“In my work as a cognitive activist, I am deeply concerned with how our representational paradigms and habits inform our capacities for insight and action. In general, I find our awareness and comprehension of the extreme dangers implicit in our common representational habits largely nonexistent, and thus these threats are operant in our minds and cultures in such a way as to continually obscure themselves from our discovery and redress. This is not surprising: they are, to a large degree, what we use to see with, and are thus unlikely to reveal anything that would overturn or threaten their continued survival as habits or dominance as paradigms of identification.

Our relationships with language and knowledge are dangerous, but we do not yet understand this as a species. We often respond to perceived or unconscious threats (or vulnerability) by creating representations whose apparent prominences become distorted by our concerns relating to them — in lieu of establishing healthy relational inquiry and intimacy, and/or meeting and resolving the conflict in a more direct fashion. The resulting representations comprise gross simplifications which discard crucial dimensionality and diversity in order to produce relatively toxic abstractions. In light of these understandings, it is important to highlight the fact that relatively utilitarian representations which do not partake of reactive distortions often comprise crucial aids in recognizing and relating with that which might otherwise be either difficult or impossible to distinguish. In other words, there is a class of representations that act as assets which empower our capacities for recognition and awareness.”