warning: existential crisis below

Spirit Smoothies Speech; Presentation

How does thought affect reality?

Cognitive Science

- Perspective

- Immanuel Kant (thing-in-itself)

- Emotion

- Cognitive Science

I'm going to explain to you the basics of having an existential crisis by explaining a couple of things related to cognitive science.

Perspective

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The first thing that you need to know is perspective. Your perspective, or point of view, is, well, how you view things. You might've heard of first or second or third person, which changes how you write, by using either I, you, or they/he/she as the pronouns. Your perspective could also be called your cognition – people see things differently as they process visual information through different cognitions.

//lowkey using persona 5 as reference

"Cognition" can be defined as the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understating through thought, experience, and the senses. When there is a stimulus, something that you react to, there are multiple factors to your reaction. The basic response is through your senses, such as see/touch/hear/feel/smell and instinct – for example, fight or flight. Whether you fight, or you fly is determined by your thought and experience – your personal information, which is tailored to your personality through nature and nurture, memory, history, and overall upbringing.

Your cognition can not only apply to concepts and actions, but also to simple objects.

//palaces

Immanuel Kant – thing-in-itself

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(... an example of this would be) Immanuel Kant is a philosopher who introduced the concept of a thing-in-itself. He introduces this concept by saying:

"[...] considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, [...] the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something."

Kant argues that "the sum of all objects, the (empirical) world, is a complex of appearances whose existence and connection occur only in our representations"

A "thing-in-itself" is related to a "noumenon", which, in simple English, is an object seen without human sense or perception. For example, you might see a meal and just call it "stuffed cabbage", when it could also be called "chou farci". A chef might know the more complicated and "official" name of a meal, like a musician might call a certain note a "soprano" or something similar, because of the different knowledge that is possessed.

A "thing-in-itself" is essentially seen as without colour (so this chair isn't ___), without a label (it's no longer a chair) and without any sense used to see it, as senses vary between individuals. Dogs smell things better than humans, and do not speak English, so they would be able to identify a smell but not "label it".

Imagine if aliens, with no senses at all, apart from basic sight, so they would be deaf, colour blind, and unable to smell, taste or feel anything (both physically and emotionally), were to come to earth, and see this chair.

It wouldn't be a chair – what would it be though? It would simply be an object, so it wouldn't exist.

But what if these aliens had emotions.

Emotion

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If one of these aliens was mad, it might see this object as a piece of junk (I never said the alien couldn't think or maybe speak English). It might be so mad that it breaks this chair because who would want to sit in it. Not that the alien knows that it's for sitting. If it was curious, it might consider the chair as an interesting object.

Back to being human.

How you feel affects the way you might experience a moment. Especially if you have depression. You might define memories as "positive" or "negative" memories, which changes depending on the emotions you were feeling at the time.

Cognitive Science

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Okay. I'm done. Bye.

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