Here’s a restrained and sensitive article from the Scotsman on Claude Wischik‘s work on Alzheimer’s disease. The tone of the article matches the low-key disposition and existential focus of Wischik. Speaking to an Alzheimic patient on a regular basis, I have often used synonyms for the metaphor of “tangles”: Wischik has spent 24 years studying the neurofibrillary ‘tangles’ that…
While I too am sceptical about the techno-ebullience associated with MRI scans what is interesting about the self-defeating claim in a cheekily entitled Economist article “Do economists need brains?” is this quote: neuroscience could not transform economics because what goes on inside the brain is irrelevant to the discipline. What matters are the decisions people take—in…
I’m pleased to discover that there’s a discussion going on at the blog The Austrian Economists relating to a posting by Steve Horwitz. Other luminaries such as Roger Koppl have chimed in. For the past year I’ve been working on a paper on the contemporary relevance of The Sensory Order – hence my keen interest.
This press release from the National Science Foundation would confound those who subscribe to Thomas Nagel’s classic thought experiment.
In today’s Guardian there is an article entitled Who do you think I am? with the tag line “It’s all too easy to categorise people but it isn’t inevitable. We can still consider the alternatives.” The writer is quite correct so say that: Identity is a contemporary buzzword and goes onto list instances of its…
If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t. …
Here is a PowerPoint slide-show intended to accompany my recent talk at Sussex. PowerPoint
Jonah Lehrer has a nice article on the memetics of social cognition. So much of what passes for “knowledge” and is transmitted and generated through the media, seems to have this character. This is what I have termed media “glove puppetry” – glossy people with an ideological, sentimental or showbiz hand up their arse.
A short review of Evan Thompson’s recent Mind in Life from Metapsychology online. I have commissioned a close-grained review essay for the Journal of Mind and Behavior – stay tuned.
I received a message from Rob Wilson one of the most talented and broad-ranging philosopher-scientists around. He was updating me on what he’s been up to of late. He brought two things to my attention. 1. Rob has begun drafting the third instalment to his trilogy which he’s entitled Blood is Thicker than Water, nicht wahr? Terra Socialis: The Individual…
manwithoutqualities 