manwithoutqualities

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March 12, 2009consciousness, robotics, robots

They’re here!

Here is a nice collection of HD photographs of a plethora of robots from Boston.com. The diversity of uses is astonishing – from the banal to the exotic – they are ubiquitous. But let’s not get carried away and talk of consciousness.

March 11, 2009artificial intelligence, Bounds of Cognition, cognition, cognitive modeling, cognitive science, cognitive systems, cognitive systems research, collaboration, collective intentionality, complexity, computational intelligence, consciousness, david chalmers, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, emergence, epistemology, extended mind, situated cognition, social cognition, social epistemology, stigmergic, stigmergy, swarm intelligence

Top of the Pops (well relatively speaking)

Sad as it is, we were chuffed to discover that our co-authored paper is the 57th most popular paper in Chalmers’ MindPapers database out of a total of 18,477 papers.

March 11, 2009john pugh, liberal education, liverpool, philosophy, stanley fish

Liberal Education Revisited

A couple of months ago I posted a link to Stanley Fish’s NYT article bemoaning the corroding of liberal education. With the news of the closure of Liverpool’s philosophy department here is John Pugh echoing Fish.

March 2, 2009philosophers, wittgenstein

Young Wittgenstein

This photograph is featured in a recent NYT book review. Photos of Wittgenstein are few and far between so it was nice to see this one of the young Ludwig around 17 or 18 with the family. I also chanced upon the full version of Derek Jarman’s film which I couldn’t find on DVD. I…

March 2, 2009conversation, michael oakeshott, oakeshott, philosophy

Philosopher of Conversation

Here’s a piece from The Spectator written by, I suspect, John Casey. It looks like it’s dated 25 May 1985. Paul Franco gave it to me a few years ago and I’d folded it into a book and forgot about it. Click image a few times to enlarge.

March 1, 2009artificial intelligence, consciousness, cosmos, philosophy of mind, robotics, robots

Dawn of the robots

Ron Chrisley has just been sent me a link to an article that features excerpts of an interview with him in the Australian science magazine Cosmos. The article “Dawn of the Robots” offers a nice overview of the conceptual problems faced by robotics and the state of the art – all wrapped up in the…

March 1, 2009evolution, evolutionary biology, new england institute, Ruth Garrett Millikan

Ruth Garrett Millikan Lecture

I want to give a plug to the Annual William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture that this year features Ruth Garrett Millikan on “The Tangle of Biological Purposes That Is Us.” For those of you in the Boston area this is an event that you really should try to attend. April 1, 2009 at 7:00 p.m. St. Francis…