Hi, my name is James Michael Corrigan and I write under the pseudonym StillJustJames. Why do I do that? It's not a game that I am playing, it involves an insight that most of what we think we know is constrained by our cognitive frame. A cognitive frame, as I have defined it, is like a 'worldview,' but that sounds so expansive – "Wow! A view of the whole world!" – and what I am pointing to is, in fact, that our view is so limited, being constrained by what we have been inculcated and enculturated with. This is why I use the image of a painting in its frame. While viewing a painting, our eyes stop at the inner edge of the frame, and we rarely notice the background it is hung on. Sometimes, our limitations are even more severe, as if we are living in a silo underground with no way out. So how does that explain my pseudonym? Well, what do you hear when you say that name, and why? Perhaps, it doesn’t mean what you think it does. I’ll give you a hint: there is no verb in that name. Were you taking it as if there was?
I am a lifelong meditator and I have a newly minted PhD in philosophy. My research focus is on advanced meditation practices, especially in Tibetan Buddhism; theories of Consciousness; scientific paradigms; and the cognitive framing within which they are developed. Now, that may read like I am all over the place – meditation, Buddhism, consciousness, and science — the truth is that I do not recognize the foundational delimitations that see them as different subjects.
The goal of my work is to promote an unconstrained science founded upon an inclusive cognitive frame that allows us to go beyond the inherent limitations of our current mechanical materialism. That frame is the reason that we see ourselves as a collection of mechanisms, with some kind of dualistic constitution of matter and spirit, or mind and body. To advance my goal, I developed a novel paradigm for understanding ourselves and our world, which I call Responsive Naturing. The original genesis for this paradigm was my meditative and contemplative practice using a singular meditation technique called Great Responsiveness Meditation which involves a foundational 'turning around' of sound and hearing.
Unlike so many others that are concerned by the limitations of mechanical materialism and work towards a more inclusive paradigm while leaving the fundamental questions of consciousness, time, and space generally unanswered, I have developed a productive principle that explains in detail how Responsive Naturing actually natures all life. I call this theory Cognizant Gravitation Only. It consists of a fully developed and necessary role for cognizance of what is done, rather than trying to find a place or origin for the abstract entity called ‘consciousness' which has no accepted explanation.
I strongly believe that only by changing how we think about our problems, how we see ourselves, and how we relate to each other and our shared world, will we be able to overcome the extreme calamities that we face today. But we can't fix our problems with our old ways of thinking and acting that caused these problems to begin with. So my efforts to develop the paradigm of Responsive Naturing and the theory of Cognizant Gravitation Only is one way that I see us breaking out of our old ways of thinking and acting.
My doctoral dissertation, "There is a Way of Seeing the World Different," is on the subject of what I refer to as Biphasic Perception, and it focuses on how this structure, and the absence or failure of the second phase, that of decorating our direct experiences, which I call imperiences explains so many open questions about perception. Some examples of how these two phases of perception explain open questions are: why we see fluid motion when we watch films and videos, including why we only see fluidity at a frame rate of 20 fps or greater; the difference between language based thinking, which is slow, and perceptual reasoning, which does not use language and is extremely fast, and how this can be; and it even explains why our early modern human ancestors used a particular painting technique as long ago as 32,000 years to induce an actual experience of motion in viewers of their cave paintings, which scientists refer to as the "prehistory of cinema,"
As well, I have had a 30 year career in Software Design, originally focused on automated software development, during which I was first confronted with the enigma of human creativity, which is unsolvable from within our current cognitive frame. I was a speaker at The 30th Annual Science of Consciousness Conference held in Tucson, Arizona, April 22-27, 2024, where I introduced my Paradigm of Responsive Naturing and Biphasic Perception.
If you would like to contact me directly, you can email me:james@stilljustjames.com