I haven’t mentioned this to many people until now, but I’m in the early stages of writing a book. I will be focusing on about two dozen false dichotomies that ill-define us. Much of my research involves cognitive linguistics and embodied cognition, but I will touch on many other areas too. Even though I’m just getting started, the process has been both exhilarating and exhausting. Two months ago, when I hit the go button on this project, I didn’t appreciate that this would turn out to be perhaps the most challenging project of my life—these ideas are spilling out of my computer and permeating many other parts of my life, including my practice of law, my art and conversations I’ve been imposing on close friends and random strangers. Throughout my life, I’ve often been told that I’m “different” in that I often crave conversation that challenges me. I’ve been told that I’m severely allergic to chit chat. I plead guilty to that, and it feels like this allergy is getting worse. It’s difficult for me to stop thinking about this project these days.

My outline is currently 100 pages and it will probably get a lot longer before I start trying to distill and wrestle it into a couple dozen digestible chapters. I’m been actively outlining my book for two months. Reviewing the literature has often been like drinking out of a fire hydrant, even though I’ve been given a big assist from the past. I’m repeatedly feeling grateful that the younger version me decided to A) audit dozens of credit hours of graduate level cognitive science classes at Washington University and B) write about many of these topics for twelve years at this website. I wouldn’t have had the audacity to undertake this project without both of these investments. I conclude this even though I can now see that many of my prior writings were naïve and wrong-headed.

I’m lucky to be in a position to dedicate substantial chunks of uninterrupted time to this. It sometimes even feels like a calling, which sounds so terribly self-important. To temper this self-confidence, a voice in my head often whispers that this endeavor is only for my own satisfaction and that I don’t have anything of substantial value to add to ongoing vigorous worldwide conversations by numerous brilliant writers who have made careers doing deep dives into the human condition. That might be correct. We’ll see, but I’m still going to give this a try.

Why does this project speak to me? Once you wrap your head around the past several decades of research of cognitive scientists, once you are no longer merely passively enjoying these concepts, something transformative happens. Once you start breathing these concepts, feeling them in your bones and muscles, almost everything changes, and it can sometimes be scary. I remember a conversation 20 years ago with a close friend. We were discussing a paper I wrote on the role of attention on moral decision-making. I will never forget that look she gave me. She was concerned that if science dug too deeply into how human animals function, this would reveal people to be machines; too much scientific curiosity might dehumanize humans. My mantra has traditionally been that exploring these topics deeply helps me to appreciate the exquisite splendor of humans even more, but my friend’s concern sometimes occasionally haunts me too, just as Terror Management Theory would suggest.

I’ve certainly encountered some shudders and shivers when I realize that science is offering far more than a good story. First rate science can trigger an autobiographical reality that forcibly removes one from one’s comfy bubble. It reminds me of moments when I stop to remind myself that the sun really is a huge fusion ball 93 million miles away, and that the fingers I’m using to hit these computer keys really morphed from the tips of the fish fins of my ancestors. These things aren’t just stories.

My pursuit of these topics has been exhilarating, arguably addictive, and that’s why I’ve pursued these studies for many years. It dovetails with my personal mythology that my life, my strutting and fretting my hour upon this stage, comes with the challenge to figure out whatever I can about who we are, we human animals. I couldn’t have figured out any of this on my own. It’s only because amazingly smart people cared enough to research and share their ideas, people like Andy Clark, William Bechtel, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Robin Dunbar, Patricia Churchland, David Buss, Randolph Nesse, Frans De Waal, Stuart Kauffman, Geoffrey Miller, David Sloan Wilson, Antonio Damasio, Jonathan Haidt, Neil Shubin and Daniel Kahneman. I’ve had the opportunity to meet many of these people in classrooms, through correspondence and in person.

There are also hundreds of other smart scientists who have inspired me with their writings and lectures, people who had the courage to follow facts wherever they led. I think of these scientists as slipping thought-grenades into their writings, disrupting my comforting thought process, then causing my head to re-congeal into counter-intuitive re-framings about who we are as human animals. It is my hope that I can distill some of these extraordinary and challenging ideas into accessible, engaging and entertaining chapters. Here’s a few of the topics that I will address in my writings:

– Emotion permeates literally (literally literally) everything we think and do (even our most abstract thoughts), meaning that our physical world is inescapably coextensive with an emotionally-weighted landscape. This means that there is no “objective” emotionally-neutral oasis from which anyone can make value-free proclamations.

– Our minds extend beyond skin and skull to include physical and cultural tools (e.g., computers and language) and other people. Thus, when a good friend dies, to a significant extent, we end up going to our own funeral.

– In order to understand any topic well, it is critical to understand the embodied, foundations of word meaning. Meaning is not something that floats in the air. Nor does meaning reside in words themselves, as though words serve as “containers” for transferring intellectual cargo from person to person akin to a pneumatic tube at a bank. This issue of word meaning is critical in many professions including my profession (I’m an attorney) where case outcomes critically depend on word meaning.

– Our concepts have inner structures that offer us a deeper understanding our written and oral attempts to communicate. Recognizing that these inner structures depend on such things as prototypes, basic level categories, radial categories and metaphorical extensions, reveals that many difficult arguments are result from ships passing in the night, by failures to appreciate these sometimes complex structures.

– There is nothing magical or ethereal about moral decision-making. Further, the roots of morality run deeply into our ancestral past, and the evidence of this in other species is ubiquitous, extending far beyond our primate branchlet.

– Action is inextricably tethered to perception. “Predictive processing” strongly suggests that we avoid the need for otherwise impossibly large bandwidth requirements by relying on Bayesian error-correction. This approach rules out viewing intelligence as passive or disembodied. Further, as Andy Clark has extensively written, experience is not constructed from the bottom up by the brain. Rather, it “is constructed at the shifting borderline between sensory evidence and top-down prediction or expectation.”

– When seen through the lens of cognitive linguistics, many intransigent philosophical conundrums dissolve and reconstitute into more science-friendly morphologies. There’s no longer a need to take a side in many traditional philosophical arguments, in that many philosophical positions are the result of unwittingly privileging one (of multiple) possible metaphorical structurings of a concept that is at the center of the debate. In many intractable philosophical disputes the participants mistakenly think that they are discussing the same topic.

– We think with our bodies, not merely our brains. Without a brain situated in a body, situated in an environment, there can no meaning. There could not be any brain in a jar (or computer) that experiences meaning like human animals do.

– It is a struggle to see us as we really are: As Nietzsche once wrote, “We cannot see around our corner.” Folk psychologists and armchair psychologists need to take heed and roll up their sleeves. Responsible discussion about what it means to be human imposes new burdens to get serious about the many truly amazing cognitive science findings from the past few decades.

– Many of the things we consider mental illness are points on a continuum that contains traits we desperately need to survive.

– One cannot seriously discuss what is moral without considering aesthetics.

It is my position that sorting out these issues reveals extraordinary things about what it means to be human. Working through these issues also would allow us to sidestep many false dichotomies that permeate and derail everyday conversations

I will be writing on these ideas at Dangerous Intersection in coming months. It is my hope that my website postings will eventually take the shape of book chapters or at least sub-chapters. You are welcome to subscribe to DI by email (on the home page) if you’d like to see how this project develops.

That’s it for now. Now to see whether I can stay on target and push this book out in less than two years. That’s my goal.