Why Frame Problems? — Frame Problems

“I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us unless it’s inside a frame.” - Abbas Kiarostami

This profound problem – the infinite search space for perceptual representation – looms over all other current psychological concerns. We live in a sea of complexity. The boundaries of the objects we manipulate are not simply given by those objects. Every object or situation can be perceived in an infinite number of ways, and each action or event h... See more

We’ve simply stopped believing in many of the stories we once told ourselves, and we don’t yet know what will replace them. As a consequence, we don’t know what to pay attention to, what is worth valuing, and where we might be headed in the future.

To act in a dynamically changing world, we need some way of limiting the scope of our reasoning and perception, some way of zeroing in on what is relevant without having to consider all that isn’t. This turns out to be a deep and difficult problem. The cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has gone so far as to argue that this capacity for “relevance r... See more

We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as Didio... See more

Storytelling is as much a process of exclusion as of invention (think of how many “projects” are left out of the dichotomy in the opening line of this essay). Include too many details or digressions and we risk losing the plot, inviting the very chaos we seek to banish. But include too few such particulars and we risk boring the audience, including... See more