We have been hearing a lot about “fake news” and “propaganda” lately, and it is as important as ever to use our critical thinking skills. But we also need to understand how propaganda works and why it is so difficult to counteract with logic. Propaganda takes advantage of the way our brains function when we are not paying attention. When we are paying attention our analytical skills are engaged. When we are not, our brains go on processing information in a non-analytical way, using what might be called a poetic logic, based mainly upon similarities, coincidental patterns, associations, repetition, and emotion. There are sound biological reasons for this mindless type of processing, which actually helps us learn faster, retain memories longer, and make appropriate decisions without really thinking. In this presentation, we will explore how and why art and poetry may actually be more helpful in developing critical thinking skills. Art also works with the poetic logic of subconscious processing, but does so in a way that is not manipulative, deceptive or dishonest.
Author Archives: VN Alexander
Free Range Humans: What Makes Good Government?
[This is a version of a talk I originally presented at the 2018 Biosemiotics conference in Berkeley last June, re-presented on Dec 9th to a Biosemiotic study group online organized by Pille Bunnell. The video is a little rough. The brilliant Qs that sparked some of my As were cut because I neglected to get permissions from all the participants beforehand. Thank you, Pille, for organizing the session.]
Synopsis Representative Democracy, Capitalism, Communism, Socialism or Anarchy? No matter what philosophy you begin with, over time political systems tend to concentrate wealth and power. Government and individual freedom should really be co-creative of one another. Why is it that we can’t seem to achieve this? As a biosemiotician, I have learned that creative and intelligent behavior emerge in complex systems when individuals have semiotic freedom and enabling constraints. Government/culture should provide the enabling constraints (language, tradition, borders, laws, courts, currency, public buildings, hospitals, schools, mass transportation, energy and communication networks) but the people making use of those constraints should have the semiotic freedom (i.e., the ability to interpret rules and even misinterpret rules) to make their own decisions, set their own goals, and enjoy/suffer the consequences.
Alexander selected to serve on Fulbright Specialist roster, 2018-2021
Victoria Alexander has been selected as a Fulbright Specialist, available to serve institutions in over 150 countries worldwide. Alexander is an expert in Vladimir Nabokov’s non-gradualist approach to the evolution of insect mimicry.
“As the number of students interested in arts and humanities programs declines worldwide, my work has focused on showing how these disciplines are vital to developing critical and creative thinking skills. My specialty, biosemiotics (the study of signaling and sign-use in living systems), combines the fields of poetics, complexity science, philosophy of language, aesthetics, and biology to investigate the nature of creativity, adaptation, learning, and intentionality.”
The Fulbright Specialist program is supported by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and World Learning, Non-US institutions interested in hosting Dr. Alexander can apply at https://fulbrightspecialist.worldlearning.org/eligibility-host-institutions/
Terrordise, semi-finalist in Austin Revolution Film Fest
My comedy screenplay about the surveillance state, set in the future, in Dallas, was just selected as a semi-finalist for Best Screenplay in the Austin Revolution Film Fest. Since the story is set in Texas, I am hoping that it will get picked up and produced by some hip Texans. Love my old home state. Read more.
Terrordise in Park City Int’l Film Fest screenplay contest
The Equity Serve Foundation is proud to sponsor the Park City International Film Festival in order to promote the development of the arts as an increasingly influential vehicle for teaching values conducive to healthy families and an ethical society. The theme for the festival is “Elevating the Human Spirit.” Festival date: June 14 & 15, 2018
Spotlight Screenplay “Terrordise” by VN Alexander.
Terrordise is a very entertaining screenplay, definitely a must see. The story is unique, funny, and interesting. It has action, suspense, drama, mystery, sci-fi and of course comedy. Terrordise is your unconventional comedy, it has a very futuristic setting but with a very interesting twist in the plot that will get you glued on to your seats from the beginning until the end. The characters have unique and interesting personalities that gave spice to the screenplay. The structure of the story is very well made, the phasing was intense, and there was depth and moral in the story despite its comic façade. It is certainly a fascinating screenplay, you’ll laugh your heart out when you get to meet the Schwartz-Johnson family, who relocated from New York City to Dallas to live the dream of an out of this word paradise and security under the watchful eye of the I.C.U. The kind and compassionate Schwartz-Johnson family will uncover something that will change the course of their life forever.
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Celebrating Humanities NY
I spent last week with fellow Public Scholars as our service (2015-2018) with Humanities New York comes to an end. Going forward, I may continue with my work, now acting as consultant on planning grants and action grants in art-science-humanities projects for any New York state based non-profit. Interested? Please apply here. From left to right: Ellen Gruber Garvey, Scarlett Rebman, Sally Roesch Wagner, Barbara Tepa Lupak, Anne Mosher, Susan Goodier, Dave Ruch, Victoria Alexander, Hallie Bond, Verdis LaVar Robinson, Antonio Pontón-Núñez, and Ryan Purcell.
Mother’s Day and the Anti-War Movement
I refuse to raise my child to grow up to kill another mother’s child. ~Julia Ward Howe, founder of Mother’s Day, 1870
Originally conceived of as a protest to war, Mother’s Day has become a marketing tool to boost consumer spending to give suck to the six or seven corporations that own practically everything. Now that Rosie the Riveter, maker of fighter planes and tanks, is the face of feminism, we tend to forget that the early feminists were anti-war activists. These days Clinton “feminists” want young women, like young men, to be required to register for the draft. More and more women today are proud to exercise the hard-won privilege of lopping mortars at meat targets, and pink-pussy-hatted feminists are appalled, not at the large number of civilians killed by U. S. supported forces worldwide, but by Trump’s attempt to keep transgender people from getting in on the killing. Continue reading
Lynn Margulis, Evolutionary ‘Naturalism,’ Chance and Conspiracy
“The endosymbiosis hypothesis is retrogressive in the sense that it avoids the difficult thought necessary to understand how mitochondria and chloroplasts have evolved as a series of small evolutionary steps.” -Thomas Uzzell and Christine Spolsky, 1974
The above old quote may make us chuckle now that Margulis’ theory has been vindicated by DNA analysis. Uzzell and Spolsky imply that endosymbiosis seemed to them too easy and naïve, like a myth describing how the first humans sprang from sown dragon’s teeth. Even though there was nothing prima facie impossible about the idea — no physical laws violated — these critics nevertheless felt that the endosymbiosis hypothesis was tantamount to a “revival of special creation.” [1] Symbiogenesis, the idea championed by Lynn Margulis, is here associated with the supernatural because it was considered to be a rare and too fortuitous event. Continue reading
A Democracy is only as good as its Free Press.
Last week Professor Mark Crispin Miller invited me to speak to his culture in media class at NYU about my experiences as an author dealing with the problems of the shrinking book publishing industry and the loss of quality and increased (ensorshlp that followed as a result. I mostly talked about the problems. During my train ride home, I started thinking more about possible solutions.
Publishing involves a product, information, that is unlike any other product; information can be copied and shared. Partly because of this, and partly because information can be a public good, a human right, writers are often expected to work for free or for low pay. The problems of this industry are unique. So must be the solutions. I put together Wish List, that, if implemented, would make my life easier and the reading public smarter. Some things on my list involve nothing less than reorganizing the entire economy or getting society as a whole to change its expectations. But, hey, the first step on the way to a revolution is to imagine how things might be, however impossible such changes may seem from where we stand now. Continue reading
Terrordise Semi-Finalist in Edinburgh International Screenwriting Competition
“Terrordise,” Screenplay by V. N. Alexander
The Schwartz-Johnson family can’t wait to get to their new home in Paradise, a high-security gated community in Dallas, believing it will be worth sacrificing their privacy for the ultimate in safety against any kind of terror threat—-until Mr. & Mrs. Schwartz-Johnson are accused of terrorism themselves. Read more.
About Edinburgh Screenwriting Competition: “We are the home of the entertainment industry’s Fringe. We are weird and we love it. Our city has a very long history of nurturing and showcasing the most creative, original and talented oddballs the entertainment industry has to offer, whether a high concept studio project worthy of Tim Burton or a little indie you are dying to see made by David Lynch. We support the arts, not only in Edinburgh, but around the world.”
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