About

Cognitive Dynamics bears no relation to General Dynamics, among the world's largest weapons manufacturers.



Hi.  I am Javier Simonpietri.  I was born, raised in Puerto Rico, then lived a bunch of places, and now reside in Puerto Rico with two sons and a third boy on the way.

From Presidential Scholar candidate and Draper Scholar at NYU to simultaneously obtaining a masters in Philosophy and another in Cognitive Science from the University of Chile without taking any shortcuts, the World Bank and the Government of Chile through the National Commission for Research in Science and Technology (CONICYT) backed my doctoral studies as somebody that could make a contribution to this world.

In 2011, I attended the 41st. St. Gallen Symposium, one of the world's top business and politics gatherings that is open to students, if not the best one, and won a 1st Prize from the University of Oxford for an essay on Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science, setting off a spree of British Council financed attendances to international gatherings in United Arab Emirates, Mexico, and Brazil.

Cognitive Dynamics has long been, is, and will continue to be a dream, yet it is also a social cause, a long-term structured path, a physical entity, a symbolic entity [these also being always physical], a novel psychological superstructure, an ancient philosophical project, and finally, perhaps above all else, an enduring test of the virtues of self-efficacy—patience, courage, persistence, and perseverance.

The name Cognitive Dynamics is derived from the empirically evidenced fact that minds are open dynamical systems and operate like open dynamical systems, such that minds do not function like computers (the computer metaphor is wrong), no mind is born logical or intrinsically thinks logically (human beings are not rational animals; logic is both an instrument and a skill that must be learned, analogous to reading and writing), functionalism is not an excuse for mind-body dualism, and Rationalism is, has always been, and will forever continue to be an incorrect basis for psychology or for understanding any minds (biological or artificial), regardless of whether that rationalism is inspired by Chomsky, Boole, Leibniz, Bayes, Descartes, Plato, Zarathustra (Zoroaster), or whomever else decides to give it another makeover in the future.

To be more precise:

"A dynamical system is a system in which a function describes the time dependence of a point in a geometrical space. Examples include the mathematical models that describe the swinging of a clock pendulum, the flow of water in a pipe, and the number of fish each springtime in a lake.

At any given time a dynamical system has a state given by a set of real numbers (a vector) that can be represented by a point in an appropriate state space (a geometrical manifold). The evolution rule of the dynamical system is a function that describes what future states follow from the current state. Often the function is deterministic; in other words, for a given time interval only one future state follows from the current state. However, some systems are stochastic, in that random events also affect the evolution of the state variables."  Thank you to the people who wrote this on Wikipedia

The most general formalization of a dynamical system is a tuple ( T, M, Φ) where T is a monoid, written additively, M is a set and Φ is a function, such that—

This is the broadest mathematical formalization & definition
of any dynamical system, thereby including every possible
formalization, be it the interaction between galaxies,
the movement of planets in our Solar System or any other,
the flight paths of migrating birds,  car traffic in any highway,
the paths of humans walking on a congested sidewalk,
any river's flow,  and also any mind, all human minds,
your mind, and how the water flushes down your toilet. 

I never said it was a simple definition. Why would you think that your mind is simple? Oh, wait, nevermind... damn rationalists...

Were you expecting to see a few connected boxes as describing what a mind is or how they work?  Did you think that you would see a box labeled "long-term memory" and another "working memory"?  Well, minds don't have boxes.  Minds don't even have long-term or short-term memory.  There isn't even a distinction between perception and cognition.

All memories are live reconstructions, carried out on the spot.  The very same networks that remember a category or an action also perceive that category or carry out that action.  If you lose the ability to see blue today, you won't be able to remember anything as ever having been blue or even truly comprehend what the word blue means beyond knowing that it is a color.  And yes, this actually can and does happen; it is a condition called cerebral achromatopsia.

Finally, if this website's color scheme freaks you out, know that that is intentional. Infrequent experiences are remembered longer and with more detail than frequent ones, additionally the highest level of contrast between the words and the background was maintained because the degree of contrast is correlated to future ability to recall.

Enjoy the site!