Here’s an article entitled “Goodness has nothing to do with it” in The Economist. Here is Bartels’ and Pizarro’s actual paper published in Cognition.
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Trailing Hayek in Mind
Here is the table of contents for my forthcoming (in press) edited volume focusing on The Sensory Order – this is the first salvo of shameless promotion.
CONTENTS
“SOCIALIZING” THE MIND AND “COGNITIVIZING” SOCIALITY
Leslie Marsh
“MARGINAL MEN”: WEIMER ON HAYEK
Walter Weimer
PART I: NEUROSCIENCE
HAYEK IN TODAY’S COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
Joaquín Fuster
THE NON-CARTESIAN VIEW AND THE BRAIN
Erol Başar
PART II: PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
HAYEK’S QUESTION: HOW CAN PARTS OF THE WORLD COME TO MODEL THE REST OF THE WORLD
Joshua Rust
HAYEK’S SPECULATIVE PSYCHOLOGY, THE NEUROSCIENCE OF VALUE ESTIMATION AND THE BASIS OF NORMATIVE INDIVIDUALISM
Don Ross
HAYEK, POPPER AND THE CAUSAL THEORY OF THE MIND
Edward Feser
PEIRCE AND HAYEK ON THE ABSTRACT NATURE OF COGNITION AND SENSATION
James Wible
HAYEK’S POST-POSITIVIST EMPIRICISM: EXPERIENCE BEYOND SENSATION
Jan Willem Lindemans
A NOTE ON THE INFLUENCE OF MACH’S PSYCHOLOGY IN HAYEK’S PSYCHOLOGY
Giandomenica Becchio
PART III: MIND AND SOCIALITY
THE EMERGENCE OF THE MIND: HAYEK’S ACCOUNT OF MENTAL PHENOMENA AS A PRODUCT OF SPONTANEOUS PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL ORDERS
Gloria Zúñiga y Postigo
HAYEK’S SELF-ORGANIZING MENTAL ORDER AND FOLK-PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES OF THE MIND
Chiara Chelini
BEYOND COMPLEXITY: CAN THE SENSORY ORDER DEFEND THE LIBERAL SELF?
Chor-yung Cheung
COGNITIVE OPENING AND CLOSING: TOWARDS AN EXPLORATION OF THE MENTAL WORLD OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Thierry Aimar
GETTING TO THE HAYEKIAN NETWORK
Troy Camplin
Chalmers’ TED talk on The Extended Mind
The Extended Mind - I think that this is the first time Dave has expanded the idea to social extension or networks. I recall that FB post he mentions.
And Dave is trailing on his website his forthcoming book Constructing the World (OUP). BIG NEWS!!
Res Cogitans Extensa: update
A few weeks ago I trailed the release of Georg Theiner’s Res Cogitans Extensa: A Philosophical Defense of the Extended Mind Thesis. Then there was no page devoted to Georg’s book by the publisher. Well now there is so check out the book’s page here. I have the book in hand – scanning it promises a good read. My only gripe is that there is no index. Hopefully, some close-grained reviews will appear over the course of the next year.
Goldman and Lackey on Social Epistemology on Philosophy TV
Here are two of the biggest names in analytical SE discussing the area on Philosophy TV. Another opportunity to plug the journal with which they are associated – EPISTEME.
Res cogitans extensa: A Philosophical Defense of the Extended Mind Thesis
Look out for Georg Theiner’s book (publisher, Peter Lang) that is about to hit the shelves. I’m reproducing the cover blurb from the preprint he so kindly sent me. Georg has already done some good work for an Extended Mind project and I’m looking forward to his contribution to the stigmergy issue.
Abstract for Res cogitans extensa: For Descartes, minds were essentially immaterial, non-extended things. Contemporary cognitive science prides itself on having exorcised the Cartesian ghost from the biological machine. However, it remains committed to the Cartesian vision of the mental as something purely inner. Against the idea that the mind resides solely in the brain, advocates of the situated and embodied nature of cognition have long stressed the importance of dynamic brain-body-environment couplings, the opportunistic exploitation of bodily morphology, the strategic performance of epistemically potent actions, the generation and use of external representations, and the cognitive scaffolding provided by artifacts and social-cultural practices. According to the extended mind thesis, a significant portion of human cognition literally extends beyond the brain into the body and its environment. This book aims to clarify the nature and the scope of this thesis, and to defend its central insight that cognition is not confined to the boundaries of the biological individual.
About Georg: Georg Theiner, born in Vienna, received his Ph.D. in Philosophy, with a Joint Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and a Minor in History and Philosophy of Science, at Indiana University, Bloomington in 2008. His research interests are in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. During his tenure as a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta, he worked on the extended mind thesis and socially distributed cognition.
Embodied economics
We know that extended mind discussion is entering unlikley quarters. The same it seems is happening with embodiment. Check out this recent paper “Embodied economics: how bodily information shapes the social coordination dynamics of decision-making” by Olivier Oullier and Frederic Basso.
To date, experiments in economics are restricted to situations in which individuals are not influenced by the physical presence of other people. In such contexts, interactions remain at an abstract level, agents guessing what another person is thinking or is about to decide based on money exchange. Physical presence and bodily signals are therefore left out of the picture. However, in real life, social interactions (involving economic decisions or not) are not solely determined by a person’s inference about someone else’s state-of-mind. In this essay, we argue for embodied economics: an approach to neuroeconomics that takes into account how information provided by the entire body and its coordination dynamics influences the way we make economic decisions. Considering the role of embodiment in economics—movements, posture, sensitivity to mimicry and every kind of information the body conveys—makes sense. This is what we claim in this essay which, to some extent, constitutes a plea to consider bodily interactions between agents in social (neuro)economics.
Consciousness, plasticity, and connectomics: the role of intersubjectivity in human cognition
Check out this just published paper by Micah Allen and Gary Williams in the open access journal Frontiers in Psychology.
Consciousness is typically construed as being explainable purely in terms of either private, raw feels or higher-order, reflective representations. In contrast to this false dichotomy, we propose a new view of consciousness as an interactive, plastic phenomenon open to sociocultural influence. We take up our account of consciousness from the observation of radical cortical neuroplasticity in human development. Accordingly, we draw upon recent research on macroscopic neural networks, including the “default mode,” to illustrate cases in which an individual’s particular “connectome” is shaped by encultured social practices that depend upon and influence phenomenal and reflective consciousness. On our account, the dynamically interacting connectivity of these networks bring about important individual differences in conscious experience and determine what is “present” in consciousness. Further, we argue that the organization of the brain into discrete anti-correlated networks supports the phenomenological distinction of prereflective and reflective consciousness, but we emphasize that this finding must be interpreted in light of the dynamic, category-resistant nature of consciousness. Our account motivates philosophical and empirical hypotheses regarding the appropriate time-scale and function of neuroplastic adaptation, the relation of high and low-frequency neural activity to consciousness and cognitive plasticity, and the role of ritual social practices in neural development and cognitive function.
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