Attachment, deadness, desire, and addictive buzz traps

In this article I describe those caught up in an increasingly common but worrying phenomenon, that of addictive states of mind, seen, for example, in obsessional use of video games or pornography. While the contemporary world has exacerbated the risks, addictive traits often originate in attempts to escape from an inner pain or deadness towards the false promise offered by the object of addiction. The article offers a different view of the dopaminergic system. It also looks at how the contemporary world is posing new challenges for people who have developed with such a propensity, and we will see how those prone to addictive states of mind struggle to bear certain emotional states, finding them overwhelming, and instead reach for a solution via their addiction.

Qui êtes-vous ? L’imaginaire du retrait dans la vieillesse

"This article proposes the approach of the imaginary of the retreat in old age and its identity implications. The rich semantism of the term retreat implies different states of mind, different worldviews and behaviours, on a scale between normality and pathology, between self-preservation and self-alienation."

The Goddess of Freedom

This chapter examines the sutra’s understanding of freedom by following the story of a goddess who for one full chapter becomes the principal teacher. She gives instruction on the formation of intention and the necessity to avoid clinging to all states of mind. She repudiates the pride of self-seeking by denying her own achievements, and teaches how bodhisattvas should understand gender roles and distinctions—by seeing how dependent and impermanent they really are. The goddess’s role in the sutra is to open Buddhism to greater flexibility and to new insights. This chapter seeks to define what those insights are.

Chaos Rainbows

Chapter 4 provides an examination of the common states of mind arising out of openness, including schizotypy, reduced latent inhibition, and cognitive disinhibition. The chapter reconstructs a frame of mind artists themselves have a hard time describing. From there, questions center on the shaping, the organizing, and the ordering involved in art-making. Most of the chapter is dedicated to chaos and its roots in personality. But chaos alone isn’t enough. Creativity is making something. Chaos is a means to that end, the making. How the artist uses chaos is just as important as finding ways to stay open to it. Numerous artists are used as illustrations, including Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Jobs, and Joni Mitchell. A four-step model for how raw materials get shaped into art is also presented.

I Wanna Draw Like You: Inter- and Intra-Individual Differences in Orang-Utan Drawings

This study analyses 749 drawings by five female Bornean orang-utans (Pongo pygmaeus) at Tama Zoological Park in Japan. We searched for differences between individuals but also tried to identify possible temporal changes among the drawings of one individual, Molly, who drew almost 1300 drawings from 2006 to 2011. An analysis of the drawings was carried out after collecting quantitative and qualitative variables. Our findings reveal evidence of differences in the drawing style of the five individuals as well as creative changes in Molly’s drawing style throughout her lifetime. Individuals differed in terms of the colours used, the space they filled, and the shapes (fan patterns, circles, or loops) they drew. Molly drew less and less as she grew older, and we found a significant difference between drawings produced in winter, when orang-utans were kept inside and had less activity, and those produced during other seasons. Our results suggest that the drawing behaviour of these five orang-utans is not random and that differences among individuals might reflect differences of styles, states of mind, and motivation to draw.

Peirce’s legacy for contemporary consciousness studies, the emergence of consciousness from qualia, and its evanescence in habits

The paper argues that contemporary consciousness studies can profit from Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy of consciousness. It confronts mainstream tendencies in contemporary consciousness studies, including those which consider consciousness as an unsolvable mystery, with Peirce’s phenomenological approach to consciousness. Peirce’s answers to the following contemporary issues are presented: phenomenological consciousness and the qualia, consciousness as self-controlled agency of humans, self-control and self-reflection, consciousness and language, self-consciousness and introspection, consciousness and the other, consciousness of nonhuman animals, and the question of a quasi-consciousness of the physical universe. A detailed account of Peirce’s three modes of consciousness is presented: (1) primisense, qualisense or feeling-consciousness, (2) altersense (consciousness of the other), and (3) medisense, the consciousness of cognition, thought, and reasoning. In contrast to consciousness studies that establish a rather sharp dividing line between conscious and unconscious states of mind, Peirce adopts the principle of synechism, the theory of continuity. For him, consciousness is a matter of degree. An important difference between Peirce’s concept of qualia and current theories of qualia in human consciousness is discussed. The paper shows how consciousness, according to Peirce, emerges from unconscious qualia and vanishes into equally unconscious habits. It concludes with a study of the roles of qualia, habit, and self-control in Peirce’s theory of signs, in particular in qualisigns and symbols, and the question of signs as quasi-conscious agents in semiosis.

I Wanna Draw Like You: Inter- and Intra-Individual Differences in Orang-utan Drawings

This study analyses 749 drawings of five female Bornean orang-utans (Pongo pygmaeus) at Tama Zoological Park in Japan. We searched for differences between individuals but also tried to identify possible temporal changes among the drawings of one individual, Molly, who drew almost 1,300 drawings from 2006 to 2016. An analysis of the drawings was carried out after collecting quantitative and qualitative variables. Our findings reveal evidence of differences in the drawing style of the five individuals as well as creative changes in Molly’s drawing style throughout her lifetime. Individuals differed in terms of the colours used, the space they filled but also the shapes (fan patterns, circles or loops) they drew. Molly drew less and less as she grew older, and we found a significant difference between drawings produced in winter, when orang-utans were kept inside and had less activity, and those produced during other seasons. Our results suggest that the drawing behaviour of these five orang-utans is not random and that differences among individuals might reflect differences of styles, states of mind but also motivation to draw.