Being, Thinking, Story Telling:
What It Is and How It Works, Reflectively

A Snapshot, Part 1
Paul Grobstein
20 October 2004

The two figures below are modified from those used in a talk about biology, sex, and gender. Drawing from conversations in the Descartes project, they are intended to illustrate the relation between body, unconscious brain processing, and conscious thinking (upper figure) and to situate the individual brain in a larger social/cultural/natural world context (lower figure).

I think the characterization offered by the figures is a useful one but that in turn raises an interesting question about claims I have made elsewhere that there is no "reality", there are only stories. How do the two "stories", the one illustrated here and the "everything is story" stories relate to one another? This question is interestingly related to some questions about mirrors and things reflecting one another that arose in the Descartes project conversation , and to some issues of recursion that are significant in thinking about information.

Parts 1 and 2 of this piece are an effort to illustrate relevant features of reflection/recursion as they bear on thinking and story telling. Each part contains at the bottom a link to the other part.

Click here to to see how Paul (asterisk in lower figure) works