Candice Shelby, Ph.D., an associate professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver campus, is a valued friend of LifeRing. She knows a great deal about how brains and minds function, including the biological, psychological and, yes, philosophical factors that determine what we are, and why we are that way. She gave a talk a few years ago at a LifeRing Annual Conference in Denver that was very well-received and continues to draw heavy readership on this website (click Here for the earlier presentation). Dr. Shelby was kind enough to quickly supply a copy of her talk so that we could post in on lifering.org. The new presentation is concerned with “biocoding” and can be read Here. Here is a brief excerpt:
What I would like to consider specifically today is the way in which the processes of addiction and recovery are connected to processes of meaning development and change. The level of meanings that I’m going to focus on here are at the semantic, psychological, and social levels. These meanings are encoded into individuals through the interaction of their highly complex organic systems with the highly complex environments in which they are embedded. The correlation of the meaning shifts with the transitions into and out of what we generally call addiction is so close that we could reasonably call addiction essentially a phenomenon of meaning, were it not for the oversimplification that such a characterization would invite.
The concepts dealt with in the talk are fascinating even while sometimes hard to grasp by the layman (or at least by me). Still, it is very much worth a read. Go Here
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