Forbes features a symposium on A.I: it’s past, present and future. The editor writes: Can machines think? In 1950, Alan Turing, considered by some to be the father of modern computing, published a paper in which he proposed that, “If, during text-based conversation, a machine is indistinguishable from a human, then it could be said…
Once again I want to bring your attention to the superb Critical Notice by Justin Fisher in the latest issue of The Journal of Mind and Behavior on Adams’ and Aizawa’s The Bounds of Cognition.
Noë’s Trends in Cognitive Sciences review “Extending our view of mind” of Clark’s Supersizing the Mind is now online (pay-per-view unless of course your university subscribes).
Speaking of homuncularity there is a nice profile of V. S. Ramachandran in the latest issue of The New Yorker (sorry it’s by subscription only). It’s a far superior piece than the one done on the Churchlands a while back. Beyond the areas that have made V.S. so well-known (synesthesia, phantom limb syndrome), several interesting…
The latest issue of The Journal of Mind and Behavior is now available. I especially want to bring your attention to the Critical Notice on Fred Adams’ and Ken Aizawa’s The Bounds of Cognition, a review essay superbly executed by Justin Fisher. Requests for reprints should be sent to: Professor Justin C. Fisher, Department of Philosophy, Hyer…
There is an excellent collection of papers comprising the latest issue of Topoi (Volume 28, Number 1 / March, 2009). I assume that because of the introduction “Mind Embodied, Embedded, Enacted: One Church or Many?” this issue was pulled together by Julian Kiverstein and Andy Clark. They set up the issue by posing the following…
How do the dancers visualize his cues? How do they respond to one another in the group dynamic? How do they remember? And how does he? There’s a fascinating experiment reported in the LA Times (and blog) on distributed cognition being run by David Kirsh in association with maestro choreographer Wayne McGregor. Of course, the reason the…
True to the spirit of stigmergy I was pleased to learn of a wiki dedicated to all things stigmergical – StigmergyLive.
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…
Alva Noë interviewed about his latest in Salon. (What’s so difficult about consistently using the umlaut in his name?)
manwithoutqualities 