Bart Hopkins Jr.'s Blog

Concepts are predictions, Lisa Barrett says, in her book How Emotions Are Made. As we go through life, we learn to categorize things. Why? Putting an object, action, or event in a category lets us infer many things, including how it will act.

We learn by association and much of it is unconscious, George Lakoff writes, in Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy In The Flesh. Those things we associate unconsciouly, like happy and up, more and up, success and up, warmth and affection, white and puri...

How do we think? Susan Greenfield has stated that thought is “movement confined to the brain.” Others contend there is a special language of thought. We think using concepts, our ways of dividing and understanding what is in the world. They are not neccesarily linguistic. Animals have concepts, too. But for the most part, they are not linguistic at all.

Concepts are mental representations of categories. Concepts are also implicitly or explicitly theor etical about the world and how it works. W...

Ian McGilchrist in The Matter With Things says: brain disease or mental illness, then, is a change in a person ‘s whole way of being in the world. I would add stroke to that list although some strokes are small and don’t affect people that much.

I had a stroke on May 2, 5 months ago, which did affect my thinking and right side a bit. I would implore everybody to check your blood pressure often. Exercise is not enough, as I found out. A diet with less salt and meat helps. I am close to normal,...

Climate is a complex subject when you’re not a meteorologist. I found the easiest way for me, as a layperson, to understand global warming was to follow the Carbon Dioxide chain of events. (Though that is complex enough!) While Carbon Dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas, it is a major contributor to warming.

1. First off, carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation, meaning it holds heat.

2. The amount of carbon dioxide in the lower atmosphere has been increasing since human industrializa...

What can I say? One of the most thought-provoking, valuable books ever! I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 50 years ago, in 1974, and have read, reread, and studied it numerous times since.

Pirsig was prescient about many things in our society.

Neuroscientists now think our brains are best described as prediction devices. We learn to categorize patterns and objects unconsciously from near birth. As we grow, our minds build models of the world, unconscious and conscious ...

I wrote a book about critical thinking. I’m not that intelligent, but I’ve read the thoughts of many folks who likely are. I took the best of these thoughts, credited the authors when appropriate, and put them in short illustrated sections to help in the critical appraisal of issues and situations.

Checking with fact-checkers on issues is important. Finding multiple reliable sources of information is also vital. Certainly, one of the biggest problems today is the proliferation of misinformati...

The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science, written by Steven Mithen, was published nearly thirty years ago, in 1996.

His daunting self-set task: to explain the evolution of the modern human mind.

Mithen is an archaeologist who has access to and studies artifacts from the prehistoric past. While there are many, in absolute terms, their number is comparatively small when looking at the vast ranges of time involved.

One question has often troubled tho...

My new book Models of Reality is now out at Amazon. It talks about modes of thought and reason and how important they are in today’s world. Cover by Bart Hopkins, enhanced photo, originally from NASA.

This book is fascinating in so many ways. Barbara Tversky accomplishes the creative task of making the familiar strange and new again. Her findings dovetail nicely with the study of analogy, since so often our spatial and embodied relations are transferred to more abstract realms. Abstract language is, in fact, largely built by analogy.

Loved the prose style. I think sentence fragments, as long as the meaning is clear, are often a more concise, quicker way to impart information than unnecessa...

Doing science is a lot like climbing a mountain. You start off in the lowlands with the things everybody knows. As you climb your particular peak, you gain more and more knowledge about whatever your field of study is.

Getting close to the top is difficult because, most of the time, to reach that point you need to absorb what is already known in any area. That’s usually a ton of information. But any journey to the unknown must begin with the known, by standing on the shoulders of others. Know...