animacy, intimacy, obstinacy

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Engels
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
(orig. 1886)
Part 2: Materialism

... From the very early times when men, still completely ignorant of the structure of their own bodies, under the stimulus of dream apparitions came to believe that their thinking and sensation were not activities of their bodies, but of a distinct soul which inhabits the body and leaves it at death — from this time men have been driven to reflect about the relation between this soul and the outside world. ... The quandry arising from the common universal ignorance of what to do with this soul... and not religious desire for consolation, led in a general way to the tedious notion of personal immortality. In an exactly similar manner, the first gods arose through the personification of natural forces. And these gods in the further development of religions assumed more and more extramundane form, until finally by a process of abstraction, I might almost say of distillation,... there arose in the minds of men the idea of the one exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.

Max van Duijn—The Lazy Mindreader

Max van Duijn
The lazy mindreader : a humanities perspective on mindreading and multiple-order intentionality
(2016)

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[9]

Introduction

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[13]

...why...The Lazy Mindreader? ...the short answer is this: we humans live in a socio-cultural environment that allows us to be “lazy” regarding the investment of mindreading efforts most of the time. This environment, of which the conventions underlying language and interaction are an important part, contains the coagulated experience of many generations interacting with each other and the world around them. Globally, I think that most approaches to mindreading have placed too much of a burden on individuals as “isolated cognitive units”, and paid too little attention to the ways in which this burden can be alleviated by, for instance, lexical items, grammatical patterns, or narrative strategies, and by the interlocutors (including writers/narrators) we cooperate with to make interaction work. My alternative view focuses on economy and least effort: processing of complex networks of intentional states is not seen as something the lazy mindreaders envisaged in this thesis do by default, but rather as a skill that is needed when the context requires deviation from a default—and even then, I will argue, is these mindreaders’ processing often supported by mechanisms that are part of, mediated by, or closely tied to language and narrative.

The Sign of the Spectacle

Mark Reybrouck
"Musical Sense-Making and the Concept of Affordance: An Ecosemiotic and Experiential Approach"
(2012)

Music, in this view, is not merely a set of structures, but something that has inductive power and that involves mechanisms of sense-making and reactive behaviour that are grounded in our biology and our cognitive abilities (Reybrouck, 2005a, 2006a). As such, it challenges traditional approaches and paradigms which run through musicology as a discipline, with a major emphasis on historical research, music analysis and performance studies. The latter, however, have received as yet a lot of empirical support from cognitive sciences with a vast body of literature on the effects of music performance as a skilled activity that requires the simultaneous integration of multimodal sensory and motor information with multimodal sensory feedback mechanisms to monitor performance (Gaser and Schlaug, 2003). Several behavioural, neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies have explored the highly specialised sensorimotor, auditory, visual-spatial, auditory-spatial and memory skills of musicians while performing motor, auditory and somatosensory tasks.

Skilled performance, however, is not the most common way of dealing with music. It is restricted to a minor part of music users in general and can be mastered only after years of special training. It is arguable, therefore, to broaden the experiential approach and to conceive of dealing with music at a more general level of coping with the sounds. ‘Dealing with music’, then, is to be considered as a generic term that encompasses traditional musical behaviours—such as listening, performing, improvising and composing—, as well as more general ‘perceptual’ and ‘behavioural’ categories as exploring, selecting and focussing of attention on the perceptual side, and actions, interactions and transactions with the (sonic) world on the behavioural side. In order to encompass all these behaviours, it is desirable, further, not to speak of listeners, or performers—as these embrace only some of the possible ways of dealing with music—but of music users in general as a broad category of subjects that deal with music by means of one or more of these behaviours.

This paper could lend support to certain pet notions of mine, especially the idea that reception/listening may itself be(come) a "practice." But then there is this always-obligatory appeal to the Average Joe, the effort to justify such a project as a major part of something or other, whereas the study of skilled performance and special training necessarily comprises only a minor part .