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AI as applied philosophy

Here’s a snappy piece by Alva Noë on man vs. machine. Is the ant smart? Or stupid? Maybe neither. Or, most intriguingly of all, maybe it is both? Is there an experimentum crucis that we might perform to settle a question like this once and for all? No. Intelligence isn’t like that. It isn’t something that…

Amygdala volume and social network size in humans

Not a deep surprise but still nice to see some empirical work coming through. Check out this brief report just published online in Nature Neuroscience. The upshot: participants with larger amygdalas typically had more people in their social lives and maintained more complex relationships.

Andy Clark in the New York Times

After some very middling opinion articles in this forum we have Andy Clark who is both a superb stylist and actually has interesting things to say. The title of the piece echos Alva Noë’s recent Out of Our Heads. Andy references some great images recently featured in the NYT that I was tempted to say something…

Ryle and Oakeshott

At last here is the book in which my essay “Ryle and Oakeshott on the know-how/know-that distinction” appears, masterly edited by Corey Abel. A draft of the paper can be found here. Don’t get hung up by the use of the word “conservatism” in the collection’s title – Oakeshott’s conservatism bears no resemblance to those…

Stigmergy group

My collaborator Marge Doyle and I have set up a LinkedIn group for the many academic disciplines that now have an interest in stigmergy. Go to LinkedIn and search LinkedIn groups for “stigmergy.”

Embodiment, Stigmergy, and Swarm Intelligence

Here is a chapter from a book by Michael Dawson, Brian Dupuis, and Michael Wilson (all of the Biological Computation Project, University of Alberta) that has just come my way and is entitled From Bricks to Brains: The Embodied Cognitive Science of LEGO Robots. In fact, all the chapters in draft are freely available to be downloaded…

Another Review of “Supersizing”

Here’s another review of Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind (Do also check out Rob Rupert’s critical notice here). It helps that Mirko, the blog author, has as his advisors, Andy Clark and Julian Kiverstein. Mirko is also working as co-translator of Supersizing into Italian. Great stuff – this guy is going places.

Guidance, Selection, and Representation/Affordances and Intentionality

Here is a two-fer from The Journal of Mind and Behavior: 1. Guidance, Selection, and Representation: Response to Anderson and Rosenberg Tom Roberts 2. Affordances and Intentionality: Reply to Roberts Michael L. Anderson and Anthony Chemero Abstracts Roberts: Anderson and Rosenberg’s (2008) guidance theory of representation offers an analysis of mental content that strongly emphasises the influence…

The Network-Extended Mind

Here are two articles brought to my attention by my collaborator, a senior member of HSI engineering at Lockheed Martin. Extended mind is making its way into what one may think is an unlikely area. It’s not. Andy Clark’s cyborg is very much part of HCI – an example being a pilot’s helmet display. The emphasis in…