Gih (Qi): Beyond Affordance

Gih (Qi): Beyond Affordance

Ancient Eastern thought posited the ontological integration of the "mind-body world". The body-mind syncretism was a foundational precept in Eastern philosophy in which "Gih" ("Qi") was considered the basic entity of the universe and the human being. This study attempts to build a meta-theory and to demonstrate empirical designs for Gih, discussing the problems of the mind and body, or the subj...

Formalizing Affordance

The idea that to perceive an object is to perceive its affordances—that is, the interactions of the perceiver with the world that the object supports or affords—is attractive from the point of view of theories in cognitive science that emphasize the fundamental role of actions in representing an agent’s knowledge about the world. However, in this general form, the notion has so far lacked a for...

The Qi connection: A study in studying Qi

What Is Qi?

At a conference of practitioners and scholars of Chinese Medicine held in Australia recently, it was reported that China has, in recent decades, spent an inordinate amount of resources on experiments to determine the existence and nature of Qi. The nub of the report was that China is easing up on this research. The veracity of the claim that these experiments are slowing down for lack of concre...

What Is an Affordance?

What should and should not be considered an affordance is still an open issue. At the 2002 North American meeting of the International Society for Ecological Psychology, a symposium was held concerning this topic. The articles in this special issue are expanded versions of the papers presented at that symposium. To set the stage for those discussions, this article presents an analysis of the ev...