Francisco Varela: Late Interview

I chanced upon this video of Francisco Varela, clearly his illness at an advanced stage. I’m not a Spanish speaker so the substance of the video is lost on me. If you don’t know who FV is, here is an obituary by one of his closest friends and collaborators, the very excellent Evan Thompson. Running the video’s…

The Legacy of Francisco Varela

Here is a video piece commemorating a decade since Varela’s passing with some lovely footage of him speaking. Though it’s titled as part 1, I can’t find the subsequent parts and I can’t find anything on the associated website. BrainCognitionCognitive neuroscienceCognitive sciencecomplexityconsciousnessEmbodied cognitionEpistemologyExtended MindFrancisco Varelaneurosciencephilosophical psychologyPhilosophy of mindqualiasocial epistemologyVarela

Remembering Varela

Four articles (and more) of interest to theorists interested in enaction: 1. Tom Froese’s new article in Adaptive Behavior: Critics of the paradigm of enaction have long argued that enactive principles will be unable to account for the traditional domain of orthodox cognitive science, namely “higher-level” cognition and specifically human cognition. Moreover, even many of the…

Embodied Functionalism and Inner Complexity: Simon’s 21st-Century Mind

The second in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Robert D. Rupert One can hardly underestimate Herbert Simon’s influence on contemporary cognitive science and empirically oriented philosophy of mind. Working with collaborators at Carnegie Mellon and the Rand Corporation, he wrote Logic Theorist and General Problem…

Hayek: Cognitive Scientist Avant la Lettre

From Advances in Austrian Economics PROLOGUE It is probably no more justified to claim that thinking man has created his culture than that culture created his reason (Hayek, 1952/1979, p. 155). For Hayek, intelligence is manifest through a reciprocal coalition with the artifactual (social and physical), a causal integration that can take ontogenetic, phylogenetic, individual,…

Embodied Functionalism and Inner Complexity: Simon’s 21st-Century Mind

The second in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Robert D. Rupert One can hardly underestimate Herbert Simon’s influence on contemporary cognitive science and empirically oriented philosophy of mind. Working with collaborators at Carnegie Mellon and the Rand Corporation, he wrote Logic Theorist and General Problem…

Social systems: complex adaptive loci of cognition

Recent working paper — Hayek even cited with some Austrians along with Edelman and Maturana and Varela. Cognitioncollective intentionalitycomplexitydistributed knowledgeDynamic systems theoryGerald Edelmanglobal brainHayekmaturanaNiklas LuhmannSimonsocial ontologySocially distributed cognitionthe sensory orderVarela

Hayek: Cognitive Scientist Avant La Lettre

From Advances in Austrian Economics PROLOGUE It is probably no more justified to claim that thinking man has created his culture than that culture created his reason (Hayek, 1952/1979, p. 155). For Hayek, intelligence is manifest through a reciprocal coalition with the artifactual (social and physical), a causal integration that can take ontogenetic, phylogenetic, individual,…

The Embodied Mind: 20 years on

Commemorating a landmark book The Future of the Embodied Mind The summer school focuses on cognition in artificial and biological systems from a theoretical perspective that considers embodiment, situatedness, and action-relatedness as key elements in understanding and implementing cognitive systems. The school will be held in San Sebastián, Spain 5th – 9th September 2011 The school will…