Brief Alva Noë article.
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Nature, nurture and liberal values
Roger Scruton weighs in on the nature/nurture debate via a threefold review. (Image another Steve Pyke portrait).
Andy Clark – “Do Thrifty Brains Make Better Minds?”
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.
The neuroscience of happiness
Here’s an interview with Shimon Edelman whose The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life has just been published.
Patricia Churchland
Having missed Pat Churchland’s talk at NEI this past October, it was great that she was in town for a full week of speaking engagements not to mention interviews and other demands being made on her time (and she is supposedly retired!). It was a pleasure to meet her (finally!) having followed her work over the years, most notably her Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain. I recall the outright hostility to this book when I very naively talked about it in a philosophy department. I asked her if she recalled this hostility – and she did – but soldiered on regardless. The book obviously made an impression on me and hence its title appears as the tag line to this website.
Here is a collection of my Churchland related posts. The Science Network has a superb collection of podcasts featuring not only Pat, but the rest of the Churchland “dynasty” including of course her husband Paul and their children Anne and Mark.
Music of the Hemispheres
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
Two versions the extended mind thesis
Here’s a draft of a forthcoming paper I chanced across.
Strawson reviews Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow
Galen Strawson reviews Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow in The Guardian.
Art and the Limits of Neuroscience
Alva Noë takes the Opinionator slot.
What is striking about neuroaesthetics is not so much the fact that it has failed to produce interesting or surprising results about art, but rather the fact that no one — not the scientists, and not the artists and art historians — seem to have minded, or even noticed. What stands in the way of success in this new field is, first, the fact that neuroscience has yet to frame anything like an adequate biological or “naturalistic” account of human experience — of thought, perception, or consciousness.
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Seeing What You Mean
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Knowledge Has Always Been Networked
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Behaviourism vs. Phenomenology
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The metaepistemology of knowing-how
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The New Theories of Moral Sentiments
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Nature, nurture and liberal values
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Andy Clark – “Do Thrifty Brains Make Better Minds?”
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The neuroscience of happiness
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Patricia Churchland
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Enaction and Dance
