Cognitive Constructs Quotes

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

If you look at all the notions we accept about who we are, you find that they are all based upon our perceptual experiences.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.

Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience.

Time, space, and causality are only metaphors of knowledge, with which we explain things to ourselves.

The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction.

Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.

Measure, time and number are nothing but modes of thought or rather of imagination.

Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness.

You are a victim of your own neural architecture which doesn't permit you to imagine anything outside of three dimensions. Even two dimensions. People know they can't visualise four or five dimensions, but they think they can close their eyes and see two dimensions. But they can't.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

Definitions are temporary verbalizations of concepts, and concepts- particularly difficult concepts- are usually revised repeatedly as our knowledge and understanding grows.

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.

Stories about ourselves and about the world continually arise in our minds and shape our beliefs about reality.