Noë on Clark
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).
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V. S. Ramachandran
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…
Homuncularity
Courtesy of the Consortium on Cognitive Science Instruction I bring you a brief clip of the superbly rendered notion of the homunculus from the film Men in Black.
A Smorgasbord of “Situated” Projects
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…
Ants
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 Interview
Alva Noë interviewed about his latest in Salon. (What’s so difficult about consistently using the umlaut in his name?)
Merging of Mind and Machine
Ray Kurzweil’s article from last year’s Scientific American special on robotics is reprinted again here.
Mirror Neurons
Marco Lacoboni lectures on the phenomenon of Mirror Neurons, possibly the hottest topic in cognitive science these days. Unfortunately some of the illustrations from his talk have been cut. (Check out Larry Shapiro’s paper on the topic here)
Pat Churchland Podcast Interview
Courtesy of Ginger Campbell’s excellent Brain Science Podcast website here is an interview with Pat Churchland (the interview begins after some preliminaries, so please be patient). An excellent idea is the inclusion of the interview transcript. I look forward to listening to the many other interviews. A great resource!
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.
manwithoutqualities 