arXiv subjects

Ankur Betageri

Publications and source records attributed to Ankur Betageri.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

The Idea of Exo-brain

In this paper I examine the process of getting affected by and the process of making sense of non-language sounds and propose the idea of the contextual cognitive apparatus or exo-brain. We are affected by a singing voice even when we do not fully understand the sounds produced by it. When the listener starts hearing words in the sung song and/or starts interpreting the heard words he recreates the sense and meaning of the song based on a context which either preexists in a culture or gets formed due to his extended engagement with a nebulous auditory stimulus that is perceived as meaningful. This is what I call the work of the creative ear. The affective power of the song comes from an affective reaction between the singing voice, especially the sung non-language sounds, and the linguistic and cultural contexts of the singer and the listener and out this affective reaction something emerges which constitutes the meaning, sensible or affective, of the non-language sound. I show how the cognitive contexts of the production and the reception of the non-language sounds, and the song, play a central role in our apprehension of the sounds and propose the existence of an extra-bodily sense making organ of our cognitive system, the extension of our brain and sense organs, which I call contextual cognitive apparatus or exo-brain.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2024

Quality of Life and the Experience of Context

I propose that quality of life can be compared despite the difference in values across cultures when it is experienced at the sensory and perceptual level. I argue that an approach to assessing quality of life which focuses on an individual's ability to organize his or her context by perceiving positive constellations of factors in the environment and his or her ability to achieve valuable acts and realize valuable states of being is more meaningful than the approaches of metrics which focus directly, and often solely, on the means of living and the means of freedom. Because the felt experience of quality of life is derived from a constellation of factors which make up the indivisible structure of a milieu, the experience of quality of life cannot be regarded as a subjective experience. Through the example of how different frequencies, and mixtures of frequencies, of light are perceived as colour by the eye, I demonstrate that the human cognitive apparatus, because of its relation to the object that is measured, apprehends different scales of quantity as degrees of quality. I show that lived experience is the result of a selective relationality with one's environment and that the experience of quality has something to do with the perception of entities in their interrelated and networked nature as wholes.

q-bio.NC↗