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James Bond and the Barking Dog: Evolution and Extended Cognition

Larry Shapiro has a new paper posted on his website. Prominent defenders of the extended cognition thesis have looked to evolutionary theory for support. Roughly, the idea is that natural selection leads one to expect that cognitive strategies should exploit the environment, and exploitation of the right sort results in a cognitive system that extends beyond the head…

What is understanding?

Here’s a singularity summit talk by Eric Baum. Baum is known to me as the author of What is Thought? and in particular his discussion of his notion of “The Hayek Machine” as set out in his  “Toward a Model of Intelligence as an Economy of Agents” Machine Learning 35, pp. 155-185 (1999).

Lies

The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.  ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Anthony Grayling’s article Don’t dismiss dishonesty, it can be virtuous takes wing from two law lecturer’s research (no citation given), who according to Grayling, say “that they have found that there is no consensus in our society about what honesty is.”  Grayling’s thesis, as interesting…

New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Studies

Check out the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Studies iTunes U site. Click the launch bar: once it loads click the NEI box and at the bottom right hand side of the first category, click the box that looks like this: You will find Ruth Garrett Millikan’s recent lecture. Richard Wrangham Paul Roscoe

The Hive Mind

                  The latest issue of Seed features an article entitled “The Hive Mind” by Benjamin Phelan:  The selfless behavior of ants, bees, and wasps has confounded scientists for more than a century. Is the question a red herring or the key to a new evolutionary synthesis?  Speaking…

Oakeshott symposium

The Oakeshott symposium on science, religion, and politics in the journal Zygon is now online.    In this issue there is also a symposium on Owen Flanagan’s latest book  The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World. I was scheduled to participate in this symposium, a symposium that I’d originally suggested, but my computer went…