CCCC online!

The Copenhagen Circle for the study of Culture and Cognition (CCCC) has begun blogging!

I will be contributiong to CognitionCulture.blogspot.com along with Gabe Levy, Anders Lisdorf, Christian C. Højbjerg, Peter Westh and other members of our small group.

So, in the future, check the above blog for cognition-stuff.

In other news, I just finished the last installment in my work on imagination, for now. This means that I will be focusing on finishing my master's degree with a few papers on brainwashing, the ritual in narrative psychology and other interesting stuff. Wit a little luck I should be all clear to write my master's thesis sometime during the summer.

Quote of the day

Too true:

"When used by theorists outside of neurology, 'CNS' should stand not for 'central nervous system', but for "conceptual nervous system'."
- D. O. Hebb


By the way, my computer is broken, so untill I get it fixed or buy a new one, I will only be online at work, and not available on messenger.

Haircut

So, it finally happened. After more than ten years with long hair, I got my hair cut. Sitting down in that chair with the friendly, talky, trendy hairdresser fuzzing about me was really wierd, and uncomfortable. The whole thing reminded me of trips to the the dentist's.

I ended up with something along the lines of tousled, spiky, not-too-short-but-definitely-short. I always thought that when the ponytail finally dropped, I should do something along the lines of Cristopher Lambert in "Metro" or John Smith from The Cure, and it's a little bit like that, only less extreme.

Photos available at my web page

Drunken Haircut Fundraiser

(doesn't that sound like the name for a bad college-band or something?)

I have been wanting to do something about my hair for a long while. At the last roleplaying "con" in the Easter holiday, I realised that my ponytail - even if well kept and frequently cut to an appropriate length - signified "geek" or even worse "live-role player" (which I am not!). It made me blend perfectly in with the embarassing parts of the crowd, that reminded me painfully of my pseudo-gothic "oooh look at me, I'm unique and special, and my clothes signals my profound spiritual debth - also I can't relate to girls or the normal crowd"-teenage style. It made me embarrased, and after telling a friend that I needed to get that haircut, I have been pestered in turns by my own fear of change and my buddies trying to keep me to my word.

Yesterday, at a party, they startd on the hair again, and I blurted out that if they did a bit of fundraising, and gathered the 200 crowns that a mid-priced cut would cost, I would get that haircut done first thing in the new week. So they did. In less than 3 minutes, they had actually scraped a lot of money together! Now I am obliged to go to the hairdresser's, and that is the nudge I needed.

So, thanks Jonas, Frederik, Morten, Mikkel and Thomas! You will see the results very soon...

Popular science...

Over the summer I have had quite a lot to do. I am probably writing this, because I know that I should be writing other stuff...

After my exams were finished, I went with my family to Mallorca off the coast of Spain. There, of course, I tried to do a bit of reading in the shade of the palmtrees, and I decided that I might as well both bring something 'light' and something more 'heavy'. By light, I mean popular science. I felt a bit guilty about reading journalism-style writing that obstinate firts-year students might include in their repertiore, but thought what the heck; I'm on a holiday.

Then it dawned on me. Some of the most influential books in my life have been published for a broader audience. I realized that this probably has to do with the fact, that the more I enjoy reading something, the greater the chance that something will stick in my mind. If something is extremely tough to get through, I don't enjoy it very much. Secondly, a writer usually has to have something important or controvrsial to say before publishing a book of popular science, and I'm pretty sure that the editorial process is a lot stricter in this venue of publishing.

So, to sum up, I have come to terms with "popular science". "Religion explained" by Pascal Boyer, which is one of the most influential and citet works in the cognitive study of religion was published as a popular-ish paperback, and the same goes for many other great books on subjects that I find important. If one looks beyond the obvious sensationalist and self-help books on the science shelves, a serious scholar being published for a broader audience is more often than not a sign of quality. Also, the coffe-table stuff, that really lacks in seriousness, has a charming way of relating anecdotes that will always be useful as ice-breakers and examples (spring-board storis if you will). "Freakonomics" by Levitt is an example of this.

In conclusion, I like popular science. It is easier to read, and contains lots of funny stuff that make the points easier to remember. Hooray for popular science, the easy way out of research, or the easy way into a subject.
I have no shame readning the stuff, while letting the grand works of science gather a bit of dust over the summer.

The quest for the Theoretical Standpoint

Now, I have been giving my personal theoretical standpoint some thought. The view that I have on human, psychological and cultural matters is largely constructed out of:
a.) theories and scholars that I buy into or want to buy into
b.) a basically realist phenomenological standpoint
c.) a notion of "good" that is worth orienting towards, rather than an evasive absolute truth
d.) a notion of both cognitive and socially constructed views of reality, that may or may not distort, or at least colour, every notion of reality

I believe that deconstruction into smaller parts must stop somewhere. Even though we might have the theoretical ability to break phenomena into smaller units, each phenomenon that can be "seen" on some level of theory - especially basic folk-notions - is worth looking at, as a sort of ontological entity. I want to help understand, not undermine. If people 'out there' utilise some notion in their daily life and actions, then that phenomenon is real to them, and worth investigating if we want to understand that level of human reality. I'm not saying that every notion of reality is equally 'real' or 'good' - just that people base their daily life on what is real to them, and this activity in daily life is what constitutes cultural and practical reality.

I think that the constellation of theoretical angles might be somehow coined through a model resembling a skewed hourglass (pardon the crude picture):

Social - Cultural
\ /
Cognitive science & psychology
/ l Neuropsychology
l /
Evolutionary
biology/psychology

Every line - starting from the top and down - must be understood as "viewed in light of...", and a line should have been going from each of 'cultural' and 'social' to the 'cognitive' level

The point of the model is to show the actual fields of interest (mainly the social and cultural in my case) descending into deeper and deeper levels of explanation (ending up in evolutionary psychology, which is a dangerous field to rely on to heavily). The drawing doesn't allow me to show it very well, but the top triangle consisting of social-sciences, cultural-theory and cognitive science is supposed to be pretty even. Social and cultural areas are mutually generative, but both grunded in individual/racual cognition.
The lower triangle, on the other hand, is supposed to be rather skewed, showing the possible venues of explanaition for the cognitive level. Neuropsychology and the evolutionary background is somewhat linked, even though it comes down to the first,wich is also largely inaccessible to science exept through tentative theories. The point of the skewedness of the lower triangle, is to show that I have more faith in neuropsychology as an explanation for cognitive sciende, but that that area must rest on a basic ground-level of evolution that we cant' circumvent in theory.

In other words; I think that the study of culture must somehow come down to an explanation trough cognition, which must in turn be more or less implicitly anchored in an acceptance of the importance of both neural levels and evolutionary background.

Thus, the center of my interest is cognitive science, because of its relevance to culture and social reality, whereas the levels of neuropsychological and evolutionary explanations of human faculty, must always be an implicit level in this construction - the most basic level of reductionism, if you will.

This is as much a mental experiment, and an attempt to align my theoretical tools, as it is a theory of any kind. It will probably be cast aside shortly, but for now it has been put into words.

That's all folks
Thanks for listening

The politics of writing theory

I have been thinking lately - mainly because I am supposed to think about something else - about the implications and moral obligations of writing for mid-level education.

On the one hand, I have a strong ideal that people should be allowed to figure "the truth" out for themselves. Mainly because I am a genX child of the postmodern, and have no clue what "the truth" might be if it - contrary to my intuitions - should exist out there, somewhere... (Probably on a beach sipping a drink with pieces of exotic fruit and an umbrella in it, because it seems to have taken a good long vacation lately...)

On the other hand, I believe that people have no chance in hell of figuring out what is going on by themselves, and If they are not given a bit of help adopting a critical perspective, they will probably end up buying the simplest and cheapest answers, mainlly peddled by right-wing populists.

Therefore, I am caught in a dilemma (apart from the fact that this is plainly an excuse from writing the paper, that I am supposed to be working on...): An article should strive to be neutral and give a varied view of the field, but on the other hand, it seems to me, that it is the duty of every published writer or artist to join in the political debate, and at least try to give people tools to shrug off populist hegemony... or an additional angle, at least.
But... doing that, I might just enter the discourse of pointless panicked leftist dribble going on in the more unfortunate varieties of critical theory, or, worse still, take part in the construction of futher one-sided political imperatives and academeese nonsense that no-one outside of the walls can benefit from.

And in all of that, the rules of "good objective science" seems to be held at knife-point by political correctness, the will to do good and publishers...

That stuff can really make your head spin.

Summer rain, flow and regrets

I'm really on a writing roll right now - both my paper and this blog. I'm in a state of flow, and even though there is no hint of structure (I guess I'll sort that out tomorrow), Ideas are pouring out and onto the pages. It is raining outside, but it's not really as cold as you might expect. I have opened both doors to the balcony of our two-roomer wide, to get all the fragrance from wet leaves , asphalt and earth inside. I would have liked to sit out there, but it's too dark to read, and the power-cable for my computer won't reach. I love summer rain, especially by night. It puts me in a romantic, even pining, mood. Morcheeba on the speakers.

The mood makes me realise that my principal regret in life is a burned hard-disc some years back. I had gotten a labtop, so the loss of hardware was of little consequence, but on the hard drive was my combined creative production - ever. A few years prior to that, I lost my entire portfolio of sketches. I never got back to drawing after that either.
The role-playing stuff, essays and odd ends of fiction in the disc was no great loss, but my songs were. I had taken the time to type in all the lyrics and tabs for songs I had written in my early twenties (mostly about love and summer rain) and even if they weren't that original, I still poured my heart into them. Girls seemed to like them too. I wanted to be a non-semitic gen-x Cohen. Recently I realised that I have forgotten about half of the songs, and those that I do have the printed lyrics for, I forgot how to play. I never got back to writing music, and it breaks my heart...

The cats have been fighting for half an hour now - probably exited by my erratic typing. I'm getting annoyed with the disturbance, and the blood have left my fingers, leaving them ice-cold and numb. The coffe is starting to disagree with me as well...

Upcoming publications

Since I have just gone public (instead of just writing to myself and my own constructed life-trajectory-narrative-whatever...), I might as well do some more self-promotion.
In the year 2006 I will be publishishing the following;

- I am bursting with pride that my paper for the international conference "Origins of religion, cognition and culture" entitled "Religion and the emergence of human imagination" has been accepted for the associated publication. I have made significant progress in my research on the cognitive study and description of imagination since January, so I will have a good deal of writing to do over the summer. Deadline September.

- I contribute two articles on fantasy literature for a book primarily directed at teacher's colleges, first-second year college students, and danish grammar-school (3.g opgaver i gymnasier). One will be on the psychological interpretation and personal and cultural significance of Fantasy-stories, and the other a more political and post-structuralist inspired account of the heroic character in fantasy-fiction (with Frederik Berg Olsen, who will contribute a different angle based on Campbell's Hero with a Thousand faces). Deadline August.

Staying with publications. My recently article entitled "With role-playing in mind - a cognitive account of decoupled reality, experinece and identity", featured in the new Knutepunkt book "Role, play, art" has been very well received indeed, and I am currently looking for a venue of publication for its theoretical big-brother which was presented at "Playing Roles" in Tampere, Finland this March.

Getting there - who cares about individuals anyways?

OK, a little more happy now. I have been writing the name Derrida five or six times, which always makes me feel better. This is remarkable, since I don't understand one word the guy wrote - but then again, nobody does... which is what makes post-structuralist stuff so great for drunken argumens and term-papers...

I am getting intensely annoyed with Danish psychologists because they insist on making up their own words for concepts that already have perfectly good names; social constructivism was used by Piaget in a different sense, so now they use the term "social constructIONism" for what everybody else understands by social constructivism... It might seem a trifle, but I have a gut-feeling (get it?) that those guys are getting on my "to sue for bleeding ulcers"-list.