Hayek already wrote in The Sensory Order (1952) that “An apparatus of classification cannot explain anything more complex than itself” and that “The whole idea of the mind explaining itself is a logical contradiction’’. Hayek takes this incompleteness — the constitutional inability of mind to explain itself — to be a generalized case of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. See…
Cognitive scienceEmotionJoe RoganJoseph LeDouxneurosciencePhilosophy of mindqualia
Published today — this should get some regressive knickers in a twist. In the past century, the tradition of Freudian psychology popularized the idea that our psychological dispositions could be traced to formative childhood experiences. In many areas of modern academic sociology and psychology this belief is still widespread, though it has been extended to…
My chum, Péter Érdi, editor of Cognitive Systems Research, has alerted me to the open access memoir (63 pages) by neuroscience grandee Michael Arbib. Giving me the opportunity to talk to these visitors was one of the ways in which McCulloch contributed more to my graduate education than any other professor at MIT. When I thanked him, he…
A potentially provocative/controversial book that I haven’t read yet but here is Richard Haier being interviewed. Here too is a preview of the book. IntelligenceneuroscienceRichard Haier
People who frequently check Facebook (or as I’ve called it “Facecrack”) on their smartphone tend to have less gray matter in a reward-related area of the brain — Behavioural Brain Research. It appeared, that in particular higher daily frequency of checking Facebook on the smartphone was robustly linked with smaller gray matter volumes of the…
Forthcoming in Cognitive Systems Research Looking Beyond the Brain: Social Neuroscience meets Narrative Practice Daniel D. Hutto and Michael D. Kirchhoff Beyond sensorimotor segregation: On mirror neurons and social affordance space tracking Maria Brincker Reuse and body-formatted representations in simulation theory Shaun Gallagher Would a Neuroscience of Violence Aid in Understanding Legal Culpability? Valerie Gray Hardcastle Will…
This from Evan Thompson. As Evan points out the phrase “Wider than the Sky” was first brought to wider attention by Gerald Edelman which I originally read as supporting material for my work on Hayek’s The Sensory Order. Cognitive neuroscienceCognitive scienceemily dickinsonEvan ThompsonExtended MindExternalismGerald EdelmanHayekneurosciencePhilosophy of mindPoetrythe sensory order
This in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. We conclude that the “allure of neuroscience” bias is conceptual, specific to neuroscience, and not easily accounted for by the prestige of the discipline. It may stem from the lay belief that the brain is the best explanans for mental phenomena. Brainbrain scansfmrimriNeuroimagingneuromanianeurosciencephilosophical psychologyPhilosophy of mindsituated cognitionsociology of…
This in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Is there a novelist today of whom we can we say, as someone said of Dostoevsky, he “felt thought”? To read Dostoevsky, as Michael Dirda pointed out, is to encounter “souls chafed and lacerated by theories.” Yes, Walker Percy Recent arguments about God or creationism are old hat, despite…
manwithoutqualities 