This is a podcast conducted by Jesica Glover as a stand alone episode in “My Child Can’t Read: A Heartland Crisis”. The podcast was as recorded on 5-12-26 and was produced on behalf of the Phillips Fundamental Learning Center. The above video is the raw interview. The interview was edited and released as a
The Crisis Beneath the Literacy Crisis Read More »
I fed the transcript of the following video of my talk to the Tomkins organization to an AI proxy of Silvan Tomkins and instructed it: Filter out everything not related to affect theory. Distill the affect-order distinctions being made. Point by point, use Tomkins to comment on them. A page of background and further
What Silvan Tomkins Might Say: My Tomkins Talk Read More »
Two very different minds. Silvan Tomkins (1911-1991) is considered by many to be the Einstein of emotional science. His theory of emotion defines a core set of indivisible neurobiological elements – “affects” -whose innate and learning conscripted behaviors aggregate to explain the entire universe of human emotion. John Steinbeck (1902-1968) also viewed humans through a
Tomkins and Steinbeck: What A Shame Read More »
In your meaning, people cannot participate in consciousness, think, choose, decide, interpret, react, resist, comply, manipulate, or adapt without learning. Thinking and choosing are not activities outside learning; they are modalities of it. Learning is the process through which consciousness is continuously differentiated and changed—not a synonym for education, knowledge acquisition, wisdom, or improvement. Learning
Our Quarter Millennium of Learning? Read More »
What are feelings? What is the difference between a feeling and a feeling we recognize? Can a feeling have meaning without prior learning? Feelings are changes in the lived state of an organism. They are not, first of all, ideas about experience. They are the experience becoming different from within: tightening, opening, dread, ease, hurt,
What’s The Role of Learning In The Meanings of Feelings? Read More »
My “Happy Easter” post became the starting point of a very interesting dialogue between myself and my friend Doug. It’s a fascinating journey into learning and belief in general, and into our beliefs about learning in particular. The following is a review of our dialogue that begins with a (ChatGpt) summary of the dialogue with
Is Spiritual Knowing Learned? Read More »
The word “Israel” means striving with god. Does the original use imply that God was a constant that Israel is striving to be near or that Israel and God are striving together? Striving describes purposefully directing change. God striving with humans means God purposefully changing with humans. God IS learning. Is God an autonomous self-aware
One Who Strives with God Read More »
He says the kingdom is within you. They say the kingdom can only be entered through their system of beliefs. He points learning toward inward spiritual truth. They profess their authority as the source of spiritual truth. He says learn like innocent children. They say children need to be saved from their natures. He speaks
Easter – Died for Whose Sins? Read More »
There is no ethically legitimate shortcut to population-scale change that bypasses population-scale learning. Ideas that posit change propagating from a small enlightened subset to transform the many—whether framed as morphogenetic fields, 100th Monkey transference, spiritual awakenings, or “miracles”—share a common flaw: they erase agency. They imagine that human transformation can happen without participation, consent, or
Lessons in Pluribus Read More »
Tangent migrations most often begin when a memory evoked in the current stream of attention overpowers the emotional motive of the stream and repurposes attention and memory according to relevance with the evoked memory rather than to the original context and purpose in the stream that evoked the memory. Where this happens without our
What Calabrese and Tomkins Might Say: Meta-tations Read More »