Here’s a two-parter with Hubert Dreyfus on embodiment – I haven’t listened to the whole talk but I recall first seeing Dreyfus being interviewed by the very excellent popularizer Bryan Magee some 25 years ago.
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Ritchie and McCarthy
With all the hipster hype accorded to Steve Jobs on his passing, there are two names that are being overlooked – Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy. Here is their obituary from The Economist.
Stigmergy and the Wealth of Networks
John Graves shares his worth with Wiki-to-Text and Stigmergy & Wealth of Networks for a Learning2gether session.
Philosophy, Neuroscience and Consciousness
Here’s a Notre Dame Philosophical Review of Rex Welshon’s Philosophy, Neuroscience and Consciousness.
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 expose young researchers to theoretical ideas and modeling techniques, thereby facilitating a wider understanding of the broader enactive approach to cognition. It will take place against the background of the celebration of 20 years of the publication of the book “The Embodied Mind” by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. This book is a symbolic landmark demarcating the beginnings of the consolidation of the embodied turn into a theoretically-loaded gathering of insights, discoveries and ideas within the sciences of the mind. The summer school will gather several of the different disciplines affected by this turn (robotics, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, AI) and some of the main protagonists in these fields. The objective will simultaneously be a taking stock of progress in embodied approaches over the last two decades and the elucidation of current challenges and directions. The school will have a duration of 5 days, each day featuring 2 or 3 talks in the morning by invited speakers, smaller discussion groups and workshops in the afternoon, and a general discussion session in the evening.
Thinking Music
Here’s an experiment (I’m assuming it’s legit) brought to my attention by the blog Artificialites.
Autopoiesis and Cognition
Maturana and Varela’s classic Autopoiesis and Cognition is freely available here (H/T to Paul Loader).
What makes a living system a living system? What kind of biological phenomenon is the phenomenon of cognition? These two questions have been frequently considered, but, in this volume, the authors consider them as concrete biological questions. Their analysis is bold and provocative, for the authors have constructed a systematic theoretical biology which attempts to define living systems not as objects of observation and description, nor even as interacting systems, but as self-contained unities whose only reference is to themselves. The consequence of their investigations and of their living systems as self-making, self-referring autonomous unities, is that they discovered that the two questions have a common answer: living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. The result of their investigations is a completely new perspective of biological (human) phenomena. During the investigations, it was found that a complete linguistic description pertaining to the ‘organization of the living’ was lacking and, in fact, was hampering the reporting of results. Hence, the authors have coined the word ‘autopoiesis’ to replace the expression ‘circular organization’. Autopoiesis conveys, by itself, the central feature of the organization of the living, which is autonomy.
Rupert Reviews Rowlands/Interview with Shapiro
These two items via Ken Aizawa’s blog.
1. Rob Rupert reviews Mark Rowlands’ latest
2. Ginger Campbell interviews Larry Shapiro (check out the companion episodes Ginger mentions)
