EP 24 - Slaughterhouse Five: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens

Visit our website BeautifulIllusions.org for a complete set of show notes and links to almost everything discussed in this episode

Selected References:

2:00 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 15 - The Mind of Gatsby: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens from June 20212:16 - Watch Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson describe “The Pyramid of Choice” and how it leads to justification of actions, leading to further action and self justification, which is an idea they present in their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts which have been referenced in multiple prior episodes2:46 - Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut2:49 - Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut3:04 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism from March 20215:22 - See “Psychoanalytic Criticism” from the “Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism” subsection of the Purdue Online Writing Lab website5:24 - See the Wikipedia entry on Psychoanalytic theory, which was first laid out by Sigmund Freud12:56 - Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli14:00 - Listen to Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast Episode 158 - David Wallace on The Arrow of Time16:39 - See the “Presentism and Eternalism: Two Philosophical Theories of Time” blog post from freelance writer and journalist Sam Woolfe19:10 - See the 2021 documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (IMDB), watch the trailer (YouTube), and read “Unstuck in Time: the Kurt Vonnegut documentary 40 years in the making” (The Guardian, 2021)19:18 - Bernard Vonnegut20:34 - The theory of special relativity was proposed by Albert Einstein in his 1905 paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”24:28 - See From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel Dennett, read a review from Philosophy Now, and watch Dennett give a talk discussing some ideas presented in the book (YouTube)26:37 - According to Wikipedia, Laplace's demon was a notable published articulation of causal determinism on a scientific basis by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814, who in his essay “A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities” stated “We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”30:48 - See the bombing of Dresden in World War II Wikipedia entry32:38 - The quote “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” comes from Vonnegut’s 1965 novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater35:23 - See The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains by Joseph LeDoux, and read Lisa Feldman Barrett’s review in Nature36:01 - See “Cognitive behavioral therapy” (National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2013) and “Written Exposure Therapy for PTSD:A Brief Treatment Approach for Mental Health Professionals” (American Psychological Association)44:30 - See the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” as proposed by the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars in his work Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man46:20 - Dadaism48:57 - See The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures by Antonio DaMasio and read “The Strange Order of Things by Antonio Damasio review – why feelings are the unstoppable force” (The Guardian, 2018)49:52 - See “Memes 101: How Cultural Evolution Works” (Big Think)50:46 - See “Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” and “Bombing of Dresdent in World War II”56:03 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 04 - Too Cultured from October 202056:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 05 - It’s Alive from October 202056:53 - The Republic by Plato58:40 - See “Plato on storytelling”1:00:17 - Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene1:03:25 - See “One Head, Two Brains” (The Atlantic, 2015), a description of a “Split Brain Experiment”, and the “Split-brain” Wikipedia entry1:08:33 - Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience by Michael S.A. Graziano1:14:05 -  Hamlet  by William Shakespeare

This episode was recorded in June 2022

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti