There’s a nice article in Scientific American entitled “The Expert Mind: Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well.” What struck me was the excerpt below which seems to be grist for the connectionist mill in that the expert is not confronted…
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…
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…
Here is a PowerPoint slide-show intended to accompany my recent talk at Sussex. PowerPoint
In a recent article in Dessent entitled “Who’s Afraid of Friedrich Hayek? The Obvious Truths and Mystical Fallacies of a Hero of the Right” Jesse Larner expresses his surprise that he finds Hayek to be “nowhere near as extreme as his ideological descendants” and “not the cynic I had braced for.” It is reassuring to know that…
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…
This paper by Naomi Rokotnitz from a recently held conference featuring Andy Clark.
According to Edge Dennett has had some second thoughts. Knowing what I do of Hayek’s philosophical psychology and his proto-connectionism, he may well approve of Dennett’s characterization. My mistake was that I had stopped the finite regress of homunculi at least one step too early! The general run of the cells that compose our bodies…
Wonderful to see Douglas Hofstadter’s book I Am a Strange Loop win an LA Times Book Award. What passess as the literati these days needs to be exposed to a mind that is highly cultured, literary and that has unforced conceptual depth. See the Scientific American and the JASSS reviews from last year. Douglas Hofstadter
Pardon the title of this posting but it’s the best I can do. A mini-interview in the New Scientist (April 19-25) caught my eye. Jill Bolte Taylor’s story gives credence to the network model of cognitive architecture that postulates that cognitive representations consist of widely distributed networks of cortical neurons. Cognitive functions, namely perception, attention, memory, language,…
manwithoutqualities 