Subject index Author index Reference list Turning Signs gnoxic blog

SourceNet:

annotated resource listings, extended quotations with comments, and external links relevant to gnoxic studies. This is also a supplement to the main Reference list which documents published sources cited (parenthetically) in Turning Signs. This page has two Indexes: Author and Subject.

On 1 August 2007 i started adding a datestamp to new or revised listings here, so any undated entries are older than that.

Since 2015 i have been citing sources in my blog posts, so more recent sources of Turning Signs can be found there by selecting the category gnew sources.


SUBJECT INDEX

anthropology
autism
autopoiesis
biology
biosemiotics
bodymind
brain
Buddhism
complexity
computation
conceptual blending
conceptual structures
consciousness
cosmology
culture
cybernetics
development
dissipative structures
dynamic systems theory
ecology
Egypt
emergence
empire
emptiness
enaction
energetics
ethology
evolution
evolutionary psychology
experience
Gospels
hermeneutics
hierarchy/holarchy
Hua-yen
intersubjectivity
Islam
Jesus
Kabbalah
koan
language
learning
life
linguistics
logic
meaning
memory
metaphor
model
myth
neurobiology
neuropsychology
organic logic
perception
phenomenology
philosophy
physics
pragmatism
primatology
psychology
pyramids
religion
sacred
science
scriptures
self
semantics
semiotics
sign
sociology
sources
spiritual classics
Sufi
systems
thermodynamics
Umwelt
Vedanta
the Way (Tao/Dao)
the wild
Zen
Zohar

AUTHOR INDEX:
Major sources (for gnoxic studies) are in bold, and key sources of inspiration in bigger type.

David Abram
James H. Austin
Aristotle
Bernard Baars
Simon Baron-Cohen
Gregory Bateson
Mary Catherine Bateson
Peter L. Berger
Thomas Berry
Black Elk
William Blake
David Bohm
Jorge Luis Borges
Søren Brier
Norman O. Brown
Jerome Bruner
Joseph Campbell
Fritjof Capra
Ernst Cassirer
Noam Chomsky
Chuangtse/Zhuangzi
Andy Clark
Henry Corbin
Francis Crick
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Eugene d'Aquili
Antonio Damasio
Richard Dawkins
Terrence W. Deacon
April D. DeConick
John Deely
Daniel Dennett
David J. Depew
Guy Deutscher
Frans de Waal
Emily Dickinson
Annie Dillard
Eihei Dogen
Umberto Eco
Gerald M. Edelman
Loren Eiseley
Gilles Fauconnier
Todd Feinberg
Stan Franklin
Walter J. Freeman
Northrop Frye
Peter Gärdenfors
Murray Gell-Mann
Eugene Gendlin
Raymond W. Gibbs
Erving Goffman
E.H. Gombrich
Ursula Goodenough
Brian Goodwin
Alison Gopnik
Temple Grandin
Susan Haack
Steven Heine
Heraclitus
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Hui-neng
Ray Jackendoff
Jablonka and Lamb
William James
Mark Johnson
James Joyce
Carl Jung
John Kaag
Kabir
Franz Kafka
Stuart Kauffman
James J. Kay
Christof Koch
Arthur Koestler
Eduardo Kohn
David Korten
Patricia Kuhl
Thomas Kuhn
George Lakoff
Lao Tzu (Laotse)
Todd Lawson
Joseph LeDoux
Rodolfo R. Llinás
Yuri Lotman
Thomas Luckmann
A. R. Luria
Gary Marcus
Lynn Margulis
Daniel C. Matt
Humberto Maturana
John Maynard Smith
Ernst Mayr
Donella Meadows
Andrew Meltzoff
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Floyd Merrell
Thomas Metzinger
Ruth Millikan
Marvin Minsky
Harold J. Morowitz
Nagarjuna
Andrew Newberg
Thich Nhat Hanh
Howard Odum
Elaine Pagels
Howard H. Pattee
Charles S. Peirce
Michael Polanyi
Karl Popper
Ilya Prigogine
V. S. Ramachandran
Robert Rosen
Jalal al-Din Rumi
Oliver Sacks
Dorion Sagan
Stanley N. Salthe
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
Daniel L. Schacter
Eric D. Schneider
Gershom Scholem
Thomas Sebeok
Aaron Sloman
Lee Smolin
Gary Snyder
John Sowa
Frederik Stjernfelt
Daisetz T. Suzuki
David Suzuki
Shunryu Suzuki
Brian Swimme
Eörs Szathmáry
Rabindranath Tagore
Leonard Talmy
Gospel of Thomas
Evan Thompson
Henry David Thoreau
Michael Tomasello
Giulio Tononi
Chögyam Trungpa
Mark Turner
Jakob von Uexküll
Robert E. Ulanowicz
Francisco Varela
L.S. Vygotsky
Bruce H. Weber
Daniel M. Wegner
Walt Whitman
Donna Williams
David Sloan Wilson
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Remarks on ‘sources’

Anyone who aims to communicate with unspecified others has to speak from (the private flow of) experience by using a public and conventional language. You learn this language by interacting with other users and exploring other uses—always aiming toward the public and universal, while your knowledge of it can only be personal. Your language is entangled with that of other users with whom you have crossed paths in the quest. Honesty invites you to bear witness to this crossing of paths by ‘documenting your sources.’ This also provides a service by linking quoted text to its original context, enabling readers to follow up on other threads with which your text is entangled. Those other threads can thus be called ‘sources’ of your expression, though the real source of its meaning is entanglement itself, which is born of the constant tension between eternal truth and its current recreation.

Throughout the gnoxic works in progress online here, documentation is done in the parenthetical-citation format common to most of the sciences. All citations are keyed to a reference list; some are also linked to (or crosslinked within) this page. Of course any writer can document only a small selection of the ‘sources’ with which his text is entangled. They are documented here on two conditions: (1) the author was conscious of them as ‘sources’ while writing the text to which they are connected, and (2) a typical general reader would probably not recognize the source if it were left undocumented.


Neuropsychology

and neurophenomenology (a term coined by Francisco Varela) – see also neurobiology, autism, phenomenology.

Neurobiology

in relation to experience, consciousness and behavior

Psychology

of memory and perception:

Psychology of meaning

and creativity (see also semantics, semiotics, hermeneutics, philosophy, phenomenology):

Developmental psychology


Ethology and the evolution of culture

The old school of science tends to feel that, as Francis Bacon wrote in his Great Instauration, ‘the nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom’; from this perspective, it's no use watching what animals do when left to themselves—they have to be artificially ‘vexed’ with experiments in the laboratory if you want to learn anything about them scientifically. Fortunately the science of ethology has changed all that. One branch of it is primatology (the study of monkeys and apes, either in the wild or in captive communities).

The evolution of culture and language is the central focus of an inquiry that takes its key idea (evolution) from biology and applies it to the social realm (with cosmological implications).


Anthropology, sociology and political ecology

— the ethology of human cultures. (The next section deals with how they have evolved.)

Nature and Culture

—or, The Wild and its orphan child civilization. The works below explore the mythic dimensions of our experience of the natural world, thus placing human practices in their more-than-human context. Human cultures and their transformations are generally guided by cosmological visions, though not necessarily conscious of them. Scientific investigations of evolution and cosmology are also listed here under other headings.

Linguistics and semantics

The study of language, including both structure (syntax) and meaning (semantics), crosses paths with semiotics, anthropology, philosophy and techniques of ‘knowledge representation’. The evolution of culture is intertwined with the origin and history of language, and an important task of developmental psychology is to explain how children learn language. [ 26 December 2012 ]


Biology

The study of life also requires attention to complex systems and ecology, and to biosemiotics. The concept of evolution is central not only to biology but also to the study of language, culture, complex systems and cosmology.

Complex systems

Understanding the emergence of complex systems from simpler physical systems is crucial to the sciences of life, ecology, cosmology and political economy.

Models and simulations of mind

One way to investigate how the mind works is to try to build one from scratch (something almost inconceivable before the computer age), on the principle that if you can't make or design even a simple working model of something, you don't really understand how it works. This is the impulse behind technologies of artificial intelligence, robotics, connectionism, neural networks etc. Naturally, since we humans are only beginners at this, the results so far are primitive compared to the results of millions of years of natural development and evolution. But artificial ‘minds’ are certainly evolving much faster than humans are.

Philosophy

investigates the nature of universal everyday experience itself and is thus the most basic of inquiries. Of special relevance to gnoxic studies are philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. See also phenomenology, and Buddhism (for Nagarjuna, Dogen and the Hua-yen school).

Experience (phenomenology)

Phenomenology is a name for ‘the systematic study of experiences’ (Walter Freeman). According to Peirce, who classified it as ‘the most primal of all the positive sciences,’ ‘Phenomenology ascertains and studies the kinds of elements universally present in the phenomenon; meaning by the phenomenon, whatever is present at any time to the mind in any way.’

Semiotics

is a very broadly based discipline first named by John Locke, but first developed in its current form by C.S. Peirce, who identified it with logic as the science of thinking, learning and knowing. For a historical analysis of the term, see Deely, Why Semiotics? (2004). In addition to the semiotic logic of Peirce, and to text semiotics (which is intertwined with hermeneutics), there is also much to be learned from biosemiotics, which investigates semiosis as a process essential to life itself. In addition to the many online sources for this domain of research, each of the following contributes to it:

Hermeneutics, literary criticism and comparative mythology

These disciplines cross over into anthropology, phenomenology and semiotics. (The enactive approach to cognition also has roots in hermeneutics.)

Scriptures

Here we list some texts which have served countless readers as spiritual classics for centuries or millennia, and have done the same for the compiler of this list. They are grouped under the religious traditions associated with them, but they are not to be taken as listing the most important scriptures in that tradition. (The Buddhist writings have a separate section of their own here.) The compiler professes no special expertise or authority in any of these traditions.

Buddhism (Dharma)

Classical and contemporary Buddhist writings, with their focus on direct experience and/or psychology rather than theology, have a special affinity with the gnoxic focus on bodymind.

Spiritual classics

which work as scriptures for the compiler of these gnoxic pages but have not been canonized as such by any religious tradition. (See also the Wild section.)

Subject index Author index Reference list gnoxic home