These programs seem to have been disfavored by history’s great scientific innovators, who tend to make statements like “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble...” or “What do you care what other people think”, which sound like endorsements of physical over social cognition.
For some reason, it’s not overly surprising to me that both Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman would directly endorse physical cognition—what with them being natural philosophers/physicists. It’s less clear however that such “physical cognition” is directly relevant to e.g. music composition, except inasmuch as both physics and music composition are linked to self-actualization—as opposed to ‘mere’ love, belonging and self-esteem, which (if pursued in excess, due to a lack of “self-actualizing” pursuits) might “lead[] to increased unethical behavior” or “produce anti-social narcissism” according to the essay you link to.
“The literature” that is relevant here consists of Michael Vassar’s 2013 Edge essay.
It’s relevant in the way that it doesn’t use the term “physical cognition”?
From the fourth paragraph:
For some reason, it’s not overly surprising to me that both Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman would directly endorse physical cognition—what with them being natural philosophers/physicists. It’s less clear however that such “physical cognition” is directly relevant to e.g. music composition, except inasmuch as both physics and music composition are linked to self-actualization—as opposed to ‘mere’ love, belonging and self-esteem, which (if pursued in excess, due to a lack of “self-actualizing” pursuits) might “lead[] to increased unethical behavior” or “produce anti-social narcissism” according to the essay you link to.