I want to give a plug to Ted Lewis’ new book Bak’s Sand Pile. Did the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, the massive power blackout of 2003, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the Gulf oil spill of 2010 ‘just happen’-or were these shattering events foreseeable? Do such calamities in fact follow a…
Richard Menary’s long time coming The Extended Mind is reviewed here by Joseph Ulatowski. CognitionCognitive neuroscienceCognitive scienceEmbodied cognitionExtended MindneurosciencePhilosophy of mindqualia
Colin McGinn locates his position within philosophy of mind. Though not a fashionable position, I’m very sympathetic to it – and of course, it is a position that has much in common with Hayek. The “mysterianism” I advocate is really nothing more than the acknowledgment that human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical and…
Here is an excellent paper by Joshua Rust. Barry Smith (1997, p. 18) observes that ‘‘Hayek is at one with the connectionist tendency within contemporary cognitive science.’’ And at one level of description, Smith is correct. Friedrich Hayek’s question is, in part, a procedural one: by what mechanism does the mental order come to replicate…
Chalmers’ and Clark’s extended mind thesis cited in this article from an architecture and design publication. Turning to philosophy and robotics gives us a new insight into what might be going on. In 1998, A. Clark and D. Chalmers proposed the “extended mind” concept, where the workings of our mind actually extend beyond the brain…
This article from The Atlantic. A FEW YEARS AFTER Philip Rosedale graduated from college with a degree in physics, he joined RealNetworks, then an audio-streaming company. It was a top-down, command-and-control kind of place, where difficult software projects were outlined in advance and executed according to carefully conceived plans. Rosedale hated it. As a teenager…
Shapin’s London Review of Books review of Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science by Mary Jo Nye. (Both Hayek and Oakeshott are mentioned by Shapin). Michael Polanyi lives on in the footnotes. If you want to invoke the idea of ‘tacit knowledge’, Polanyi is your reference of choice. You’ll probably…
My chum Gloria is convening the following conference: Call for Papers for Conference on Austrian economics and philosophy at the University of Texas at Arlington, Nov- 1-3. Abstracts due July 2. We seek innovative contributions that deepen our understanding of Austrian philosophy and Austrian economics. For the purposes of this conference, we are demarcating the…
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…
Two articles on that old philosophical chestnut – free will: one from Intelligent Life (neurons v. free will) and one from the sister title, the Economist (Free will and politics). Cognitive scienceFree willIntelligent LifeneurosciencePhilosophy of mind
manwithoutqualities 