Abstract
The dynamics of human mental life constantly involve going through non-real situations. Thus, the inner world is a universe of possible worlds whose study is necessary to ground a complete cognitive psychodynamic approach. In this chapter, we show how ideas developed in cognitive science can account for our remarkable ability to “navigate” through possible worlds. By exploiting the similarities between web navigation and mental navigation, we highlight the basic device underlying the following of mental paths, before showing in more detail how a mental universe can be constructed from fragments of representation. Then we specify the flexible processes that make possible the safe and fast mental navigation that we constantly practice without being aware of, but which can be disrupted in pathological conditions such as schizophrenia.
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Notes
- 1.
“Possible worlds” is a phrase whose first rigorous use is attributed to the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646–1716) in his metaphysical work Theodicy (1710/1985), but that has taken a fresh start since the work of the logician Saul Kripke who has proposed a semantic for modal logic based on “possible worlds” (Kripke, 1963).
- 2.
Notice that by reading and understanding the two first paragraphs of this section you have projected a series of images from your memory. Similar mental walks are commonly used in relaxation or hypnosis.
- 3.
- 4.
Perceptions and images are deployed within the spatial array in similar ways and elicit the same type of treatment (Borst & Kosslyn, 2008; Ciaramelli, Rosenbaum, Solcz, Levine, & Moscovitch, 2010). Mental imagery uses structures developed for perception (Ganis, Thompson, & Kosslyn, 2004; Kosslyn, 1994), whilst any perception is largely projective (Clark, 2013; Soto, Wriglesworth, Bahrami-Balani, & Humphreys, 2010).
- 5.
Reciprocally, building a model of the inner world displayed by a representational system can draw a new light on the current limits of artificial intelligence.
- 6.
- 7.
However, unlike a website, a mental object is essentially dynamic. The memory processes of coding allow to decompose a scene/snapshot and to recombine the pieces into new fragments according to the active memory context (see Plagnol, 2002, 2004, in press). You may have stored in memory only a few percepts about Hyde Park, but it is sufficient to give rise to a potential infinity of mental images of Hyde Park in your window of presence.
- 8.
Some of these ideas have been introduced in the previous chapters.
- 9.
- 10.
Here we only consider mental representations that are able to enter the conscious flow of the phenomenal experience. Constraints can be different for other cognitive levels.
- 11.
In Chapter 7, the elementary fragments were called “analogical fragments” because Chapter 7 focused on their depictic format, which is in contrast to that of symbolic representations. Here, we focus instead on the elementary character of these presence fragments from which complex entities are constructed. As mentioned above, the grounded cognition framework (Barsalou, 1999, 2008) offers strong reasons to admit that elementary fragments of representation are analogical (or depictic, iconic…).
- 12.
A symbolic structure is the mental equivalent of a series of hypertext links on the World Wide Web.
- 13.
See Note 8 of this chapter.
- 14.
Functional decontextualization of representations is at the heart of cognitive troubles in schizophrenia (see Plagnol et al., 1996).
- 15.
- 16.
It can also easily be observed in an infant during a pretence game (Leslie, 1987).
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Ward, T., Plagnol, A. (2019). Possible Worlds. In: Cognitive Psychodynamics as an Integrative Framework in Counselling Psychology and Psychotherapy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25823-8_9
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