Excerpt from Kitty No! The Zen Sittin’ Kitten.

 Excerpt from Kitty No! The Zen Sittin’ Kitten.

    Soensa-nim struck his staff against the floor making a loud sound, “This staff, this sound and your mind, are they the same or different?”
     There was silence in the room after he said this. The Zen Master looked like he was waiting for an answer.
    After waiting a moment Soensa-nim added, “If you say the same, I will hit you thirty times. If you say different, I will hit you thirty times.”
    Meanwhile Kitty-No had frozen at the sound of the staff but wanted to run toward Tom. When she did take off running, she knocked down a heavy cane belonging to a listener seated in a chair in the back of the room. This broke the silence with a loud wooden slap!
    Immediately upon hearing the sound, Soensa-nim said, “CORRECT!” and laughed. Suddenly the whole room was laughing and looking around to see who made the sound that answered the Koan!
    Kitty-No ran to Tom as fast as she could. Tom picked her up and held her in his sweatshirt. When he looked up, the whole room was looking at him, including Marge, who was scowling.
  “I’m so sorry. This is my cat. I must have left a window open. It will not happen again.”
    A man in the back said, “Your cat answered the Koan! The sound came from the cat knocking my cane down.”
    Tom started walking toward the door, feeling embarrassed and worried. Just then Soensa-nim stood up, staff still in hand and said, “Stop!”
    Tom felt humiliated. “I’m sorry Soensa-nim,”
   “No need to apologize” said Soensa-nim calmly. “Your cat is a very good Bodhisattva!”
    A Bodhisattva is a being who has found enlightenment but has vowed to stay in the world to save all creatures from suffering. Tom was stunned. How could a cat, an animal; and an exclusively carnivorous predator be a Bodhisattva? What was Soensa-nim trying to teach?
  “Your cat came to save you from the boring Dharma talk!" said Soensa-nim, and everyone but Tom and Kitty-No laughed. “She answered the koan correctly when all of you were silent, and she didn’t say a word. Some animals are very special. She found you, and on the way, she stopped all our minds with an unexpected sound in answer to the question. The cat had the right answer, by just being a cat and trying to find you, she gave us a taste of “don’t know mind.”
    Tom was calmed by Soensa-nim’s voice and what he was saying. The crowd did not seem upset at all. Even Marge stopped scowling and sighed. She seemed almost as relieved as Tom himself.
    Kitty-No squirmed against Tom’s chest, her face buried in his sweatshirt. Tom was glad that the crowd looking at him could not see the diagonal line through the kitten’s face. He didn’t want to explain it and be further embarrassed.
    “She is a feral cat and afraid of everyone but me. I need to get her back inside the cottage,” said Tom.
  “Take your friend home. I will come to see her before I leave,” said Soensa-nim.
  “Yes, thank you!” said Tom and hurried out the door. As he was walking away from the building Tom heard another laugh from the audience. At first, he thought, “Oh, they must have made another joke about me.” But as he was remembering what had just happened, he realized that Soensa-nim’s “blessing” had saved him from getting in trouble with his boss for the cat’s escape. This made Tom smile.

The failure of Embodied Cognition (in a nutshell)

     It has taken me many years to learn enough to state outright that using Embodied Cognition as an epistemology is premature and probably wrong. Therefore, all of the work that uses Lakoff and Johnson in the fields of theatre history and performance studies does not dismantle semiotics or theories of mental representation as claimed by McConachie and others.
      The prejudice of the embodied cognition hypothesis is to have never seriously considered, let alone tested and then rejected, an alternative hypothesis about the format of concept representation. And when we look at the type of evidence that one would want to be in place, minimally, to reject the view that concepts are represented in an amodal format, there is no decisive evidence. What would a nonembodied view of concepts predict about sensorimotor activation during conceptual processing? It all depends on one’s theory of activation dynamics— or information exchange— among representationally distinct processes. 
     There are no theories of conceptual processing that deny that activation spreads from concepts to input/output or sensorimotor systems. Therefore, all extant theories that maintain a strict representational separation between concepts and input/output systems would also predict that input/output systems can be active during conceptual processing and that the state of input/ output systems can affect cognition. It is absolutely the case that we would not be compelled to expand theories of amodal concept representation in this way were it not for the many elegant findings that can be referred to collectively as the “phenomena of embodiment.” However, I would argue that phenomena of embodiment actually have nothing to do with whether cognition is embodied. The substantive issue at stake is not whether the format of concepts is modality specific but the dynamics of activation flow in the system. This is not a dour conclusion—it means that the phenomena of embodiment can be repurposed as clues about how abstract concepts interface with the sensorimotor systems.

Dallas 1963 : Adlai Stevenson attacked a month before JFK assasinated

Today's liberal bashing reminds me of the vocal right-wing effort to discredit and demonize President Kennedy in the early 1960s. One of the leaders of this effort was Edwin Walker, a former World War II general who helped foment riots at the University of Mississippi when the school attempted to integrate by admitting James Meredith in 1962. Walker also ran as a fringe candidate for governor of Texas. Using language similar to the attacks President Donald Trump and his supporters would wage on his political opponents a half century later, Walker declared that civil rights demonstrations in Washington and Texas were “pro-Kennedy, pro-Communist and pro-Socialist.”

A month before JFK was shot in Dallas, remarks by Adlai Stevenson were disrupted by Walker supporters who held American flags upside down (a tactic Walker encouraged), unfurled a banner that replaced the words Welcome Adlai with UN RED FRONT, and tried to drown out Stevenson’s words with noisemakers.

The scene is recounted in masterful and harrowing detail in the book Dallas 1963 by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis:

As one particularly combative heckler was escorted out, Stevenson called after him: “For my part, I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.”

After the remarks, Stevenson was spit on and one protestor, Cora Lacy Frederickson, began hitting Stevenson with large sign. It read: ADLAI, WHO ELECTED YOU?

 

Unaccusative verbs and Unergative verbs: Weird language stuff

 In linguistics, an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose grammatical subject is not a semantic agent. In other words, the subject does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action expressed by the verb. An unaccusative verb's subject is semantically similar to the direct object of a transitive verb or to the subject of a verb in the passive voice. Examples in English are "the tree fell"; "the window broke". In those sentences, the action (falling, breaking) can be considered as something that happened to the subject, rather than being initiated by it.

Now studies of language acquisition have shown that children learning their first language have no trouble distinguishing between unaccusative verbs and their opposite, unergative verbs, such as run or resign, which describe actions voluntarily initiated by the subject. But the second language presents difficulty in the same kind of semantic recognition.