Beginnings

  Good evening, blogosphere. Here's my first post, with a brief explanation of what I'm trying to begin here, and why.

  I'm going to use this space as a think-aloud protocol for ideas that I'm working on, for either business or pleasure, that I think others might value and benefit from. Since I'm hoping to take up wisdom research as a career, and have put three years of thought into the subject so far, you'll see a lot of that here... what wisdom is, what it isn't, why it's important, and how it impacts and is impacted by our thoughts, actions, and lives. However, don't expect what you read here to be a series of irrefutable arguments on the subject. I intend to use this space for more fast-and-loose meme-play about wisdom, leaving the tighter, more formal argumentation to the writing I'm doing with Dr. John Vervaeke and David Kim, which we intend to submit for publication.

  Aside from wisdom, I have a bunch of other interests within Cognitive Science that will perennially surface on this blog. I might throw in write-ups on or links to cool goings-on in A.I. research, for example, or consciousness studies, mindfulness, embodiment, emergence... and on and on.

  Since the mind necessarily impinges on practically every facet of our existence, the boundaries of the discipline of Cognitive Science are some of the fuzziest you'll find. Even though this can sometimes cause my attention to become spread too thinly across my dangerously eclectic set of interests, it usually allows for very powerful and insightful associative thinking. This breadth of interests will certainly be reflected in the types of posts you'll find here. I'm quite sure that the generalist-friendly attitude that I associate with Cognitive Science had a major role in me choosing it over Psychology as my program of study. I'm a dabbler, and I love stitching disparate ideas together in novel ways. I suppose that's why I find CogSci so personally rewarding. So don't be surprised to read posts about stuff from philosphy or computer science, or literature, or even more distantly-related spheres of knowledge, like economics, or ornithology, or knot theory. It's often the things that initially appear rather irrelevant that trigger the most profound insights.

  Since I enjoy writing fiction, I'll be posting some of that, too. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the stuff that I've been scribbling down for fun has had a mentalistic bent to it, so I've decided to try and focus on CogSci-Fi... works of fiction related to the mind, augmented by a healthy dose of science. Dreams, hallucinations, personality disorders, clairvoyance, and so on. Figuring out the ramifications of slight changes in how our minds actually work sounded like a fun thing to write about, so I'll probably have stories that attempt to answer questions like, "What if our brains had property x instead of property y?"

  And with that, it's time begin.

  Welcome to Cortical Wisdom.

  May it make your gray matter matter more.