This from MIT Technology Review (H/T to Mark Frazier).
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.
I’ve always liked Ferry’s quirky rendition of Dylan’s classic and the low-budget glam video (well it was 1973).
The superb Rob Rupert contribution to the superb Byron Kaldis edited volume.
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.
A pre-novelist Walker Percy. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Jun., 1956), pp. 522-530.
A POSSIBLE BRIDGE FROM EMPIRICISM
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.
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
An interesting article by the excellent team of Harris, Barnier, Sutton and Keil
Therefore, my size itself is a safeguard against my ever sinking too low within the structure of our civilization.
I was there — on the very rim of our age — when my mother’s cataclysmic intemperance, as you well know, catapulted me into the fever of contemporary existence (pp. 195-196).
(H/T to Cory McLaughlin for the image)
You’ve got to love Susan Ford’s “understated overstatedness” or perhaps the reverse or even perhaps Southern Stoicism — whatever, she is a treasure! Check out her Louisiana Kitchen and Culture mag.
Two summers ago, when hurricane Isaac was looming in the Gulf of Mexico, I took stock of my freezer to see what I could cook vs. lose in the inevitable power failure — I had all the makings for red beans, so I made a big batch the day before the storm was due. My husband made sure both propane tanks were full for our gas grill, and moved it under shelter. As it turned out, the storm stalled after the eye came ashore, and sat over us for 36 hours. Our power was out from Tuesday early until Sunday afternoon, and I ended up being cook for a lot of our neighbors. We stacked up ice chests in my kitchen and pooled our resources; Wednesday morning everyone brought over their breakfast items and we cooked breakfast on the grill. Those beans lasted for three days, and several neighbors declared them the best they’d ever had. What got everyone talking, though, was the spectacular Bolognese sauce I produced on the grill Saturday night; you can only hold a piece of beef in melting ice so long. I cooked the roast down in a couple of quarts of my red sauce that was also in the freezer, boiled some pasta, made garlic bread, and sautéed broccoli with garlic and lemon, all on the barbecue grill. The side burner was a lifesaver; my kitchen is (unfortunately) electric. No power in south Louisiana in August means we were miserably hot, and the food was pretty heavy, but we ate every bite.
manwithoutqualities 