Beauty and the brain
Here is a New York Review of Books blog report on a workshop conference held at IULM University Milan bringing together a mix of neurobiologists, philosophers and art historians.
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Bayesian Reconstruction of Natural Images from Human Brain Activity
Article in latest issue of Neuron – well worth checking out.
Critical Notices: Thompson and Strawson
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 Metaphysics of Mind
This past weekend I attended the Timothy Sprigge Memorial Conference (see link to obituary by Jane O’Grady who was in attendence). I met Sprigge in 1997 at the Bradley conference at Harris-Manchester College Oxford, a time when I was very interested in the idealists. Funny how philosophical changes come and go – Sprigge, ever the…
Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology
Call for papers Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology Leslie Marsh, Volume Editor Advances in Austrian Economics Hayek’s philosophical psychology as set out in his The Sensory Order (1952) has, for the most part, been a neglected work. Social theory, Hayek’s traditional disciplinary constituency, has recently begun to take note and examine its place in the complete Hayek corpus. Despite being…
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…
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…
Clark’s reply to Fodor
This hot off the press. Jerry Fodor, you may recall, reviewed Andy Clark’s latest work Supersizing the Mind in the London Review of Books. In the latest issue, Clark uses the Letters section to respond. As this is a general link I paste in Clark’s letter below. Letters Vol. 31 No. 6 · Cover…
Merging of Mind and Machine
Ray Kurzweil’s article from last year’s Scientific American special on robotics is reprinted again here.
manwithoutqualities 