Chart of mental processes. 2012.

Mental process or mental function are terms often used interchangeably for all the things that individuals can do with their minds. These include perception, memory, thinking (such as ideation, imagination, belief, reasoning, etc.), volition, and emotion. Sometimes the term cognitive function is used instead.

CONTENT : A - F , G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

When we say experiences are internal to the experiencing person , then we refer to the states of concious ness or awareness

Quotes

Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - F

  • Cognitive processes Higher mental processes, such as perception, memory, language, problem solving, and abstract thinking.
  • Criteria of Mind
    1) A mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components.
    2) The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference, and difference is a nonsubstantial phenomenon not located in space or time; difference is related to negentropy and entropy rather than energy.
    3) Mental process requires collateral energy.
    4) Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination.
    5) In mental process, the effects of difference are to be regarded as transforms (i.e., coded versions) of events which proceeded them. The rules of such transformation must be comparatively stable (i.e., more stable than the content), but are in themselves subject to transformation.
    6) The description and classification of these processes of transformation disclose a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena.
  • We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. ... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
  • The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer's thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator.
    • Jacob Deschin, "Nature as it is". New York Times (1857-Current file); Feb 3, 1952; Proquest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2002) pg. X14
  • Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth, something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.
  • What attracted me so strongly and exclusively to mathematics, apart from the actual content, was particularly the specific nature of the mental processes by which mathematical concepts are handled. This way of deducing and discovering new truths from old ones, and the extraordinary clarity and self-evidence of the theorems, the ingeniousness of the ideas... had an irresistible fascination for me. Beginning from the individual theorems, I grew accustomed to delve more deeply into their relationships and to grasp whole theories as a single entity. That is how I conceived the idea of mathematical beauty...

G - L

  • The classical support for as-if models in the social sciences stems from the economist Milton Friedman (1953), who, like the psychologist B. F. Skinner, saw little value in modeling cognitive processes. In contrast, our aim is to understand actual decision processes, not only the outcomes. There is a good reason for this. Without modeling the cognitive blade of Simon's scissors, it is utterly impossible to determine in what environments heuristics succeed, that is, their ecological rationality.
    • Gerd Gigerenzer, Ralph Hertwig, and Thorsten Pachur, Heuristics: The Foundations of Adaptive Behavior, 2015.
  • It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.
  • In the near future, neurobiology will address a matter of more general and fundamental importance: the biology of human mental processes. ...Psychology and psychiatry can illuminate and define for biology the mental functions that need to be studied if we are to have a meaningful and sophisticated understanding of the biology of the human mind.
    • Eric Kandel, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind (2008)
  • In conceptual art the idea or the concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive; it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman.
    • Sol LeWitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art", Artlorum, V/10, Summer 1967, p. 80. Cited in: Diane Waldman. Carl Andre. Published 1970 by Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. p. 7.

M - R

  • It's difficult to be rigorous about whether a machine really 'knows', 'thinks', etc., because we're hard put to define these things. We understand human mental processes only slightly better than a fish understands swimming.
  • Cognitive processes surely exist, so it can hardly be unscientific to study them.
    • Ulric Neisser. (1967). Cognitive Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. p. 5

S - Z

  • No scientist has yet provided an acceptable definition of "mind" or "mental" that reveals the character of "unconscious mental processes," and no physicist a lucid definition of "elementary particles" that shows how they can appear or disappear, and why there are so many.

See also

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