Cognitive Representation Quotes

If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.

Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.

It is interesting to observe how real the object remains, in spite of all abstractions.

Conversation is the image of the mind. As the man is, so is his talk.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

A logical picture of facts is a thought.

Words are intermediary between thought and things. We express ourselves really not through words, which are only signs, but through what they signify - through things.

The essential form of knowledge... is nothing but a representation of truth: for the truth of being and the truth of knowing are one, differing no more than the direct beam and the beam reflected.

One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.

If you have just an emotion, you would not necessarily feel it. To feel an emotion, you need to represent in the brain in structures that are actually different from the structures that lead to the emotion, what is going on in the organs when you're having the emotion.

Every relationship between persons causes a picture of each to take form in the mind of the other, and this picture evidently is in reciprocal relationship with that personal relationship.

The universe is real, but you can't see it. You have to imagine it.

Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input.

So, the point was to be able to have a medium that would record all the connections and all the structures and all the thoughts that paper could not. Since the computer could hold any structure in any form, this was the way to go.

If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.

In my head, the sky is blue, the grass is green and cats are orange.

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

I don't think there is any scientific evidence about the question of whether we think only in language or not. But introspection indicates pretty clearly that we don't think in language necessarily. We also think in visual images, we think in terms of situations and events, and so on, and many times we can't even express in words what the content of our thinking is. And even if we are able to express it in words, it is a common experience to say something and then to recognize that it is not what we meant, that it is something else.

It taught that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.

Language is memory and metaphor.

Words are the motes of thought, and nothing more.

At the lowest cognitive level, they are processes of experiencing, or, to speak more generally, processes of intuiting that grasp the object in the original.

Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first.