INVENTING NEW COGNITIVE PROCESSES. What might account for how mindapps provide new ways to use our minds such as in problem solving? Emergence is a clue. Emergence points out that combinations of things often produce characteristics that their individual parts don’t posses. For example, when the two gasses hydrogen and oxygen combine, water has watery qualities that neither gas does alone. Colloquially, this is often expressed as: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. When the components of our brains including their chemistry combine and interplay, they produce mindstates (a.k.a. states of consciousness) that the individual parts don’t possess, and the emergent characteristics are such things as cognitive processes, intra-brain communication, and self-awareness. This is one explanation for what we call “mind,” a collection of emergent properties. When we change the underlying brain chemistry, say with psychedelics or other mindapps, new cognitive processes with their distinct characteristics appear. Prohibiting this process prohibits the full development of the human mind. Promoting this process promotes mind development. ---------------------- forthcoming in You Have a Constitutional Right to Psychedelics by T. Roberts Chapter in The Psychedelic Policy Quagmire, JH Ellens & TB Roberts (eds.). Praeger, Westport, CT. & ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:11:22 +0000
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