Check out my chum, philosopher extraordinaire, and occasional co-author, Chris Onof’s new piece for the Kant Yearbook.

Here’s a brief view of neurophilosophy from Anthony Grayling in The Philosopher’s Magazine.
Stigmergy – the phenomenon of indirect communication mediated by modifications of the environment – was first conceptualized by zoologist Pierre-Paul Grasse in his ground-breaking work on termite colonies (Grasse 1959). It wasn’t until 1999 that Grasse’s work was brought to a wider audience by Eric Bonabeau et al (1999) in a special issue of Artificial Life. Since then interest in stigmergic systems has blossomed with researchers recognizing the application of Grasse’s insights to stock markets, economies, traffic patterns, supply logistics, computer networks, resource allocation, urban sprawl, and cultural memes. New forms of stigmergy have been exponentially expanded through the affordances of digital technology: Google’s recommendation algorithm, Amazon’s filtering algorithm, wiki, open source software, weblogs, and a whole range of “social media” are now deemed as essentially stigmergic.
Though the concept of stigmergy has typically been associated with ant- or swarm-like “agents” with minimal cognitive ability or with creatures of a somewhat higher cognitive capacity such as fish (schooling patterns) or birds (flocking patterns) or sheep (herding behavior), stigmergy offers a powerful tool to be deployed in the human domain. The editors of this special issue are thus looking for contributions that have human-human (social, organizational, and socio-technical) stigmergy as the main focus.
Proposals are invited from social scientists, social epistemologists, cognitive scientists, economists, group decision theorists, collective intentionality theorists, computational sociologists, network theorists, multi-agent modelers, and indeed researchers from any discipline that has social complexity and coordination as a core topic.
Papers that are theoretical, experimental, or computational in orientation are welcome. Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to lesliemarsh [at] gmail [dot] com with “Stigmergy/Cognitive Systems Research” in the subject line. The deadline for proposals is Nov 1, 2010.
All papers will be subject to double blind review by a least two referees and accepted papers will be published in a special issue of Cognitive Systems Research
Special Issue Editors
Margery Doyle
Senior Cognitive Research Scientist Air Force Research Lab
711 Human Performance Wing
L-3 Communications Link Simulation & Training
Leslie Marsh
Assistant Director
New England Institute of Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Behavior
References
Grasse, P. P. (1959). La reconstruction du nid et les coordinations interindividuelles chez Bellicositermes natalensis et Cubitermes sp. La theorie de la stigmergie: Essai d’interpretation du comportement des termites constructeurs. Insectes Sociaux, 6(1), 41–83.
Bonabeau, E. (Ed.) (1999). Stigmergy. Artificial Life, Vol. 5, No. 2: 95-202
Here’s an article from The Economist on the practical application of swarm intelligence to human optimization problems.

I shall disclaim responsibility for this particular choice of terms. The phrase “artificial intelligence,” which led me to it, was coined, I think, right on the Charles River, at MIT. Our own research group at Rand and Carnegie Mellon University have prefered phrases like “complex information processing” and “simulation of cognitive processes.” But then we run into new terminological difficulties, for the dictionary also says that “to simulate” means “to assume or have the mere appearance or form of, without the reality; to imitate; counterfeit; pretend.” At any rate, “artificial intelligence” seems to be here to stay, and it may prove easier to cleanse the phrase than to dispense with it. In time it will become sufficiently idiomatic that it will no longer be the target of cheap rhetoric.
Herbert Simon 1996
Joshua Knobe, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Tim Maudlin, Timothy Williamson, Brian Leiter, and Ernie Sosa discuss in The New York Times “Philosophy’s New Take on Old Problems: Do experimental methods offer new horizons for philosophy departments, which have come under attack for being impractical?”
Here’s a report in The New York Times
It was a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects.