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Closer to Truth: Consciousness

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…

The Extended Mind Revisited

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

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…

Small is beautiful

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…

Momento’s Revenge

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;…

Hayek Interview

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…

Ryle & Oakeshott on the “Knowing-How/Knowing-That” Distinction

Some two and a half years ago I previewed this paper. For several reasons, not least because of my faffing about and constantly reworking it in light of new reading, not to mention wrestling with some Quine and Frege, it only now has gone to press. Here are the first and last sections. Section II…

The Extended Mind and Religious Thought

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…

Rob Rupert’s Cognitive Systems and The Extended Mind

Earlier this year I trailed Rob Rupert’s new book. I now want to give a plug to a workshop that is going to be held to discuss this eagerly awaited book. I’ve commissioned a Critical Review for The Journal of Mind and Behavior to be written by the very able Colin Klein.