Search Results (7)

Despite a century of learning research, why human beings desire to learn remains theoretically unresolved. Behaviorist, cognitivist, and constructivist paradigms explain the mechanisms of learning but presuppose rather than account for its motivational genesis—a gap this paper terms motivational minimalism. Drawing on René Girard’s mimetic anthropology, this paper develops Mimetic Learning Theory (MLT), grounded in philosophical anthropology (Plessner, Gehlen), hermeneutics (Rosa, Gadamer), and normative theory (Biesta, Honneth, Arendt). MLT reconceives learning as the reflective transformation of mediated desire. Humans do not merely copy actions but appropriate the desires of models who render knowledge, identity, and recognition worth striving for. Eight dominant learning paradigms are reread as partial articulations of this mimetic dynamic. Two novel constructs are introduced: mimetic load (the affective–cognitive tension from competing models of desire, complementing cognitive load theory) and zones of desire (a reformulation of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development). MLT does not displace existing frameworks but re-grounds them in a shared anthropological logic—that learning begins not in the mind, but in the field of mediated desire. Full article

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a heterogeneous disease with a high relapse rate. Cytokine receptor targeted therapies are therapeutically attractive but are subject to resistance-conferring mutations. Likewise, targeting downstream signaling pathways has been difficult. Recent success in the development of synergistic combinations has provided new hope for refractory AML patients. While generally not efficacious as monotherapy, BH3 mimetics are very effective in combination with chemotherapy agents. With this in mind, we further explored novel BH3 mimetic drug combinations and showed that pimozide cooperates with mTOR inhibitors and BH3 mimetics in AML cells. The three-drug combination was able to reach cells that were not as responsive to single or double drug combinations. In Flt3-internal tandem duplication (ITD)-positive cells, we previously showed pimozide to be highly effective when combined with imipramine blue (IB). Here, we show that Flt3-ITD⁺ cells are sensitive to an IB-induced dynamin 1-like (Drp1)-p38-ROS pathway. Pimozide contributes important calcium channel blocker activity converging with IB on mitochondrial oxidative metabolism. Overall, these data support the concept that antioxidants are a double-edged sword. Rationally designed combination therapies have significant promise for further pre-clinical development and may ultimately lead to improved responses. Full article

Ritual artifacts are produced by individuals and/or small groups, left over-there, in the environment, perceivable, sharable, and more or less available. Artifacts of this type can be considered cognitive mediators, insofar as they are collective memory stores of related habits, in the sense that they mediate and make available the story of their origin and the actions related to it, which can be learnt and/or re-activated when needed. Indeed, symbolic habits embedded in rites can also be seen as memory mediators which maximize abducibility, which is the human capacity to guess hypotheses, because they maximize recoverability of already stored cognitive contents. In sum, once suitable representations are externalized in a ritual artifact, they can be sensorially picked up and manipulated to re-internalize them when humans attend the rite: the externalization can be seen as the fruit of the so-called “disembodiment of the mind” as a significant cognitive perspective, able to show some basic features of what I called manipulative abduction, which I will describe in my presentation. When analyzing artifacts and habits in ritual settings, it is important to remember that interesting cases of creative meaning formation are also at play. Actually, we can distinguish two kinds of habits that are at play in rites: (a) a knowledge-based kind of habit, for the analysis of which the concept of “affordance” is useful, which also plays a pivotal role in the justification of the agent’s own beliefs; and (b) an ignorance-based kind of habit, which will be proved as necessary for the beginning of thought, and which is at the base of the ampliative abductive reasoning. Full article

Eco-cognitive computationalism considers computation in the context of following some of the main tenets advanced by the recent cognitive science views on embodied, situated and distributed cognition. It is in the framework of this eco-cognitive perspective that we can usefully analyze the recent attention in computer science devoted to the importance of the simplification of cognitive and motor tasks caused in organic entities by the morphological features: ignorant bodies can be domesticated to become useful “mimetic bodies”, that is to be able to render an intertwined computation simpler, resorting to that “simplexity” of animal embodied cognition, which represents one of the main qualities of organic agents. Through eco-cognitive computationalism we can clearly acknowledge that the concept of computation changes, depending on historical and contextual causes and we can build an epistemological view that illustrates the “emergence” of new kinds of computations, such as the one regarding morphological computation. This new perspective shows how the computational domestication of ignorant entities can originate new unconventional cognitive embodiments. I also introduce the concept of overcomputationalism, showing that my proposed framework helps us see the related concepts of pancognitivism, paniformationalism and pancomputationalism in a more naturalized and prudent perspective, avoiding the excess of old-fashioned ontological or metaphysical overstatements. Full article

Eco-cognitive computationalism sees computation in context, exploiting the ideas developed in those projects that have originated the recent views on embodied, situated, and distributed cognition. Turing’s original intellectual perspective has already clearly depicted the evolutionary emergence in humans of information, meaning, and of the first rudimentary forms of cognition, as the result of a complex interplay and simultaneous coevolution, in time, of the states of brain/mind, body, and external environment. This cognitive process played a fundamental heuristic role in Turing’s invention of the universal logical computing machine. It is by extending this eco-cognitive perspective that we can see that the recent emphasis on the simplification of cognitive and motor tasks generated in organic agents by morphological aspects implies the construction of appropriate “mimetic bodies”, able to render the accompanied computation simpler, according to a general appeal to the “simplexity” of animal embodied cognition. I hope it will become clear that eco-cognitive computationalism does not aim at furnishing a final and stable definition of the concept of computation, such as a textbook or a different epistemological approach could provide: I intend to take into account the historical and dynamical character of the concept, to propose an intellectual framework that depicts how we can understand not only the change of its meaning, but also the “emergence” of new forms of computations. Full article

Eco-cognitive computationalism sees computation as active in physical entities suitably transformed so that data can be encoded and decoded to obtain fruitful results. Turing’s original intellectual perspective first of all clearly depicted the evolutionary emergence in humans of information, meaning, and of the first rudimentary forms of cognition, as the result of a complex interplay and simultaneous coevolution, in time, of the states of brain/mind, body, and external environment. At the same time it furnished the conceptual framework able to show how thanks to an imitation of the above process the subsequent invention of the Universal Practical Computing Machine is achieved, that computer that in the perspective offered by Turing I call “mimetic mind”. It is by extending this framework that I think we can limpidly see that the recent emphasis on the simplification of cognitive and motor tasks generated in organic agents by morphological aspects implies—in robotics—the need not only of further “computational mimesis” of the related performances—when possible—but also the construction of appropriate “mimetic bodies” able to render the accompanied computation simpler, according to a general appeal to the “simplexity” of animal embodied cognition. Full article

The externalization/disembodiment of mind is a significant cognitive perspective able to unveil some basic features of abduction and creative/hypothetical thinking, its success in explaining the semiotic interplay between internal and external representations (mimetic and creative) is evident. This is also clear at the level of some intellectual issues stressed by the role of artifacts in ritual settings, in which also interesting cases of creative meaning formation are at play. Taking advantage of the concept of manipulative abduction, I will stress the role of some external artifacts (symbols in ritual tools). I contend these artifacts, and the habits they originate, can be usefully represented as memory mediators that “mediate” and make available the story of their origin and the actions related to them, which can be learned and/or re-activated when needed. This is especially patent in an anthropological perspective. Furthermore, symbolic habits—for example in psychoanalytical frameworks—can also be seen as memory mediators which maximize abducibility, because they maximize recoverability, in so far as they are the best possible expression of something not yet grasped by consciousness. Full article