A Fractal Epistemology for a Scientific Psychology

A Fractal Epistemology for a Scientific Psychology PDF Author: Terry Marks-Tarlow
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527544931
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
Fractal dynamics provide an unparalleled tool for understanding the evolution of natural complexity throughout physical, biological, and psychological realms. This book’s conceptual framework helps to reconcile several persistent dichotomies in the natural sciences, including mind-brain, linear-nonlinear, subjective-objective, and even personal-transpersonal processes. A fractal approach is especially useful when applied to recursive processes of consciousness, both within their ordinary and anomalous manifestations. This novel way to study the interconnection of seemingly divided wholes encompasses multiple dimensions of experience and being. It brings together experts in diverse fields—neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, physicists, physiologists, psychoanalysts, mathematicians, and professors of religion and music composition—to demonstrate the value of fractals as model, method, and metaphor within psychology and related social and physical sciences. The result is a new perspective for understanding what has often been dismissed as too subjective, idiosyncratic, and ineffably beyond the scope of science, bringing these areas back into a natural-scientific framework.

A Fractal Epistemology for a Scientific Psychology

A Fractal Epistemology for a Scientific Psychology PDF Author: Terry Marks-Tarlow
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527544931
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
Fractal dynamics provide an unparalleled tool for understanding the evolution of natural complexity throughout physical, biological, and psychological realms. This book’s conceptual framework helps to reconcile several persistent dichotomies in the natural sciences, including mind-brain, linear-nonlinear, subjective-objective, and even personal-transpersonal processes. A fractal approach is especially useful when applied to recursive processes of consciousness, both within their ordinary and anomalous manifestations. This novel way to study the interconnection of seemingly divided wholes encompasses multiple dimensions of experience and being. It brings together experts in diverse fields—neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, physicists, physiologists, psychoanalysts, mathematicians, and professors of religion and music composition—to demonstrate the value of fractals as model, method, and metaphor within psychology and related social and physical sciences. The result is a new perspective for understanding what has often been dismissed as too subjective, idiosyncratic, and ineffably beyond the scope of science, bringing these areas back into a natural-scientific framework.

Reflexive Methodology

Reflexive Methodology PDF Author: Mats Alvesson
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1446244733
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Praise for the First Edition: 'Reflexive Methodology is a textbook indispensable to any young researcher. It does not tell its readers how to do research. It does something much more important: It shows how research has been done in the qualitative tradition, thus encouraging the readers to make their own choices' - Barbara Czarniawska, Goteborg University 'I would go so far as to argue that this book should be on the reading list of all social scientists and philosophers with an interest in the theory and practice of research' - Prometheus Reflexive Methodology established itself as a groundbreaking success, providing researchers with an invaluable guide to a central problem in research methodology - how to put field research and interpretations in perspective, paying attention to the interpretive, political and rhetorical nature of empirical research. Now thoroughly updated, the Second Edition includes a new chapter on positivism, social constructionism and critical realism, and offers new conclusions on the applications of methodology. It also provides further illustrations and updates that build on the acclaimed and successful first edition. Reflexivity is an essential part of the research process. In this book, Mats Alvesson and Kaj Skoldberg make explicit the links between techniques used in empirical research and different research traditions, giving a theoretically informed approach to qualitative research. The authors provide balanced reviews and critiques of the major schools of grounded theory, ethnography, hermeneutics, critical theory, postmodernism and poststructuralism, discourse analysis, genealogy and feminism. This book points the way to a more open-minded, creative interaction between theoretical frameworks and empirical research. It continues to be essential reading for students and researchers across the social sciences.

A Fractal Epistemology for a Scientific Psychology

A Fractal Epistemology for a Scientific Psychology PDF Author: Terry Marks-Tarlow
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 9781527540231
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
Fractal geometry provides an unparalleled tool for understanding the evolution of natural complexity throughout the physical and biological realms. Fractal dynamics also help to reconcile perplexing dichotomies, such as subjective-objective, mind-brain, self-other, and linear-nonlinear processes. In their application to recursive processes of consciousness, both within ordinary and uncanny manifestations, they open a novel way of studying the interconnectedness of seemingly divided wholes. This extends to the most inclusive ways of encountering reality, described as transpersonal and even spiritual dimensions of experience. This volume pulls together experts in diverse fields, such as neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, physicists, physiologists, and mathematicians to demonstrate the value of fractal geometry as both a model and metaphor within psychology and related social and physical sciences. The result is a new perspective for understanding what has often been dismissed as too subjective, idiosyncratic, and ineffably beyond the scope of science, bringing the conversation back into a scientific framework.

Chaos and Nonlinear Psychology

Chaos and Nonlinear Psychology PDF Author: David Schuldberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190465026
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
The pandemic, and our response to it, has shown how unpredictable, irrational, illogical, suddenly changing, and muddled human interactions can be in a time of crisis. How can we make sense of such confusing and baffling behavior? This book reveals how chaos and nonlinear dynamics can bring new understanding to everyday topics in social sciences. It brings together chapters from leaders at the intersection of psychology and chaos and complexity theories. Conceptual and user-friendly, it is built around six themes: 1) Seeing nonlinearity, 2) Finding patterns, 3) using Simple models, 4) Intervening nonlinearly, and 6) teaching a new Worldview. It takes no specialized study-although there is more sophisticated material and optional math for those wishing it. The techie will, in addition, find concepts and diagrams to ponder. The volume is engaging, at times startling-whether about the weather, Internet, organizations, family dynamics, health, evolution, or falling in love. It reveals how many social, personal, clinical, research, and life phenomena become understandable and can be modelled in the light of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems (NDS) theory. It even offers a broadening worldview, happening already in other sciences, toward a more dynamic, interconnected, and evolving picture, including process-oriented appreciation of one's own experience. The book offers those in the field of psychology and the social sciences a stunning new perspective on human behaviour.

Fractals: A Very Short Introduction

Fractals: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: K. J. Falconer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199675988
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
This essential discussion of the popular science and mathematics behind fractals reveals how fractal shapes can be found everywhere in nature from clouds to coastlines, and explains how basic concepts in fractal geometry produced a revolution in mathematical understandings of patterns in the 20th century.

Radical Embodied Cognitive Science

Radical Embodied Cognitive Science PDF Author: Anthony Chemero
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262258080
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
A proposal for a new way to do cognitive science argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than computation and representation. While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach (which he terms radical embodied cognitive science), puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitive science is a direct descendant of the American naturalist psychology of William James and John Dewey, and follows them in viewing perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemero argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than in terms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, “shored up” and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems (reductionism, epistemological skepticism, metaphysical realism, consciousness) through the lens of radical embodied cognitive science and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolves these problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitive science a rewarding one. “Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher,” Chemero writes in his preface, adding, “I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything.” With this book, Chemero explains nonrepresentational, dynamical, ecological cognitive science as clearly and as rigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitive science in his classic work The Language of Thought.

Imagination, Creativity and Spirituality in Psychotherapy

Imagination, Creativity and Spirituality in Psychotherapy PDF Author: Leanne Domash
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100019079X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
The aim of this book is to awaken creative desire and expand the imagination of the psychotherapist and, in turn, her patient. Each chapter is meant to surprise the reader and help him see the world in a new way. Many varieties of imagination are explored -- the spiritual, the relational, the dreamworld, the aesthetic and the adaptive. The author offers space to reflect, to daydream, to remember; space to pursue goals, to make new connections; space to take risks and space to be wrong. The psychotherapist is encouraged to find her own voice, be poetic, dare to create, converse with other disciplines and, most especially, enter the world of dreams. This is all passed onto the patient as the dyad enters the intersubjective field. Both scholarly and practical, this volume elegantly and persuasively synthesizes for the first time research in many fields, including spirituality and Kabbalah, neuroscience, the arts, biology and artificial intelligence, to give an in depth and original understanding of the current pressing problems in the rapidly changing field of psychotherapy: how do we work with unconscious processes and early memories to help our patients become more imaginative, creative, hopeful and resilient, and in so doing, heal. The relationship between the body and creative imagination is fully explored as well as the disruptive effect of trauma on the imagination and how to address this. The emphasis on surprise, uncanny communication, interdisciplinary inquiry, use of dreamwork and the imagination of the body — how it spontaneously meets new challenges— all stimulate the creativity of the reader. Through numerous case studies, the author illustrates the practical implications of how this exploration allows for deeper understanding and more effective treatment. With the innovative synthesis and specific techniques the author provides, the clinician has tools to carry on the work of moving the field of psychotherapy forward as well as work ever more effectively with patients.

Time and Trauma in Analytical Psychology and Psychotherapy

Time and Trauma in Analytical Psychology and Psychotherapy PDF Author: Deborah Bryon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040015565
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This book explores the experience of time in psychoanalysis and Andean shamanism. It plots ways to work through unresolved trauma by expanding how we conceptualize both implicit and nonverbal atemporal experience, drawing from the rituals, narratives, and medicine of Andean shamans and quantum theory. Shifting between subjective states in time is fundamental in trauma work and psychoanalysis. Integrating traumatic experiences that have become split off and held in “timeless” unconscious states of implicit memory is an essential aspect of psychic healing. Becoming familiar with the Andean shamans’ understanding of atemporal experience, as well as learning about their ways of “grounding” the experience consciously, can offer a route through which psychoanalysis and therapy may deepen the therapeutic process and open new states of consciousness. Theories developed in quantum physics are included to parallel the shamans’ experience and for describing the analytic process. Written by a noted expert in this field, this insightful volume will interest trainee and practitioner analytical psychologists, as well as any professional interested in the resolution of trauma within a psychotherapeutic setting.

Unifying Themes in Complex Systems X

Unifying Themes in Complex Systems X PDF Author: Dan Braha
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030673189
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
The International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS) offers a unique interdisciplinary venue for researchers from the physical and biological sciences, social sciences, psychology and cognitive science, engineering, medicine, human systems, and global systems. This proceedings volume gathers selected papers from the conference. The New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) has been instrumental in the development of complex systems science and its applications. NECSI pursues research, education, knowledge dissemination, and community development efforts around the world to promote the study of complex systems and its application for the benefit of society. NECSI hosts the International Conference on Complex Systems and publishes the NECSI Book.

The Creative Trance

The Creative Trance PDF Author: Tobi Zausner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108488269
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
An investigation of how the creative trance works across multiple domains in the arts, sciences, sports, and self-transformation.