Shackelton’s Scotch

scotch

H/T to my chum and fellow scotch aficionado Peter Brooks for pointing to this article.

Talk about whisky on ice: Three bottles of rare, 19th century Scotch found beneath the floor boards of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackelton’s abandoned expedition base were returned to the polar continent Saturday after a distiller flew them to Scotland to recreate the long-lost recipe.

And just in case you were curious, here is an enthusiast’s review of the replica scotch. And this from the NYT:

Shackleton would have loved the idea of a replica whisky. An improvident man, always in debt, he was partial to get-rich-quick schemes, including a Hungarian gold mine. By today’s standards, he was an unlikely explorer, with little scientific training or interest. He wasn’t even particularly enthralled by snow and ice. What motivated him was the lure of fame and wealth, and exploration was the best way he knew to get them. Shackleton’s great gift was his personality. He was irresistibly charming, especially to women, and for his time — he was born in 1874 — was a highly advanced adulterer, who liked sharing his girlfriends with their husbands. Men adored him, too, in part because he ignored social hierarchy and treated everyone the same. He was an instinctive, natural leader who somehow inspired others to share impossible hardships with him.

Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of Freestyle Rap

neuroscience

Here’s a study that would seem to be a companion to the earlier Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation, Allen R. Braun the shared investigator.

Neuroporn/Neuromania?

neuromania, neurophilosophy

H/T to David Livingstone-Smith for pointing to this article.

Exploring the trend of neuro-rejectionism.

Neuroscience is in vogue. In the mainstream news and on pop-science bestseller lists, in academic departments and in deli refrigerators, interest in all things brain-related continues to grow, to be sold, and to be consumed. But the growth in public interest in the brain— and the hope that research into its vastly complex workings will unveil deep truths relevant to our daily lives— is still somewhat unspecific in its ends, for most present-day insights into the workings of the brain, gained from very specific research (and usually on mouse, rat, or fruit fly brains), examine quite basic and elementary features, ask more new questions than they answer, open more doors onto future lines of research than they solve or complete, and continually remind us of how much there is left to explore, especially when it comes to the human brain.

Louis Prima Fest

new orleans

Louis Prima honored with his own New Orleans music and food festival. Louis is one of those people who along with Pops and Fats just put me in a good mood immediately.

Dreamless Sleep, Embodied Cognition, and Consciousness: The Relevance of a Classical Indian Debate to Cognitive Science

cognitive science

A terrific talk (see abstract below) by Evan Thompson as a curtain raiser to his forthcoming book from Columbia University Press entitled Waking, Dreaming, Being: New Light on the Self and Consciousness from Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy. In the meantime check out the expansive review of his Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind to be found in JMB.

One of the issues debated between the Advaita Vedānta and Nyāya schools in classical Indian philosophy is whether consciousness is present in dreamless sleep. Advaita Vedānta argues that the waking report “I slept well” is a memory report and hence requires previous experience, whereas Nyāya argues that the report expresses a retrospective inference. Consideration of this debate, especially the reasoning Advaita Vedānta uses to try to rebut the Nyāya view, calls into question the standard neuroscience way of operationally defining consciousness as that which disappears in dreamless sleep and reappears when we wake up or dream. The Indian debate also offers new resources for contemporary philosophical concern with the relationship between phenomenal consciousness (subjective experience) and access consciousness (accessibility to working memory and verbal report). At the same time, findings from cognitive neuroscience have important implications for the Indian debates about cognition during sleep, as well as for Indian and Western philosophical discussions of the nature of the self and its relationship to the body. Finally, considerations about sleep drawn from Advaita Vedānta, as well as the Yoga school and Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, suggest new experimental questions and protocols for the cognitive neuroscience of sleep and consciousness.

Jane Jacobs and New Orleans

urban studies

Jane Jacobs is a name us spontaneous order types like to invoke. Here she is referenced in connection with the new documentary by Jonathan Demme entitled  ‘I’m Carolyn Parker’, the protagonist being:

resident of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans and the subject of Jonathan Demme’s marvelous new documentary, as an indispensable “public character.” With her stubborn attachment to place, her vigilant, sympathetic “eyes on the street” and her unsentimental civic-mindedness, Ms. Parker is the exactly the kind of person Jacobs identified as crucial to the life of great American cities.

Hayek, Connectionism, and Scientific Naturalism

hayek

Here’s is an extract from Joshua Rust’s prize-winning essay from this volume.

The above criticisms look at The Sensory Order through the lens of nearly 60 years of work in the philosophy of mind. And it must be emphasized that Hayek’s text appears remarkably neoteric, anticipating both questions and answers in the field that would come to be known as cognitive science. However, I want to conclude on a cautionary note.

However, exegetically fruitful it may be to compare The Sensory Order to contemporary theories of mind, I wish to claim that such comparisons ultimately misconstrue the nature of Hayek’s project. In the end, Hayek’s question is importantly different from Searle’s or Fodor’s; Hayek’s ontological and epistemological presuppositions are not those of most contemporary theorists of mind.

In the previous section, I had assumed that both Searle and Hayek agree that there is a really-real physical order of atomic and subatomic facts. And we have assumed that Searle and Hayek share the task of reconciling the mental order with that ontologically basic physical order. Indeed, according to Searle (2010, p. 4), all ‘‘persistent philosophical questions’’ have the same characteristic structure: How is it possible in a universe consisting entirely of physical particles in fields of force that there can be such things as consciousness, intentionality, free will, language, society, ethics, aesthetics, and political obligations? Though many, perhaps most, contemporary philosophers do not address it directly, I believe that this is the single overriding question in contemporary philosophy.

On Searle’s view, philosophy’s aim is to reconcile the manifest image with the scientific image (Sellars, 1962) in the sense that consciousness, free will, language, and so on must be explained in terms of or shown to be consistent with the real, observer-independent world of brute facts. And there are passages in The Sensory Order, which suggest that Hayek’s question is not that different from Searle’s, even if the answer is. For example Hayek says, ‘‘A precise statement of the problem raised by the existence of sensory qualities must start from the fact that the progress of the physical sciences has all but eliminated these qualities from our scientific picture of the external world’’ (1.6). It is easy, then, to assume that, like Searle, Hayek is trying to locate mental qualities within the world as construed by our scientific picture.

But, appearances aside, Searle’s and Hayek’s questions are in fact quite different.

Toussaint’s The Bright Mississippi

The Bright Mississippi

The smooth, classy but and never bland maestro behind so many others here on top form and without (for the most part) his own dulcet vocals – only a genius can always squeeze something new from other geniuses. My personal favourites – the tracks that really swing! Get the album The Bright Mississippi (the track listing not in the order as I’ve posted them).

Herbert Simon as Behavioral Economist

Herbert Simon

Here is a draft of a co-authored entry for Real World Decision Making: An Encyclopedia of Behavioral Economics. Morris Altman, editor. Santa Barbara: Praeger.

Aaron Neville’s My True Story

Aaron Neville

Coming very soon – Neville’s affectionate revisiting of the doo-wop music he grew up with. If you appreciate doo-wop then you’ll love Zappa’s self-penned tribute to doo-wop though of course it being Zappa it has a bit of gentle naughtiness. 

76817baa88cb00a821b27162680cd6acAaron, Don and Keef, the latter turned me onto the Neville Brothers in ’81. Read an attenuated version of Keith Spera’s moving account of Aaron’s loss and gain that was to later appear in Keith’s wonderful Groove Interrupted.