I’m pleased to have discovered a superb website that accompanies the PBS series Closer to Truth. The definitive series on the latest advances in brain, mind, free will, personal identity, alien intelligence, parapsychology, afterlife, and brain-mind critical thinking. Interviewer Robert Lawrence Kuhn does a super job of guiding the discussion for a lay audience and pretty…
Here’s a rare treat to hear David Chalmers on the extended mind – typically, it’s been his co-author Andy Clark who has been exploring this idea in great detail. Here is their original paper; stay tuned for Rob Rupert’s review of Andy’s Supersizing the Mind to appear in the Journal of Mind and Behavior (as Chalmers…
Swarm grandee Guy Theraulaz presents a lecture on Biological Principles of Swarm Intelligence. Other salient talks available on this site include: Evolutionary Algorithms by Adam Prügel-Bennett Dance evolution by Jeff Balogh, Gregg Dubbin, Michael Do Science, Technology, and Applications of Swarm Robotics by Dario Floreano The Mathematics of Emergence and Flocking by Stephen Smale Fuzzy Logic by Michael Berthold Differential Evolution and…
Over at Vitorino Ramos’ ever thoughtful blog is a post extolling the virtues of the “small”. The point is twofold: First, the superb detail afforded by the photographs that Vitorino has assembled shows a rather complexly “designed” creature – a design that belies the supposedly simple life-form that ants are typically taken to be. The…
I’ve read just about everything by Andy Clark – as I’ve said several times before he is a superb stylist and is philosophy at its most lively. Some years back I read his paper Memento’s Revenge: Objections and Replies to the Extended Mind. I don’t recall having seen the film that Andy references in his paper;…
Here is a transcript of a 15.25-hour interview completed under the auspices of the UCLA Oral History Program and the Pacific Academy of Advanced Studies. I haven’t read the piece so I can’t vouch for its quality (I don’t recognise the interviewers). Anyway, one would hope that there will be some interest within the 1,046…
I want to bring your attention to this superb paper by Jacky Mallett (one of the sharpest minds around) published in Studies in Emergent Order, Spring 2009, Vol. 2.
Brin and Page: We assume page A has pages T1, . . ., Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85, . . ., C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The…
I want to bring your attention to two superb reviews on the work of Evan Thompson and Galen Strawson. These very thoughtful reviews are not space fillers nor point scoring exercises, but represent a close engagement with the material. If you would like a copy of either review please don’t hesitate to get in touch with…
THE EXTENDED MIND AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT Zygon symposium (Volume 44 Issue 3 September 2009) is now available online. The lineup as follows: MINDSCAPES AND LANDSCAPES: EXPLORING THE EXTENDED MIND (p 625-627) Leslie Marsh THE EXTENDED MIND (p 628-641) Mark Rowlands PERSONS AND THE EXTENDED-MIND THESIS (p 642-658) Lynne Rudder Baker MINDS, INTRINSIC PROPERTIES, AND MADHYAMAKA…
manwithoutqualities 