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Can "concept" become a legitimate scientific term? This goal could be taken to be the central goal of cognitive science.

Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas, p89

My own mental image of the creative process involves viewing the organization of a mind as consisting of thousands, perhaps millions, of overlapping and intermingling implicospheres, at the center of each of which is a conceptual skeleton. The implicosphere is a flickering, ephemeral thing, a bit like a swarm of gnats around a gas-station light on a hot summer's night, perhaps more like an electron cloud, with its quantum-mechanical elusiveness, about a nucleus, blurring out and dying off the further removed from the core it is. if you have studied quantum chemistry, you know that the fluid nature of chemical bonds can best be understood as a direct consequence of the curious quantum-mechanical overlap of electronic wave functions in space, wave functions belonging to electrons orbiting neighboring nuclei. In a metaphorically similar way, it seems to me, the crazy and unexpected associations that allow creative insights to pop seemingly out of nowhere may well be consequences of a similar chemistry of concepts with its own special types of "bonds" that emerge out of an underlying "neuron mechanics'.

Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas, p250

Our society does a rather poor job of making us aware of, let alone interested in, the nature of common sense, the hidden assumptions that permeate thought, the complex mechanisms of sensory perception and category systems, the will the believe, the human tendency toward gullibility, the most typical flaws in arguments, the statistical inferences we make unconsciously, the vastly different temporal and spatial scales on which one can look at the universe, the many filters through which one can perceive and conceptualize people and events, and so on. The resulting deceptions, delusions, confusions, ignorances, and fears can lead to many disquieting social consequences, such as mildly or absurdly wasteful spending of funds, blatant or subtle discrimination against groups, and local or global apathy about the current state and momentum of the world. Of course everyone labors under some delusions, avoids certain kinds of thoughts, has an overly closed mind on this or that subject. What, however, are the consequences when this is multiplied by hundreds or thousands of millions, and the small pieces are woven together into a vast fabric? What does a carpet woven from the incomplete understandings and ignorances of five billion sentient beings look like from afar - and where is this flying carpet headed?

Ricky's Alleyway

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