Archive | March, 2008

Relativism

Steve Wood may not be afraid of Paul Boghossian - he should be.

If Steve Wood is not afraid of André Kukla - his posturing is nothing short of perverse.

 

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March 31, 2008 Comments Off Short URL epistemology, Kukla, Paul Boghossian, relativism, science wars, social constructivism, social epistemology

Free Access to EPISTEME

A reminder. You have one week left to take advantage of EUP’s offer to freely download the issues as listed on their site:

EPISTEME

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March 23, 2008 Comments Off Short URL editorial projects, episteme, epistemology, social epistemology

The ‘Hard Problem’ – Consciousness, Experience, and Mind

This past Monday I presented a talk to the Advanced Seminar Program at the Chicago-based Zygon Center for Religion and Science and editorial home of the journal Zygon: Journal of Science & Religion. My host was Zygon’s editor Phil Hefner. The theme of this year’s seminar was The ‘Hard Problem’ – Consciousness, Experience, and Mind - my talk dealt with “Philosophical Responses to the ‘Hard Problem’” (a very modest PowerPoint slide show can be downloaded here). The  multidisciplinary audience (from various branches of medicine, other natural sciences, computer science, mathematics, psychology, philosophy, theology, and the arts) was comprised of faculty and students from the umpteen colleges and universities in Chicago. This audience proved to be as attentive, open, congenial and highly thoughtful a group as one could wish for.  The format was terrific – an informal chat with attendees over a dinner followed by 90 minutes of my talking in the seminar room, a break, and then discussion open to the floor that lasted until past 10 p.m. The discussion then continued in a local bar lubricated by good company and several pitches of good beer. A couple of hours later I had to head out to O’Hare and went directly to work in Boston – all in all a wonderful experience despite the fatigue that finally caught up with me.

Prior to my talk I had the privilege of having a lunchtime meeting at Northwestern with Gayle Woloschak. Over lunch Gayle gave Phil Hefner and I a layman’s overview of what nanotechnology is, it’s successes, it’s limitations and the resistance such research faces within the public domain.

I want to thank Phil Hefner for his amazing hospitality as well as the Zygon Center staff for their hospitality and attention to detail in making my stay so comfortable.

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March 22, 2008 Comments Off Short URL Chalmers, cognitive science, Colin McGinn, consciousness, Daniel Dennett, deism, embodiment, metaphysics, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, psychology, religion, science, science wars, social cognition, sociocognition, stigmergy, the "hard" problem, Zygon

Supersizing the Mind

I read on Dave Chalmers’ weblog that he’s written the preface to Andy Clark’s forthcoming Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. It’s very exciting news that a) there is a new book by Clark, perhaps the best stylist around and that b) Chalmers (and Clark) have returned to considering their thesis of active externalism ten years after the publication of their classic paper, a punchy paper that launched a cottage industry. Clark’s book will no doubt be required reading by all those participating in the themed issue of The Journal of Mind and Behavior I’m editing on the extended mind thesis. 

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March 16, 2008 Comments Off Short URL Andy Clark, Bounds of Cognition, Chalmers, distributed knowledge, extended mind, journal of mind and behavior, neurophilosophy, stigmergy

Neuro-narratives

I chanced upon this rather turgid article that claims there is now a new sub genre of literature. The writer coins the label “Neuronarratives” to denote works of fiction that incorporate advances in cognitive studies. The writer takes the “two cultures” debate as the organizing theme in the two novels under consideration. One of the books that he refers to that I have read is David Lodge’s Thinks . . . Another novel that I’ve read but is not referenced is Dan Lloyd’s Radiant Cool.

Both novels are written by university insiders: the former makes all-knowing play of the incestuous culture of universities, the protagonist being a Dennett-like character (intellectually, not in a personal sense). In effect, this novel is fluff: the neuro content is incidental and is merely used as a device to make the novel seem current and the writer deep. The latter is actually a work of philosophical imagination – and not surprisingly was written by a philosopher. Having recently read John Casti’s The Cambridge Quintet: A Work of Scientific Speculation which scans the history of AI and consciousness over the last 50 years, I am of the view that these novels fall under the rubric of “novels of ideas” and do not constitute a new genre – there is no plausible collecting feature to denote a sub genre.

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March 13, 2008 Comments Off Short URL cognitive science, consciousness, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind

Perspectives on Social Cognition

Here is the fully published special issue of Cognitive Systems Research
Volume 9, Issues 1-2, March 2008

  2. Introduction to the special issue “Perspectives on Social Cognition”
Cognitive Systems Research, Volume 9, Issues 1-2, March 2008, Pages 1-4
Leslie Marsh and Christian Onof		  
  3. Functionalism and mental boundaries
Cognitive Systems Research, Volume 9, Issues 1-2, March 2008, Pages 5-14
Lawrence A. Shapiro		  
  4. Consciousness and the social mind
Cognitive Systems Research, Volume 9, Issues 1-2, March 2008, Pages 15-23
Philip Robbins		  
  5. Social relationships and groups: New insights on embodied and distributed cognition
Cognitive Systems Research, Volume 9, Issues 1-2, March 2008, Pages 24-32
Eliot R. Smith		  
  6. A conceptual and empirical framework for the social distribution of cognition: The case of memory
Cognitive Systems Research, Volume 9, Issues 1-2, March 2008, Pages 33-51
Amanda J. Barnier, John Sutton, Celia B. Harris and Robert A. Wilson		  
  7. Dynamic empathy: A new formulation for the simulation theory of mind reading
Cognitive Systems Research, Volume 9, Issues 1-2, March 2008, Pages 52-63
Teed Rockwell		  
  8. The social-cognitive dynamics of metaphor performance
Cognitive Systems Research, Volume 9, Issues 1-2, March 2008, Pages 64-75
Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. and Lynne Cameron		  
  9. Frege’s puzzle and Frege cases: Defending a quasi-syntactic solution
Cognitive Systems Research, Volume 9, Issues 1-2, March 2008, Pages 76-91
Robert D. Rupert		  
  10. Cultural-historical activity theory and the zone of proximal development in the study of idioculture design and implementation
Cognitive Systems Research, Volume 9, Issues 1-2, March 2008, Pages 92-103
Robert Lecusay, Lars Rossen and Michael Cole		  
  11. The cultural evolution of socially situated cognition
Cognitive Systems Research, Volume 9, Issues 1-2, March 2008, Pages 104-114
Liane Gabora		  
  12. Economics, cognitive science and social cognition
Cognitive Systems Research, Volume 9, Issues 1-2, March 2008, Pages 125-135
Don Ross		  
  13. Stigmergic epistemology, stigmergic cognition
Cognitive Systems Research, Volume 9, Issues 1-2, March 2008, Pages 136-149
Leslie Marsh and Christian Onof		  
  14. Methodological situatedness; or, DEEDS worth doing and pursuing
Cognitive Systems Research, Volume 9, Issues 1-2, March 2008, Pages 150-159
Joel Walmsley
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March 6, 2008 Comments Off Short URL Bounds of Cognition, cognitive modeling, cognitive science, connectionism, consciousness, distributed knowledge, Economics, embodiment, epistemology, extended mind, hayek, Heidegger, leslie marsh, neurobiology, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, psychology, social cognition, social epistemology, sociocognition, stigmergy, swarm intelligence

Science Wars Revisted

Just the other day I was conversing with a biochemist friend of mine who works in R&D. We were discussing the entrench attitude to science that still seems to prevail 12 years on from the so-called “Science Wars” of the mid-90s. On the one hand, there is a schizophrenic attitude emanating from the humanities and the social sciences:

1. that the truth-value of science is “merely” relative, generated by an uncritical constructivist viewpoint.

Counterposed by,

2. the incorporation of a low grade undertanding of science that is appealed to almost as a form of intellectual “penis envy”.

On the other hand, it doesn’t of course help that scientists self-promotion in the perpetual chase for funding, is characterised by hyperbole of enormous proportion, further vitiated by journalists who then in turn embarrass any genuine research by coming up with snappy headlines that bare only faint resemblance to what was being claimed.

Anyway, I notice that Alan Sokal (he of the so-called “Sokal Hoax“) has a new book  just about to come out. I look forward to getting his take with the passing of the interim years. Indeed, one of the motivations behind my setting up of the journal of social epistemology, EPISTEME, was motivated by Sokal – I wanted to create a forum that could take the heat out of this bitterest of debates.

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March 4, 2008 Comments Off Short URL alan sokal, science wars, social epistemology

Robots

sciam_special-robotics.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Volume 18, Number 1 issue of Scientific American Reports is a special edition on robotics. The following articles feature:

 1. Bill Gates’s “A Robot in Every Home” concentrates on such commonplace items as the vacuum cleaner and not the exotic anthropomorphous robots of the popular imagination.

2. Hans Moravec’s “Rise of the Robots” does discuss issues facing artificial intelligence.

3. Ray Kurzweill’s “The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine” oozes a techno-ebullience about neural implants and the processing power of chip development. He then takes a philosophical turn by discussing whether by 2020 when a $1,000 computer is expected to match the processing power of the human brain, will it be conscious?

4. The highlight of the issue is the ever reliable Eric Bonabeau and Guy Theraulaz, the doyens of Swarm Theory. Their article “Swarm Smarts” summarizes how their work, inspired by social insects, finds practical application in solving issues arising from complexity.

5. Moshe Sipper and James Reggia discuss the notion of self-replicating (and self-repairing) machines.

6. Miguel Niclelis and John Chapin’s article “Controlling Robots with the Mind” picks up where Kurzweill left off. The idea of brain-machine interface in a very intimate way, is fascinating.  

The rest of the issue is devoted to a variety of engineering issues and progress in hardware and materials functionality. For those who are interested in the philosophical issues that underlie all these articles I’d recommend John Casti’s The Cambridge Quintet. Casti offers a fictionalized account of the meeting convened by C.P. Snow – a dinner discussion with Turing, Haldane, Schrodinger and Wittgenstein –  a narrative device to hang discussion of the philosophical issues of artificial intelligence on  and present it in a highly accessible manner. If you liked David Lodge’s Thinks . . . you’ll probably like this.

Regarding the above SAR issue it seems to me that Andy Clark would have been a wonderful addition to the lineup – Clark is someone who has a fascination with cyborgs, is a great popularist and is very philosophically literate. Clark would have been the ideal person to give a deeper editorial coherence to this issue. Still there is the super art work of Mondolithic Studios offsetting any editorial shortcomings – the photo above is a variation of the photo that actually appears on the cover. 

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March 1, 2008 Comments Off Short URL Bounds of Cognition, brain damage, cognitive modeling, cognitive science, consciousness, distributed knowledge, embodiment, extended mind, leslie marsh, neurobiology, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, robots, scientific american, swarm intelligence

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