Consciousness Explained
Can it really be twenty years since Dennett’s Consciousness Explained? There were of course many reviews of said book but check out Galen Strawson’s review.
Can it really be twenty years since Dennett’s Consciousness Explained? There were of course many reviews of said book but check out Galen Strawson’s review.
Check out the terrific work of artist Susan Aldworth. Her artistry emerges from both a philosophical and an empirical sensibility. See here for a brief profile and artist’s statement.
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…
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.
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…
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,…