cognition

We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.

I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices.

Having escaped the Dark Ages in which animals were mere stimulus-response machines, we are free to contemplate their mental lives. It is a great leap forward, the one that Griffin fought for. But now that animal cognition is an increasingly popular topic, we are still facing the mindset that animal cognition can be only a poor substitute of what we humans have. It can__ be truly deep and amazing. Toward the end of a long career, many a scholar cannot resist shining a light on human talents by listing all the things we are capable of and animals not. From the human perspective, these conjectures may make a satisfactory read, but for anyone interested, as I am, in the full spectrum of cognitions on our planet, they come across as a colossal waste of time. What a bizarre animal we are that the only question we can ask in relation to our place in nature is __irror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all?

The hormonal interplay inside a woman__ head creates her reality. Her hormones tell her day to day what__ important. They mold her desires and values.

There are two aspects of man__ existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.I am referring here to romantic love, in the serious meaning of that term__s distinguished from the superficial infatuations of those whose sense of life is devoid of any consistent values, i.e., of any lasting emotions other than fear. Love is a response to values. It is with a person__ sense of life that one falls in love__ith that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person__ character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul__he individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness. It is one__ own sense of life that acts as the selector, and responds to what it recognizes as one__ own basic values in the person of another. It is not a matter of professed convictions (though these are not irrelevant); it is a matter of much more profound, conscious and subconscious harmony.Many errors and tragic disillusionments are possible in this process of emotional recognition, since a sense of life, by itself, is not a reliable cognitive guide. And if there are degrees of evil, then one of the most evil consequences of mysticism__n terms of human suffering__s the belief that love is a matter of __he heart,_ not the mind, that love is an emotion independent of reason, that love is blind and impervious to the power of philosophy. Love is the expression of philosophy__f a subconscious philosophical sum__nd, perhaps, no other aspect of human existence needs the conscious power of philosophy quite so desperately. When that power is called upon to verify and support an emotional appraisal, when love is a conscious integration of reason and emotion, of mind and values, then__nd only then__t is the greatest reward of man__ life.

Poor feeling hijacks thinking for self-deception: to hide harsh truths, avoid action, evade responsibility, and, as the existentialists might put it, flee from freedom. Thus, poor feeling is a kind of moral failing, indeed, the deepest kind, and virtue principally consists in correcting and refining our emotions and the values that they reflect. To feel the right thing is to do the right thing, without any particular need for conscious thought or effort.

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.

Another big group of dolphins had just surfaced alongside our moving vessel__eaping and splashing and calling mysteriously back and forth in their squeally, whistly way, with many babies swift alongside their mothers. And this time, confined to just the surface of such deep and lovely lives, I was becoming unsatisfied. I wanted to know what they were experiencing, and why to us they feel so compelling, and so__lose. This time I allowed myself to ask them the question that was forbidden fruit: Who are you? Science usually steers firmly from questions about the inner lives of animals. Surely they have inner lives of some sort. But like a child who is admonished that what they really want to ask is impolite, a young scientist is taught that the animal mind__f there is such__s unknowable. Permissible questions are __t_ questions: where it lives; what it eats; what it does when danger threatens; how it breeds. But always forbidden__lways forbidden__s the one question that might open the door: __ho?_ _ Carl Safina

Cognition can happen in many different ways and combinations.

The aim of interpretation is not agreement but understanding

How much have we not seen or felt or heard because there was no word for it -- at least no word we knew? We speak to navigate ourselves away from dark corners and we become, each one of us, cartographers.

It is cognition that is the fantasy.... Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will... My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence.

Then, as Father had trained him, Rigg thought past his feelings.