The latest issue of Seed features an article entitled “The Hive Mind” by Benjamin Phelan: The selfless behavior of ants, bees, and wasps has confounded scientists for more than a century. Is the question a red herring or the key to a new evolutionary synthesis? Speaking…
The MOA CFP has been extended to May 15.
I came across this article in The New York Times. January 11, 2009 I’m pasting it in since access may well be denied. My Genome, My Self By STEVEN PINKER ONE OF THE PERKS of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself. I have been tested for…
The post-lecture reception for Ruth at NEI. L-R: NEI director, David Livingtone Smith, Ruth, MWQ, NEI co-director Rob Haskell. Ruth graciously dealing with her fan club. See Larry Shapiro’s wonderful “intellectual love-letter.” Larry writes: Recently I was asked to deliver a comic paper about Ruth Millikan on the twenty fifth anniversary of her Language, Thought,…
Alexander Waugh’s The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War reviewed in the latest The New Yorker. I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door!
A human brain has 10,000,000,000 cells so a colony of 40,000 ants has collectively the same size brain as a human. If the human population is 6,760,000,000 (2009) and the ant population is 1 quadrillion 1,000,000,000,000,000 (1999). If my mathematics is correct the brain cell count of the ant population is nearly 4 times that…
The latest issue of Philosophy Now features a collection of articles on “machine morality”. The Challenge of Moral Machines Wendell Wallach tells us what the basic problems are. Four Kinds of Ethical Robots James H. Moor defines different ways in which machines could be moral. How Machines Can Advance Ethics Susan Leigh Anderson and…
In today’s Boston Globe Mickey Edwards reviews Cass Sunstein’s latest book A Constitution of Many Minds. Though I haven’t read the book, Edwards’ rather snippy and ill-informed review calls for some comments. ***************** If “A Constitution of Many Minds” reveals anything, it is that its author may teach about constitutionalism but he is at heart…
For my amusement – showing my age, eh? Apparently the “brain” was represented by Honeywell 200 consoles. The cover of Deighton’s novel is far superior (and much more sinister) than the film’s posters.
Alva Noë interviewed about his latest in Salon. (What’s so difficult about consistently using the umlaut in his name?)
