“Language allows us to represent autobiographical events in the past, present and future; we can imagine events that have not yet happened, that we wish to happen or fear will happen. Jerome Bruner first proposed narratives as the best candidate for how people give meaning to the world, themselves and dominated in our everyday representation of our lives, rather than narrower units that featured in the information processing paradigm at that time.”
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“Under the best conditions, disasters and plagues did that. It wasn’t universally true. There would always be hoarders and price gouging, people who closed their doors to refugees and left them freezing and starving. But the impulse to help was there too. To carry a burden together, even if it meant having less for yourself. Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’t come without the other, and Holden had to take comfort in that. The sense that however terrible humanity’s failings were, there was still a little more in them worth admiring.”
― Babylon's Ashes
― Babylon's Ashes
“If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.”
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“In sum, then, "thinking about thinking" has to be a principal ingredient of any empowering practice of education.”
― Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture
― Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture
“Contrary to common sense there is no unique "real world" that pre-exists and is independent of human mental activity and human symbolic language; that which we call the world is a product of some mind whose symbolic procedures construct the world.”
― Actual Minds, Possible Worlds
― Actual Minds, Possible Worlds
Robert’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Robert’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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