Not a deep surprise but still nice to see some empirical work coming through. Check out this brief report just published online in Nature Neuroscience. The upshot: participants with larger amygdalas typically had more people in their social lives and maintained more complex relationships.
Yet another installment on mind in the NYT – this time from the highly distinguished and very influential Tyler Burge.
Speaking of Andy Clark and Alva Noë in the previous posting, here is Noë writing for NPR set to continue in another installment.
After some very middling opinion articles in this forum we have Andy Clark who is both a superb stylist and actually has interesting things to say. The title of the piece echos Alva Noë’s recent Out of Our Heads. Andy references some great images recently featured in the NYT that I was tempted to say something…
John Searle’s philosophy of mind lectures freely available on iTunes.
At last here is the book in which my essay “Ryle and Oakeshott on the know-how/know-that distinction” appears, masterly edited by Corey Abel. A draft of the paper can be found here. Don’t get hung up by the use of the word “conservatism” in the collection’s title – Oakeshott’s conservatism bears no resemblance to those…
A thumbnail overview of consciousness by Alison Gopnik in Slate. alison gopnik
Here is a superb paper by Gualtiero Piccinini that brings much needed clarity to a longstanding issue. A penultimate ms can be found here. As a consequence, when the behavior of ordinary computers is explained by program execution, the program is not just a description. The program is also a (stable state of a) physical component of…
My collaborator Marge Doyle and I have set up a LinkedIn group for the many academic disciplines that now have an interest in stigmergy. Go to LinkedIn and search LinkedIn groups for “stigmergy.”
Here is an interview conducted by Howard Rheingold, as he says motivated by Andy’s Natural-Born Cyborgs. Note Andy’s reference to stigmergic (swarm) behavior though he doesn’t actually use the term. (Via David Livingstone Smith and Mirko Farina).
manwithoutqualities 