Well, good evening and thank you, everybody,
for coming out today to hear my talk and glad it stopped raining so that there's somebody here to talk to.
I shall be speaking today about a psychological phenomenon that's overlooked in the philosophy,
literature and appears to receive only minor attention from researchers in psychology.
It is, I think, a phenomenon that's commonplace, of practical significance and relevance to varying issues in ethics.
I will not today be presenting a tightly crafted argument in support of a precise claim,
but more of an exploratory survey to make a looser case that the phenomenon in question is worthy of extended theoretical attention.
My personal, philosophical background could be described positively as eclectic and interdisciplinary, or not so positively as unfocused.
I'm drawn to issues concerning mental structures and processes, the pursuit of truth, insight and understanding, and how this gets corrupted.
How we use make sense of it are and are affected by language, virtue,
moral and intellectual and human interaction and moral responsibility. When compelled to provide a single self-identifying category term
I say that my field is neuropsychology, which concerns the way that the mind and its processes bear on moral questions.
One more autobiographical data.
I teach students who are obtaining an engineering heavy education to prepare them to be officers in the United States Navy and Marine Corps.
The few philosophers we have on staff there were hired not to make philosophical exploration available to these clever young men and women.
Alas, as there is a shortage of appreciation in those military services for philosophy or indeed most of the humanities and social sciences,
but rather to teach a required and certainly important second year course in ethics for military leaders.
My topic for today has been somewhat prompted by the Naval Academy understandable preoccupation with preparing students to cope with the physical,
mental and moral demands of battlefield combat.
A very psychologically challenging environment, and also by a more widely shared experience of classroom teaching in an era in the United States,
at least, of greatly heightened attentiveness to the sensitivities and sensibilities of students.
And what follows. I shall first talk generally about emotionality, self-regulation.
Then introduced the phenomenon of interest to us today. Then after briefly connecting it to the psychological literature on defence
mechanisms of using numerous examples to make the case for its broad utility,
we will then turn to examining how it works briefly contrasted with other techniques of emotional self-management.
At this point, we'll examine how taking note of this process can enrich our analysis of more responsibility in particular cases.
Then, following a brief extension of the cast of emotions,
the desire to ask whether the technique under examination might be relevant to character virtues.
Concluding with a sober acknowledgement of the pathological usage to which could be put at that point,
will open up to for your comments, suggestions, objections and questions.
Of course, this is still a new area of research for me,
and one which I have not yet settled on a position or even properly located its philosophical significance.
I've even more eagerness than usual to receive feedback from you.
I hope that the breadth of my talk with lots of ideas and use for us to discuss the Q&A
period is the generous payoff that I receive for sharing my half baked ideas with you today,
and I'm really looking forward to that. So welcome.
Those of you who've come in, you haven't missed anything except the throat clearing that has typically been in the preamble.
Right, exactly. Emotion, inhibition or suppression does not get a lot of good press these days and has not for a long time now.
A recent encyclopaedic contributor felt no need to provide a citation for the statement that suppression of emotion,
especially negative emotion, is typically linked to poor health and well-being for Westerners.
Popular Western culture has for decades to an increasing general valorisation of emotionality.
The experiencing of emotion is thought to be a basic part of sound, human functioning and flourishing.
Starting this endangers relationships, moral behaviour and mental and even physical health.
Emotions are informative, helpful and generally to be acknowledged, valued and even validated as embodying, justified or true perceptions.
They emerge naturally in response to events and states of affairs in the environment, just as perceptions do.
But they're even more personal and subjective, so their epistemic credentials are not to be scrutinised, but in general,
philosophers for their part of extensively explored both emotion generally as well as specific emotions,
and presented views that find great value in emotions and emotionality.
There's a great deal of children's attitudes, I think, and there are salutary corrective to a long period during which emotions were
subject to widespread denigration or dismissal as undeserving of attention.
Emotions were regarded as fundamentally counter rational.
They were held to have no place in productive thinking, which was taken to consist solely the logical manipulation of symbolic propositions.
They were associated with women in a partnership that was thought to be mutually unflattering.
They were supposed to make no contribution to intelligent action or penetrating inquiry, whether philosophical, scientific or otherwise.
But it is perhaps time for a counter correction, for the pendulum, for the pace of the swing back toward a more balanced assessment.
Emotionality can obviously be informative, productive, gratifying and fulfilling, but it can also obviously be disturbing and counterproductive.
Given this, there ought to be a welcome world we play by methods of emotion,
self-regulation that counteract the emergence of emotions in certain sorts of circumstances.
Such methods could, it would seem, be conducive to better judgement and decision making and lessening of pointless, subjective, emotional suffering.
Let's consider a simple to imagine that tangling for a couple of unpleasant weeks with a flu like Non-covid illness prompts us to get a physical exam,
after which we're summoned for a consultation with the doctor.
In his private office, we're presented with the grave news that we have cancer in our blood cells.
That is leukaemia. Patients facing a life threatening illness like leukaemia and aggressive medical treatment like bone marrow transplantation,
are suddenly confronted with a highly threatening situation that turns their lives upside down.
Typically, the time spent for adjusting to the new situation is highly compressed.
Patients have hardly realised what their diagnosis implies before they are confronted with very aggressive treatments.
The mortality rate in bone marrow transplantation is up to 36%.
Survival after one year is reported to be about 50% in the donors unrelated and 70 to 80% with a related donor for most patients.
Bone marrow transplantation is the very last hope for survival. Now.
It's an almost practical importance for us to be able to discuss intelligent intelligently with the doctor, what our options are,
what actions we ought to take or not take, and so on, and to be able to recall the details of this discussion afterwards.
So we cannot afford to become very emotional under these circumstances.
Hence, we might attempt to avoid suffering distress by not allowing ourselves to bring to mind,
even ideally to the unconscious mind, any cancer associated imagery that might well cause debilitating panic.
Or to think of, or imagine the more dire of the implications and consequences of our treatment decline and possible death.
The extra information, the beliefs, images and speculations would not be relevant to the urgent task at hand.
Would not significantly enhance our discussion and planning at the doctor's office.
On the other hand, its presence to mind could very well be distracting or crushing in a way that would undermine the current activity.
At the very least, it would demand a great effort of will to maintain our composure and focus adequately,
despite the upwelling of fear effort that could otherwise be directed in more productive directions.
In order to achieve this self-control over our emotional and cognitive responses.
Therefore, we restrict our engagement with the issues to a purely intellectual plane and a topically constrained one at that,
thereby reproducing either the cognitive aspect of fear and or the affect of the physiological aspects that accompany it.
Success could simply be a matter of degree rather than all or nothing.
The managing of our cognitive response will in fact also prevent us from experiencing other potent emotions that could derail irrational efforts.
Hear, despair, say, or anger or grief, because it aims at a broader current blackout of all associated,
dark, strongly, negatively balanced ideas stored in our long term memory.
In other contexts, such as conversations we have about the dire prognosis with our spouse, children, parents or business partners.
It might be that more of the information will be properly admitted within our current
perspective to help us plan as well to connect emotionally to those we care for.
We've been here. A good deal of the related memory contents might prudently be suppressed, including much of the potentially attendant imagery.
I propose that we use the term shallow cognisant for this method of self limiting
our emotional responses by a selective suppression or non activation of emotion,
arousing imagery and verbal thoughts.
In describing this process as I have, I do presuppose a cognitive conception of emotions in which emotions are caused,
shaped and even partly constituted by thoughts of conscious and unconscious in both symbolic and imagistic.
So mission fights in a broad sense. If cognitions are components of emotions,
then we can readily make sense of our routine observations of emotions being substantially controlled, triggered, moderated,
eliminated,
redirect and transmuted by the cognitions that are activated and alive within our stream of consciousness and unconsciousness from moment to moment.
I say substantially control rather than completely controlled because emotions are more than just cognitions.
They include physiological elements for one thing, and they thereby gain an independence that can keep them from being fully under cognitive dominion.
Once we have the concept shallow cognisant in hand, it quickly becomes evident just how commonplace it is.
Its implementation is not restricted to start with dramatic episodes like the one we began with.
Indeed, that kind of life situation itself will, if things go reasonably well, gradually become more prosaic and shallow.
Cognisant will continue to have a constructive role to play as the period of leukaemia treatment stretches out further into the future.
We hope the sufferers, family, friends and associates will do well to avoid having their minds conjure pointlessly disturbing thoughts
or images relating to cancer victims so as not to interfere with their ongoing care relationships.
Relationships with this sufferer or with one another.
The practice of shallow cognisance is not unheard of in common discourse where it might be true intellectualising often used in a pejorative sense.
This usage may have been borrowed and adapted from the domain of psychology,
where Freud began a tradition still alive of using Intellectualising as a defence mechanism.
Unconsciously aimed at allaying anxieties or unacceptable impulses.
These mechanisms are respected as normal ways of coping with the vicissitudes of life.
More than a century of research demonstrates that defence mechanisms are automatic psychological
processes that aid individuals in dealing with internal conflicts in stressful situations.
Albeit practices that vary in how helpful or dysfunctional they are and supporting human flourishing within particular life contexts.
Intellectual zation is said by psychologists specialising in the theoretical formulation
and clinical measurement of defence mechanisms to involve the use of general,
impersonal, abstract thinking in order to stave off disturbing feelings.
Another closely related defence mechanism referred to as isolation of affect,
is said to keep emotional accompaniments out of consciousness in some unspecified specified way,
but it's not very well distinguished from intellectual zation. It's not clear which of these mechanisms might correspond to shallow cognitive.
Both mechanisms, at any rate, are yoked together as so-called obsessional defences in the middle range of adeptness of all defence mechanisms.
They help the individual in keeping out of awareness parts of the conflict, for instance, associated feelings,
desires and thoughts which would generate intolerable anxiety perceived as an integrated psychological experience.
By contrast, the mature, most adaptive defence mechanisms or coping strategies promote the integrated and partially aware experience of feelings,
ideas, desires and thoughts associated to an internal conflict or external stressful situation,
and help the individual fuming with his or her psychologically stressful experiences by integrating
ethics with ideas for optimising and possibly resolving the internal or external causes of distress.
So shall recognising seems unlikely to be looked upon with complete favour by researchers in this field.
But consider some of the myriad beneficial applications of shell companies.
A market investors say needs to weigh risks without allowing thoughts of possible
catastrophes to render her fearful and irrational in her decision making.
A team of mountain climbers must be able to coordinate their precise actions while avoiding anxious or fearful emotions that could impair execution.
Performers, including university lecturers, need to closely monitor their performances,
taking note of unplanned problems and handling these without the intrusion of resource sapping discombobulating emotions.
Poker players, in addition, cannot afford to manifest emotion, which might tip off competitors in ways that can be exploited.
If the attachment of those eager to enjoy humour must often be able to resist.
Envisioning the jokingly depicted events vividly lest revulsion, distress, discomfort or ethical concern preclude amusement.
Shallow cognition can also be important for interpersonal or inter-group cooperation, a function that is not highlighted in the psychology literature.
When people, intimate partners, international diplomats or anyone in between need to negotiate conflicting interests, shall we?
Cognisant of the other's expression of needs and requests,
bypasses thoughts concerning their threatening, anxiety provoking defensiveness, eliciting implications,
and thereby permits a more patient, sympathetic, slow, co-operative, creative consideration that can discover mutually acceptable resolutions.
We also see social and political relations that are dependent upon there being
reliable expectations that people can and will exercise share recognising.
Is when show a cognisant contributes to productive, respectful,
rational discussions of issues that easily arouse tempers or libidos or affronted egos.
Relatedly, we shall return to this later.
Students receiving trigger warnings from teachers are presumed to possess some capacity for restraining the flaring of emotions that could disturb,
distract or otherwise interfere with rational analysis and discussion.
In all these cases, holding emotion,
evoking thoughts and imagery cognitively at bay seems a generally effective route to maintaining emotional control.
The inhibitory utility of Shell recognising is not confined to negative emotions.
It also helps with emotions that are ordinarily considered to be positive, but that in particular settings can be problematic.
For instance, shallow cognition may prevent a general policy judgement or choice for being unbalanced
by a powerful reaction of compassion or empathy to a single person's anecdotal case.
What can help us control the onset of sexual, romantic, or even merely fraternal feelings of affection in a professional or otherwise unsuitable
setting where they might lead to behaviour that amounts to sexual harassment or worse.
Harrison excuse me, given the potent behavioural consequences of positive as well as negative emotions,
emotional self-regulation is crucial across the board to avoid infringing upon the rights and interests of others.
Not that shallow cognition is all powerful. Some stimuli to deep cognisance seem to be less resistible than others,
such as the smell of a lost loved one versus the sight or verbal description of him or her,
or a lengthy or repeated vision of a gruesome wound,
as opposed to a quick glimpse or a depiction in words or repetitive exposure to the serious stressors of a battlefield engagement.
There's certainly much to explore concerning the variables that determine the varying degrees of success met by shallow cognisance.
Now I've been speaking as if shallow cognitive is the only emotion self-management game in town, but certainly is not.
Reason psychological literature describes, for instance, emotion regulation strategies that include what's called attentional deployment,
which is shifting one's attentional focus toward less distressing or more positive emotion inducing stimuli.
Cognitive change. Modifying one starts to improve mood and response methylation,
which is directly altering the physical or behavioural aspects of an emotional response.
According to this model, a person facing an unpleasant work environment might intentionally ignore problematic co-workers,
which would be intentional to reframe the boss's criticism as feedback that will help a career trajectory in the long term.
Cognitive change or practice.
Relaxation and deep breathing techniques to facilitate relaxation when becoming annoyed by co-workers, which is a response modulation.
This provides a landscape in which to situate shallow cognisant.
Notice how shallow colonising differs from the methods that redirect our attention toward different
perceptions or thoughts that will undermine or counteract the arousal of an undesired or unhelpful emotion.
Shallow colonising arguably,
arguably holds the advantage over these techniques as it permits continued cognitive engagement with the ideas or realities
needed to be faced without either escaping into self distraction or diverting to a very different construal of the situation.
When we need to deal intelligently, properly with a diagnosis of leukaemia,
it's no help to start thinking about politics or football except to offer a brief breather before returning to reality,
perhaps, or even to find silver linings. Though such perspective shift certainly had their place, it could be profoundly valuable.
Likewise, those who are determined not merely to fret about aspects of themselves, their lives and their worlds, but to work to change.
Those cannot simply switch the channel to something that's completely different or has been re construed to be emotionally benign.
If they're to strive to make improvements in the realities that disturb them.
So they need to engage mentally with those realities, but without being brought low emotionally by.
Someone who finds herself overwhelmingly dismayed and despairing when mulling over the plight of the poor or of animals in the modern world,
must, if she is to play the role of activist,
find some way to engage mentally with the issues that so disturbed her to read and listen and view and converse and write about these issues,
all the while decoupling the foreseeable emotional reactions who strain may undermine her ability to continue and even her physical and mental health.
Salman Khan. I think there's not, of course, eliminate the threats or Dr. Dyer reports it does not itself undo harsh realities,
but it does facilitate our coping with them intelligently.
And its function is often to postpone an emotional reaction, not to eliminate it permanently.
The ideal outcome might typically not be complete prevention of an emotion,
but mere delay until the circumstances are more propitious for confronting.
The pathetic accident. Moreover, most emotionality is benign and stands outside a shallow cognisance,
proper sphere of action which embraces only emotions that interfere with proper functioning.
So a position in support of the use of shallow cognisance does not entail a general stance against emotionality.
It can deem emotionality highly valuable and important as long as is in its proper place.
With shallow cognisant being a tool for situating, it will best serve the good.
How exactly did the shadow cabinet work? What's the mental mechanism that underlies it?
I've said a tiny bit about and I'll say a little more, and what I say will be speculative and without a strong memory.
But I do invite your comments on the account.
I give my starting point here and indeed in much of my research elsewhere, is that the individual cognitive system is not fully integrated.
Numerous familiar psychological phenomena, including priming effects, framing and scheme and script effects, expectation effects,
temporary forgetting inconsistencies among beliefs or beliefs like states setting
relative personas that we adopt and ambivalence suggest that our cognitive endowment,
the pool of resources stored in memory for utilisation and thinking resources that I take to comprise both sentences and images is
not a single find from which any and all assets are available to be activated whenever relevant to the current topic of cognition.
Rather than provide in such such fashion, a single perspective upon the world.
Our endowment is functionally compartmentalised in a complex pattern that actually supports many distinct,
partial, partly overlapping situation triggered and sometimes mutually inconsistent prospects that quarter.
Our stream, recognising, which is only partly conscious, involves a continual shifting from one perspective to another,
as differing subsets of our representational resources get activated for the pragmatic task at hand as we perceive it.
In short, our standpoint keeps changing how we think or behave and what kind of setting is no sure indicator of how we think or behave in a different.
Shallow cognisance seems to work by creating a prospect that is insulated or sealed off from certain kinds of memory representations.
We managed to activate the focal ideas with which we need to reason, for example, and planning how to respond to a leukaemia diagnosis.
But we've all activated some representations that by virtue of their associations
in relations with the focal ideas would ordinarily be activated as well.
But for the shallow curtain. Engaging shall occur as it can be.
Analogised using a simulated computer, also known as an emulator or a virtual machine as a safe sandbox environment in which to examine
potentially dangerous entities without exposing the rest of the system to the risk of infection.
So just how available is this show according to ordinary people?
Is this a capacity that all possess or that can at least be developed by anyone?
Or does it require some specialised kind of mental training in practice?
This practice and shallow cognition strengthen one's ability in a way that transfers readily across different sorts of emotional listening stimuli,
such that maybe practising in educational settings when confronted by emotion, trigger ideas can empower one to better,
better handle not only future classroom provocations, but emotional triggers elsewhere in life.
It's important that we find answers to these empirical questions because they bear upon significant issues of moral right and wrong.
So a covenant is relevant not only to achieving our practical ends, as I suggested earlier, but also for the moral relationships that we bear to one.
The earlier examples I offered were cast in terms of the self-interest and the shallow moderniser.
But of course there were possible moral dimensions to those scenarios, too.
The mountain climbers, for instance, may owe it to their loved ones to take all reasonable measures not to be undone by panic on the rock face.
The market investor and poker player may have dependants carrying on them to avoid emotion caused by poor performance.
But a pure case of moral responsibility to others.
Simple one is presented by the choral singer who is at risk to choke up, literally with singing a certain, certain moving passage of text.
And I know all I speak about.
He needs to remember that singers indulging their emotional inclinations are likely to undermine the audience's ability to satisfy indulge theirs.
But he can meet his ethical obligation here by using shallow cognisance while
still clearly enunciating the words he sees and understanding their meaning.
Another interesting sort of case is presented by the negative reactions of some passers by two women who are nursing young children in public.
Policy discussions commonly balance the rights to breastfeed and to be breastfed against the supposed rights of these bystanders,
not to be compelled to experience discomfort, revulsion, or other aversive emotions.
A first response to the bystander's claim might be that they can look away if the site is disturbing to them.
But this fails to grapple with the apparent psychological reality that much of the breastfeeding
related emotional suffering derives not from being confronted by the actual sight of a woman's breast,
but by unseen thoughts and images that only onlookers allow themselves to activate when witnessing nursing,
even when there's no breast or suckling that is visible at all.
Now, if the passer by passers by can be expected to engage easily in shallow cognisance, then their complaints seem to have no purchase whatsoever.
That is as it is then their own failures to deploy the self-regulation measure that is the morally relevant cause of their own suffering.
Might such an analysis be condemned as victim blaming? That wouldn't be surprising, though, in my view, victim blaming charges do not cut the ice.
They're popular thought to cut. But that's a topic for another time.
A still richer example might be found in the realm of informed consent to medical procedures.
Our earlier leukaemia example suggests that shallow cognisance may play a highly constructive role in patient's provision of consent,
as it makes it possible for them to weigh their options and choices without having to fight off their own distressing,
disorienting and deflating emotional reactions.
If doctors can be confident that patients who face serious health challenges are capable of calmly, rationally processing all processing,
all the decision, relevant information regarding those challenges and the medical and non-medical interventions that are available,
then they can open the information spigot or tap,
and patients will be able to make fully informed choices without feeling overwhelmed
or raced in certain directions by painful emotions they are undergoing.
On the other hand, what if patients cannot be counted on to mobilise Shell or cognisant effectively where Edwards needed?
Then doctors will be tempted, perhaps rightly, to withhold choice, relevant information that's emotionally highly disturbing and therefore liable,
thereby liable to exert an irrational bias upon the patient's choice.
In the jargon of the law courts, the probative epistemic value of some information would be outweighed by its likely prejudicial effect.
In which case we might encounter episodes like the one I experienced with my own orthopaedist
as he and I plan in arthroscopic surgical procedure on the meniscus of my knee.
He said nothing to me at that time about the procedure involving tourniquets and the wrenching or distorting of my knee joint in order to fix it in
place for the surgery or the resulting micro tearing to be expected in the anterior cruciate ligament and the discomfort this would produce post-op.
I learned about these standard features of the procedure only after the surgery.
From the notes taken during the procedure. Plus what the doctors assistant said at my first post-op follow up appointment.
Given my seeming shallow calmness and capability, it looks as if I was wrongly denied the opportunity to give informed consent to the procedure.
Once, at least, the doctor had good reason to expect it.
I, perhaps, like most of his patients or most surgery patients or most medical patients,
couldn't handle the truth, as Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men.
That is that I would not possess the mental resources to make good, rational use of the extra information.
So it is important that we ascertain just how competent people in all walks of life are at shallow cognition.
And it's also important that we learn whether shallow cognition is a skill that can be developed, and if so, how for it is an empowering skill.
And what we are known to possess it heightens the respect with which we must be treated by others.
They're not permitted to materialistically withhold from us the information to which we are otherwise entitled,
on grounds that it will disconcert us, arousing emotions that will overwhelm our capacities for rational decision making.
Another setting in which moral issues arise with greater complexity but still serious personal and political consequences.
Because education, we are in the USA at least.
There are frequent allegations made by students of having been harmed and victimised by upsetting, insulting or offending words or images.
Such charges are taken very seriously by school administrators,
especially when the students have issued their complaints on social media or other public fora,
and they often result in serious punitive consequences for the instructors involved.
And then a university faculty approve of this state of affairs.
Many decry it might show recognising have some relevance to the controversy.
Well, if our current housing is a practice that students routinely can practice completely at low cost,
then it would seem to deflate the students claims of more.
The psychic vulnerability to potentially disturbing content such as mere mentions, not uses of supposedly toxic slurs or microaggressions,
like a statement praising colour-blind marriage standards or tentative statements of controversial or widely despised political or social views.
The psychic vulnerability in such material is largely under recipients control through the shallow, cognisant technique of mental self management,
and this removes a substantial part of the case to suppress or punish the expression of such content.
There may remain reasons to limit or prohibit the expression, but they will not concern its infliction of psychic pain or damage.
But promoting and teaching is necessary.
The use of shallow, cognisant educators would be free to pursue and model basically unfettered inquiry in the educational environment,
including about difficult topics like sex,
violence, death, religion and race, while not provoking emotional reactions in sensitive students that could undermine their learning.
Indeed, it could well be that classroom experience in handling disconcerting emotional
reactions in self-education that it helps students develop their shallow,
cognisant capacities, thereby providing an important component of the emotional,
hardiness and resilience that students will need in their subsequent professional intellectual
activities if they're not to veer off course whenever encountering matters that threaten to disorient,
disturb and dis compose. We cannot take a subtle stance on this topic, however,
until we know the empirical realities regarding shell cognisant and those realities might well complicate the final picture.
It could turn out, for instance, that while shallow colonising is effective and widely available for deflecting the majority of slings and arrows,
certain kinds of traumatic experience produce emotional reactivity that cannot be easily overcome by the shallow cognitive mechanism.
Additionally, the shallow cognisant consume resources of which we have a limited supply so that we have to be aware of inflicting
shallow cognisant fatigue upon our students where they find its exercise more taxing or even ineffective.
It will also be worth learning whether an inability to utilise economising effectively is fostered or reduced by certain experiences or attitudes,
for instance, about oneself of one's psychic vulnerability or about others.
Emotional conditions and experiences are about the nature of emotions.
Empirical data will not resolve all the conceptual and ethical issues, of course.
Suppose that we learn that students are able to cognisable shallowly about blatantly disturbing content content like profanity or bigoted speech,
or blunt descriptions of disgusting situations or violent atrocities,
but that later they often encounter memories of the initial problems,
and that these memories are not as reliably and effectively stripped of their aversive emotion by shallow cognisance at those later moments.
Or subsequent protective shallow cognisance is just as effective in most instances,
except that some of the recognised recognised episodes occur when the recipient is not well positioned to conduct shallow compromising effectively,
such as during a sleepy state or an illness or an emotionally vulnerable period.
If these are the realities,
then we need to grapple with how to balance the cognitive emotional burdens borne by students against the benefits of making classrooms,
venues for open and blinkered, fearless inquiry rather than safe spaces where social taboos are not challenged or ignored but differentially honoured.
And how do trigger warnings intersect with shallow cognitive? Suppose that our cancer diagnosis doctor character had prefaced his terrible report
of leukaemia with a true warning about how he had some terrible news to impart.
There are many easier for the patient to get. Shallow quagmire isn't going.
We might reasonably expect that a trigger warning will help people, including students, to initiate their shell cabinet mechanisms.
But the research without which I am only beginning to explore, is similarly tending not to support this,
suggesting instead that expressed trigger warnings have little effect and the trauma
survivors actually themselves trigger a heightened anxiety over what is to come.
Anticipatory anxiety. And reinforced survivors view of their trauma is central to their identity in these ways,
perhaps undermining the engagement of the shallow cognitive mechanism.
What the discussion thus far is focussed upon. Shall Cognisant is a tool for controlling emotion.
It may actually be a broader utility. The show recognising process recall is but a means to override the normal situation or task best
based activation of representational resources from our compartmentalised cognitive storehouse.
While altering the sets of cognitive assets, both intentional imagistic that are activated for use can obviously shape emotions.
Given the dependence of emotions upon cognitions. To be parallel, I think can be said for desires, desires to or shaped by conditions.
So shallow cognisant should offer control over these as well to some degree.
Consider a couple of brief examples. If we are giving intimate counsel to a friend for whom we might have romantic or sexual feelings,
we might engage our partners in order to block activation of fantasy images and thoughts that would only breed destructive desires.
Or depending upon the matter under discussion, we might need to interrupt the unhelpful arousing of longings,
possibly envious for what our friend is contemplating, like exotic travel or quitting his job.
We might temper our desire to lash out punitively at an insult or an instance of
sexual harassment by inhibiting activation of thoughts about the negative events,
adverse implications for us, for our vulnerability to future foreign misconduct, our reputation relationships,
and what will be felt by our loved ones when they hear about what we suffered,
as well as by inhibiting activation of imagery related to such applications such as our furious or crestfallen spouse or the event itself,
like the perpetrators smirking face. I closed my remarks today by considering whether, given what we surveyed so far,
the capacity information for shallow caverns might be components of character virtue.
Do they not facilitate app responses?
Emotional is iterative, behavioural and intellectual to circumstances that might otherwise throw us off kilter by arousing,
unhelpful emotions or desires. If we can't, for instance, think clearly and forthrightly about the dangerous circumstances we face.
Yet with the aid of shallow recognising stem, the arousal of fear, we should be better positioned to face these circumstances courageously.
We will, however, need to choose wisely when to deploy shallow cognisance, as it's a tool that could be used to prod ourselves toward.
In this case, fear, ignoring action whether the action would be virtuous or vicious.
So there would seem to be no escaping the need for Aristotelian practical wisdom being
able to discriminate the virtuous from the vicious courses in concrete situations.
Only now it needs to guide also the deployment of the instrument of shallow covenant.
Ordinary discourse, we should note,
sometimes includes character attributions and evaluations that arguably turn upon the use or non-use of shallow cognitive.
A political leader who could not talk about potentially emotional issues like environmental catastrophe without getting visibly choked
up and apparently losing some control is liable to be judged harshly by the electorate as unfit to lead on account of a character flaw.
Oversensitivity. The norms are complex and shifting, as the same politician might be faulted for insensitivity,
or she or he to employ shallow cognisant to provide entirely detached comments on a child centred threat or tragic tragedy.
We seem to recognise that people are endowed with some powers to regulate their emotions and our perception of these powers
seems to bring with it the description of more responsibility for the emotional responses that we do permit ourselves.
The four challenges might be lodged against the proposal. The cello cognisant plays a role in virtues of character.
First, it might be thought that surely virtue which comprises rationality, ought not require avoidance of certain thoughts or knowledge.
Judgement. Decision making cannot benefit from contracting the cognitive base upon which they rely.
But an information avoidance requirement is readily acceptable once we allow for a broad notion of rationality,
whose standard is not purely epistemic but also practical.
When the human ideal is understood, as in the act of fitting tradition, to include apt behaviour, motives,
emotions and emotional reactions, choices, values, desires, receptions, attitudes, interests, expectations and sensibilities.
Then the virtue idea can no longer presuppose maximal knowledge.
For there are trade-offs between knowledge inside these other desiderata.
For instance, recalled the early example of an arousal excessive empathy or compassion.
Here, using shallow cognisant to constrict the information we entertain might undermine this arousal,
thereby averting an unbalanced judgement or choice that would have been responsive only
to a subset of the multiple relevant considerations while being neglectful of others.
The second challenge is to show a cognisance as a contributor to virtue derives from the fact
that you are housing is not itself a distinctive dimension of character akin to generosity,
good karma for patients of courage, but a psychological faculty or activity that cuts across numerous dimensions.
In this, it seems perhaps similar to continence or willpower.
So this. The willpower is an asset deployed by the Nano, not yet virtuous when faced with uncooperative contrary to reason, desires and emotions.
So maybe shallow energy is likewise not a virtue, but a compensatory resource used by those lacking it for virtue.
However, there are important functional differences between continents and shallow cognisant.
The ideally virtuous person could not dispense with shallow cognates.
Either way, she could dispense with willpower if her other psychological dispositions were operating fully, rationally.
Even if you were competent in utilising a potential deployment, cognitive change in response modulation to achieve emotional self-regulation.
Such approaches would be less effective than shallow cognition. You could not substitute effectively for it.
For one thing, those other practices of self-regulation standardly engage only after troubling emotional arousal has begun leaving an
inertial residue still to subside ratio recognising is typically deployed in advance or at the very outset of arousal.
For another yellow card analogy has the advantage when it comes to managing desires, at least in the domain of responding to verbal stimuli.
If someone tries to tempt us with dessert or sex by graphically describe these delights,
we can utilise cognitive change by reminding ourselves of our reasons not to indulge but ocracy our income, and this may well undo us.
On the other hand, if we can cognate the verbal description shallowly,
the resulting detachment should stand us a better chance of resist the temptation.
Moreover and more significant other techniques of emotional self-regulation achieve their emotional desire,
thwarting or undermining effects only at high cost, by subverting our ability to engage mentally with the eliciting stimuli,
and thus our ability to remain intellectually engaged at length in rational discourse.
We don't want to be rudely uncommunicative with the person who wishes us the pleasure of a wonderful dessert or sexual encounter.
And we can't participate properly in a discussion of our dire medical situation if we're repeatedly distracting ourselves or,
say, rehearsing, reassuring thoughts, shallow, cognitive.
You avoid such costs as it permits more selective content restrictions upon a current cognisant.
A third objection to linking virtue to shallow cognisance is an over intellectualising issue.
Pretty shallow covers. You may seem to reduce human thinking to mere abstract simple processing by eliminating or more accurately,
not activating the associated representation resources, especially images that are most prone to arouse emotions and desires.
But this seems to be a distorting exaggeration.
Shadow cabinet, as you need not interfere, say with being highly creative, witty or amused in handling verbal information.
It permits and in some cases facilitates friendly, affectionate and loving feelings.
In fact, it is very selective in its suppression of emotion, desire.
Through its cognition activation inhibition. It targets certain mental states for avoidance while allowing others to be addressed freely.
For instance, we might utilise cognisant when talking about a painful life episode or a perilous situation we now face all in the same conversation,
becoming indignant upon learning how some people are being mistreated or pitying toward the student or office.
He tells us of his family tragedy. There's one more chance to attack the linkage between virtue and shadow cabinet.
Up to this point, we've been surveying shallow cognisance, admirable power, appreciating the benefits it provides.
But does it have a darker side? Indeed, it can be used in ways that do not promote human flourishing.
Nothing in the foregoing discussion, I hope is clear,
entails that all are two sides of shallow cognisant tend toward the virtuous while maintaining clinical intellectual distance has broad utility.
It can be directed not only against irrational emotions and desires, but also rational, appropriate ones.
It can distract us from irrelevant, prejudicial or competence, compromising information, but also from considerations that do deserve our attention.
For instance, a conspiracy and how to face death head on.
Which might be sensible if you're currently not in a position to do that productively or might be cowardly, evasive, or in bad faith.
There's no kind of facial reason to believe the cello, as he cannot be initiated as part of a program of motivated irrationality.
Or consider herself current as it can interfere with rational decision making if its filtering
out of information ends up subverting a key part of the process of decision making.
Our imaginative awareness and evaluation of alternative scenarios and options.
In cases like these, we can speak of pathological, dysfunctional or vicious shallow cognitive.
There may also be cause to worry that silicone, as you can for some people, become a mechanism of habitual emotional withdrawal and deadening.
You might expect, for instance, that those whose normal emotional reactions have been consistently penalised or ignored,
they become fixed in a pattern of shallow cognitive suppressing, even emotions that will be productive.
Anjelica Huston can certainly convey false or misleading signals to others about our beliefs and other attitudes,
as well as our emotional or other psychological traits. For instance, what it serves to inhibit our manifestation of emotional desire.
The grizzly easily crossovers to mistakenly take us to be not care.
Or as being generally detached and unfeeling. There is danger with a somewhat explicit awareness of shallow cognisant become widespread.
Finally an ethical judgement in decision making.
We would hope that shallow cognisant would work to suppress the arousal of emotions desires that tempt us away from morally sound
judgements such as a lawyer finding it hard to defend his repulsive client or a submarine weapons officer baulking at firing his missile.
But it might at times counter ethically black emotions that would inform us more fully of reasons or stakes that we're not confronting.
Frankly, like the Nazis who would recoil viscerally from their brutal conduct and experience terrible guilt,
if not for deploying psychological techniques to suppress these enlightened reactions.
I hope I've thrown out enough provocations to stimulate your creative and critical faculties,
and that you will not hesitate to share your thoughts and experiences now.
Thank you very much for your patience.