Metaphors Of Conciousness

As we move into the 1980s, there is an increasing awareness that our civilization is going through a profound cultural transformation. At the heart of this transformation lies what is often called a "paradigm shift"-a dramatic change in the thoughts, perceptions, and values which form a particular vision of reality. The paradigm that is now shifting comprises a large number of ideas and values that have dominated our society for several hundred years; values that have been associated with various streams of Western culture, among them the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, The Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. They include the belief in the scientific method as the only valid approach to knowledge, the split between mind and matter, the view of nature as a mechanical system, the view of life in society as a competitive struggle for survival, and the belief in unlimited material progress to be achieved through economic and technological growth. All these ideas and values are now found to be severely limited and in need of radical revision.

First published in 2000, this book explores the metaphors used by philosophers and psychologists to understand memory over the centuries.

Curiosity about the human mind—what it is and how it functions—began long before modern psychology. But because the mind and its processes are so elusive, they could be described only by means of metaphor. Michael Kearns, in this prize-winning study, examines the development of metaphors of the mind in psychological writings from Hobbes through William James and in fiction from Defoe through Henry James. Throughout the eighteenth century and even into the early nineteenth, metaphors of the mind as a relatively simple entity, either mechanical or biological, dominated both those engaged in psychological theorizing and novelists ranging from Richardson and Smollett through Dickens and the Brontes. In the nineteenth century, such psychologists as Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain conceived of the mind as a complex organism quite different from that embodied in earlier thinking, but their figurative language did not keep pace. The result was a tension between theoretical expression and actual discussion of mental phenomena

Describing how to give individuals an opportunity to discover how their symbolic perceptions are organized, what needs to happen for these to change, and how they can develop as a result, this text includes three client transcripts.

Arguing that psychologists and their predecessors have invariably relied on metaphors in articulation, the contributors to this volume offer a new "key" to understanding a critically important area of human knowledge by specifying the major metaphors.

On a quest for the roots of intelligence, Natural Metaphor: The Intelligent Evolution of Consciousness is both timely and timeless. Sourcing its inspiration in nature, both around and within us, Natural Metaphor draws from the scientific and theoretical insights that explain nature's form and dynamics, while deferring to the mystical seers who speak of its substance. As science probes ever deeper into the mysteries and complexities of the universe and its denizens, an underlying, unifying pattern emerges from beneath the sheath of outward disparity. This pattern is transcendent enough to reconcile the seeming opposition between science, with its meticulous observation of forms and processes, and spirituality, with its inwardly penetrating nature. Natural Metaphor crosses the bridge between diversity of form and the singular condition which underlies it, revealing all formal variations to be physically enacted metaphors of a single, indissoluble wholeness. While endlessly variable in contour and capacity, each participant in the ongoing project of manifestation is bound to every other by universal laws that are common to all. Beyond these all-inclusive principles, however, are higher laws, intelligently constructed, that emerge with each evolutionary venture into novelty and complexity, but which are still circumscribed by the same foundational parameters. Although not currently numbered among the primary forces of the universe, intelligence offers its subtle guidance at even the most elementary levels of complexity and evolution. Disclosing its adaptive logic through the physical vehicles it fashions and inhabits; the interactions that enjoin those forms into complex systems; and even the language that allows explicit disclosure of form's inner experience, intelligence is as paramount to evolution as physical law. Its function is to create the structure that is necessary to convey its ineffable foundation on an embodied journey through event and experience, whispering the same secret with a multitude of voices--that of their origin, consciousness itself.

The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.

"In Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman explores fundamental questions about memory, thought, emotion, consciousness, and other cognitive processes through the game of chess, using the moves of thirty-two pieces over sixty-four squares to map the structural and functional organization of the brain." --Book Jacket.