Muscle Shoals

muscle shoals, music, Rick Hall

Top-notch documentary about an amazing man and his sense of place (even the usually irritating talking heads such as Bono are for once palatable).

Located alongside the Tennessee River, Muscle Shoals, Alabama is the unlikely breeding ground for some of America’s most creative and defiant music. Under the spiritual influence of the “Singing River,” as Native Americans called it, the music of Muscle Shoals has helped create some of the most important and resonant songs of all time. At its heart is Rick Hall, who founded FAME Studios. He is responsible for creating the “Muscle Shoals sound” and the Swampers, the house band at FAME that eventually left to start their own successful studio, known as Muscle Shoals Sound. Greg Allman, Bono, Clarence Carter, Mick Jagger, Etta James, Alicia Keys, Keith Richards, Percy Sledge and others bear witness to Muscle Shoals’ magnetism, mystery and why it remains influential today.

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Bounded Rationality Updated

bounded rationality, Herbert Simon

Special issue of Mind & Society. (H/T to Francesco Di Iorio)
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From April 8th to 10th 2013, the Herbert Simon Society held its first General Conference in New York. About fifty researchers from different countries and working in different areas attended the event. The conference focused on three topics which were identified as particularly relevant in the development of Simonian thought: duality of mind, creativity and alternative theories to rational expectations. A first Herbert Simon Honorary Lecture by Gerd Gigerenzer opened the conference. Gerg Gigerenzer was later elected as Chairman of the Herbert Simon Society. Joseph Stiglitz closed the conference with the second Herbert Simon Honorary Lecture.

The Herbert A. Simon Society brings together economists, social and cognitive scientists engaged in critical issues such as bounded rationality, problem solving, simulation of human thought and creativity. In particular, it gathers some of the most important economists who try to reformulate economic theory by starting from some of the non-neoclassical micro-foundations that have been developed in recent years. The Simon Society shares many interests with other Associations working on Behavioural Economics, Economic and Cognitive Social Psychology and Artificial Intelligence.

This special issue collects some of the most interesting papers presented at the conference. Katherine Simon Frank, Herbert Simon’s daughter, made some welcoming remarks and talked about her father. In describing his way of being a parent, Kathie highlights some important aspects of Herbert Simon’s intellectual nature, such as his openness, his willingness to understand the world and debate with no preconceptions. This is also one of the goals of the Herbert Simon Society.

A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 64

A Confederacy of Dunces

Unfortunately, my feet could not keep pace with my soul (p. 197).

Some musk which my system generates must be especially appealing to the authorities of the government . . . Like a bitch in heat, I seem to attract a coterie of policemen and sanitation officials (p. 198).

Perhaps the Quarter will provide me with some material: a crusade for taste and decency, for theology and geometry, perhaps (p. 200).

Suspendedly,

Lance, Your Besieged Working Boy

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Q+A with Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio

This from MIT Technology Review (H/T to Mark Frazier).

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He believes that neurobiological research has a distinctly philosophical purpose.

There was something that appealed to me because of my interest in literature and music.

We wouldn’t have music, art, religion, science, technology, economics, politics, justice, or moral philosophy without the impelling force of feelings.

I would not want to go to only one level, because I don’t think the really interesting things occur at just one level.

Distributed Cognition and Extended Mind Theory

byron kaldis, philosophy of social science, robert rupert

The superb Rob Rupert contribution to the superb Byron Kaldis edited volume.

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It may seem natural to think of the mind as a stream of conscious experience occurring squarely behind the eyes, or perhaps as some single, persisting subject of these experiences, hovering in the center of the skull. The past hundred years of scientific thinking about the mind have challenged this view in a variety of ways. The most recent challenge, and the most striking to date, rests partly on the distributed nature of cognition – the fact that intelligent behavior emerges from the interaction of a variety of elements, some of which may be spatially removed from the locus of behavior. From such distributed models of cognition, many authors have inferred the extended-mind thesis, the claim that the mind itself spreads into the world beyond the boundary of the human organism. Distributed cognitive models have had direct impact on, and to some extent have been inspired by, research in the social sciences. Studies of insect behavior, for instance, form a bridge between the interests of cognitive scientists and matters to do with group-level behavior: large numbers of social insects, each of which “mindlessly” follows such simple information-processing rules as “drop my ball of mud where the pheromonal concentration is the strongest,” design elaborate nests. This illustrates both how intelligent-looking results can arise from a distributed – and one might think fairly unintelligent – process and also how their emergence might be social in nature: environmental conditions induce various sub-populations to play different roles in the life of the insect colony. Some robustly cognitive, human social processes also seem amenable to distributed theorizing: contemporary scientific results, in particle physics, for 2 example, often involve the contribution of hundreds, or even thousands, of individuals and instruments; here, each individual exercises a rich set of her own cognitive resources while playing a role in a much larger, highly structured enterprise. An intermediate case might be the modeling of traffic patterns: individual humans can reason in flexible and complex ways about driving and routes of travel, but, constrained by the presence of other automobiles and surrounding infrastructure, drivers’ contributions to traffic flow, and the resulting traffic patterns, have much in common with large-scale behavioral patterns of social insects. The remainder of this entry consists of three sections. Section II describes distributed cognitive modeling and the extended-mind thesis in more detail. Section III reviews critical reactions to the extended-mind thesis. Finally, Section IV briefly discusses fruitful areas of ongoing research on distributed cognition and the extended mind.

Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism

walker percy

A pre-novelist Walker Percy. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Jun., 1956), pp. 522-530.

A POSSIBLE BRIDGE FROM EMPIRICISM

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If it is true that both Anglo-American empiricism and European existentialism contain valid insights, then in respect of the failure to make a unifying effort toward giving an account of all realities, the former is surely the worse offender. For the existentialists do take note of empirical science, if only to demote it to some such category as problem, Seiendes, passionate abstract, etc. But the empiricists are notably indifferent toward existentialism. In the empirical mind, existential categories are apt to be dismissed as “emotional” manifestations, that is, as dramatic expressions of a particular historical circumstances, or – what is worse – as exhortatory, and deserving the same attention as any other pulpiteering. Such notions as Dread, Dasein, boredom, and the dichotomies: authenticity-inauthenticity, freedom-falling-prey-to, esthetic-ethical, will inevitably appear as reducibles if they have any meaning at all. Whatever significance they have will be assumed to yield itself in their objective correlates.

Real-World Decision Making

behavioral economics, Real-World Decision Making

Coming soon:

The first and only encyclopedia to focus on the economic and financial behaviors of consumers, investors, and organizations, including an exploration of how people make good—and bad—economic decisions.

Features

• Contains an informative introductory essay that familiarizes students with the various aspects of behavioral economics

  • Provides a list of additional readings for those interested in learning more about the topic

• Includes cross-references in each entry to help readers make connections between related topics

• Defines key terms that are likely to be unfamiliar to those without advance knowledge of the subject

• Helps readers identify and study particular entry categories through accompanying Topic Finders

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