About me
My name is Stefan and I am a University Assistant at the Department of Psychology at the University of Graz, affiliated with the Digital Psychology Lab. There, I am currently doing my doctorate in psychology in the scope of the project Game elements: Understanding their influence for learning (GUI:L). Before that, I completed my doctorate in (molecular) physics at the University of Innsbruck, where I also worked as a physicist and lecturer, and conducted my first psychophysiological experiments during my part-time psychology studies. In doing so, I followed a long-standing research interest that can, perhaps, best be described as a general curiosity about the phenomenon of episteme (the ancient Greek word for knowledge or understanding), which I try to describe in the following paragraph (for the very interested reader).
The interest in questions such as "Why can I know or understand anything at all? And what do knowledge and understanding even mean in this question? What does it mean when someone says they know or understand something?" goes back at least as far as my childhood and the amazement at questions of this kind has not ceased to this day. I still wonder how it is possible to fundamentally know or understand or come to an understanding of something (i.e., learning). Or more specifically: How is it possible to read a manual and then know how to operate a machine for a specific purpose without ever having operated that machine before? How is it possible to read a map and then walk and reach a specific destination? Examples like these make it appear evident that learning and understanding can generate reliable knowledge, but how is this possible and what are the processes that make this possible? The mere possibility of such a thing presupposes a certain regularity or stability of the world in which this phenomenon (i.e., episteme) occurs. Would the path change unpredictably while we were studying the map, we could never arrive at our destination. This presupposed external structure is what I would call the exogenous aspect of episteme, and what has probably been (in hindsight) the motivation why I spent about a decade learning how to study the material constitution of the world. Yet the mere possibility of understanding presupposes more than that. It presupposes that those who generate the understanding are capable of changing, adapting, learning. Their behavioral capabilities must be flexible enough to adapt, but, at the same time, allow for the emergence of stable patterns that stand the test of time (that is, they must be capable of learning and show memory). This is what I would call the endogenous aspect of episteme, and what has probably been the motivation why I spent another decade or so to learn how to study human behavior and the human mind. And lastly, the two of those aspects must come together (the reason for Nietzsche's assertion that it always requires two to understand), resulting in the emergence of an understanding from the dynamic interaction between those capable of understanding and a world allowing for it. This is what I would call the dialogic aspect of episteme, which I hope to be able to devote another decade to learning how to explore it, perhaps first by delving into the science of complexity and the theory of probability (or induction). And after that, I hope there will still be enough time to combine all three aspects into a coherent theory; or at least into a story that makes any sense at all.
Besides pursuing my interest or curiosity in such ethereal things, I like to enjoy good books (like Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), movies (like The Dark Knight trilogy), video games (like Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2), music (like the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness), or a good conversation during a long and aimless walk through the woods (which is actually how I would imagine heaven, or a great deal of it, if I would believe in it).
