McGinn, one of my favourite philosophers of mind, notwithstanding Dennett’s view of McGinn’s well-known position:
In the Critics section of this week’s New Statesman, ten pages of which are devoted to a philosophy special, our Critic at Large is Colin McGinn, professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami, who surveys the current state of play in the philosophy of mind and consciousness. Although McGinn concedes, in the spirit Descartes, the irrefutable existence of the self, he cautiously downplays the scope of the intellect: “Human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical and expendable feature of life on earth – an incremental adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one would regard as faintly omniscient.” In Socratic vein, McGinn asserts: “There is more ignorance … than knowledge.”
February 16, 2012
Short URL Cognitive neuroscience, Cognitive science, Colin McGinn, complexity, consciousness, McGinn, New Statesman, Philosophy, Philosophy of mind brain science, cognition, cognitive closure, Colin McGinn, consciousness, Dennett, Descartes, philosophy of mind
Check out my colleague’s article in Psychology Today.
February 15, 2012
Short URL Psychology, Psychology Today, Sigmund Freud Clark Glymour, cognition, Cognitive Revolution, cognitive science, consciousness, david livingstone smith, Descartes, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of science
Check out two forthcoming papers from Rob Rupert, one of the sharpest minds around:
1. Against Group Cognitive States (forthcoming in S. Chant and G. Preyer (eds.), From Individual to Collective Intentionality. No listing on OUP’s website yet).
English users are not fazed by such sentences as “Microsoft intends to develop a new operating system” and “England wants to retain the pound as its unit of currency.” We produce and consume such claims frequently and with ease. One might nevertheless wonder about their literal truth. Does Microsoft — the corporation itself — literally intend to develop a new operating system? Does England — as a single body — genuinely want to retain the pound as its unit of currency. More generally, it is a substantive philosophical and empirical question whether groups of individuals (who themselves instantiate mental states) instantiate mental states properly so called.
2. Keeping HEC in CHEC: On the Priority of Cognitive Systems
February 11, 2012
Short URL Cognition, Cognitive science, Microsoft, social epistemology Adams & Aizawa, Andy Clark, Bounds of Cognition, brain science, cognition, cognitive science, Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind, collective intentionality, david chalmers, distributed cognition, embodied cognition, enaction, extended cognitive systems, extended mind, externalism, philosophy of mind, robert rupert, situated cognition, social epistemology, social ontology, sociocognition
Brief Alva Noë article.
February 4, 2012
Short URL Alva Noë, brain science, cognition, cognitive science, Embedded, embodied cognition, embodiment, emotion, empathy, extended mind, externalism, neural correlates, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, situated cognition, speech
I’ve just come across this article by Andy with a follow-up here.
Some recent work in computational and cognitive neuroscience suggests that it is indeed the frugal use of our native neural capacity (the inventive use of restricted “neural bandwidth,” if you will) that explains how brains like ours so elegantly make sense of noisy and ambiguous sensory input.
January 29, 2012
Short URL Artificial intelligence, Cognitive neuroscience, Cognitive science, Neural Networks Andy Clark, brain science, cognition, cognitive science, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind
Here’s an article in The Economist that my colleague, Roger Koppl, who has done terrific work in the field of forensic evidence, alerted me to. The article mentions Itiel Dror who I’ve been in correspondence with though Roger. I know Itiel’s work through his co-edited Cognition Distributed. Here is his co-authored “extended mind” chapter.
January 20, 2012
Short URL Forensic science, Science in Society cognition, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, extended mind, externalism, forensic science, forensics, Itiel Dror, Roger Koppl, social epistemology, testimony
“Stigmergy” has finally made it into a mainstream philosophy reference work. It is mentioned in the chapter entitled “Reasoning and Rationality” written by Collin Allen, Peter M. Todd, and Jonathan M. Weinberg.
Colin, by the way, is co-authoring a paper for a themed issue of Cognitive Systems Research on stigmergy Marge Doyle and I are editing.
January 10, 2012
Short URL cognition, cognitive science, cognitive systems, colin allen, Jonathan Weinberg, peter todd, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy
January 1, 2012
Short URL brain, brain science, christof koch, cognition, cognitive science, consciousness, daniel stoljar, declan smithies, epistemology, intropection, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, qualia, reductionism
Check out philosopher Dan Lloyd’s film project. On the film site there are several videos of different brain states worth watching. Dan is, of course, no stranger to using other modalities to communicate his thoughts on consciousness – his book Radiant Cool is a classic in the genre.
Inside each of us, at every moment, a symphony plays. It’s the symphony of consciousness, but at the same time it’s the symphony of the brain.
– Dan Lloyd
December 22, 2011
Short URL Brain, Cognition, Cognitive science, consciousness, Consciousness Studies, Dan Lloyd, philosophical psychology, Philosophy of mind brain, brain scans, brain science, cognition, cognitive science, consciousness, dan lloyd, data visualization, mri, mri and music, music, Music of the Hemispheres, neural correlates, neural networks, neurobiology, neuron, neurophilosophy, Neurophysics, neuroscience, philosophical psychology, philosophy of mind
