider are at the center of cognition. These are the “what” of cognition, the raw material we process. Within my consideration of the topic of what is the material of cognition I come up with the things of the world - not abstractions but rather concrete experience in the world. These things are the real artifacts we encounter in the world, as well as the sensory-based experiences we have. Some examples of sensory-based experience would be our interactions with others, all the things that our occur between ourselves and others that “really happen.” Within the structure of my considerations of cognition the “stuff” we process exists at some level in the extant world.
So, the third level must be that I am an “ontologically-organized concrete cognitive scientist” - referencing the “what” of cognition.
Of course once you begin to discus “what” you’ll often find yourself led to considering “how” as well. These two aspects of action are so intertwined as to be virtually inseperable. We act upon something in some particular way, regardless of whether that something is an intrinsically extant thing like a house, or something that isn’t as intrinsically extant like an idea or concept. The how of cognition from my point of view has always been an embodied consideration. We “think” in an embodied way. As we encounter the “stuff” of cognition we experience it in ourselves as a body-based response. To a great extent I’d argue that in many ways we are our bodies, so fundamentally it only makes sense that we would process our experience in a body-based way. The process of cogntion as embodied however has not always been a given in the world of cognitive science so this is a controversial position to take even today. Yet I stand firm in this position that cognition is situated not only in the concrete world in terms of what we consider, but also in terms of the way in which we consider it.
So now we arrive at another level, that I am an “ontologically-organized concrete, embodied cognitive scientist” - taking us much further down this rabbit hole of consideration.
Where this is leading is straight to what I will argue is the most fundamental of all cognitve acts, deciding. Our life is the string of the decisions we’ve made, and anything that serves to improve the process by which we make the decisions from which we make our lives thereby improves our lives. This is where I’ve gathered my professional attention for more than ten years, around the process we use to make the decisions that become our lives as we know them. I have “lived and breathed” the pursuit of a somatically-based decision-making process during this entire time. My work as a “cognitive scientist” is specifically in the domain of decision-making and helping folks to buid higher-quality lives by teaching them how to make higher-quality decisions that are ontologically organized, concrete and embodied - as they go ...
I promise I’ll come back to the application of these ruminations soon.
Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Princeton, NJ
