Here’s an excellent article in The Economist by Jon Fasman. (H/T to Brett Martin for this). One can get a good sense of how just much work is involved in making these suits via the character played by Clarke Peters in Treme. Here he is talking about the role.
Hayek in Today’s Cognitive Neuroscience
My chum, the extraordinarily distinguished and generous neuroscientist Joaquín Fuster, has this excerpt from his essay:
In bold characters I mark the concepts advanced by Hayek in his The Sensory Order. In parentheses, under each conclusion, the text passages are noted in which he makes reference to those concepts:
1. The cognitive code is a relational code; memories are self-organized networks of associative connections formed in the cortex by the temporal coincident activation of dispersed neuronal assemblies.
(The Sensory Order 2.1-2.5, 3.51-3.78)
2. The networks or cognits of perceptual memory self-organize hierarchically in posterior cortex; those of executive memory do it in frontal cortex.
(The Sensory Order 4.1-4.26, 5.17-5.32)
3. The prefrontal cortex, at the top of the perception/action (PA) cycle, integrates behavior, language and/or reasoning by, among other operations, working memory.
(The Sensory Order 4.45-4.55, 5.33-5.49)
4. Working memory is maintained by recurrent activity within the PA cycle between perceptual and executive cognits.
(The Sensory Order 5.63-5.91)
Thus far I have summarized the contributions of modern neuroscience that support Hayek’s thinking in The Sensory Order. There, in accord with the latest data at the time he theorized, that perceived knowledge was distributed in the cerebral cortex in the form of associative networks (“maps”) that bound together the sensory elements of every perceptual experience. He also theorized that the cortical perceptual system thus constituted a classificatory apparatus that was embedded in memory and would serve to classify future percepts by association or similarity. He proposed that that perceptual-knowledge apparatus of the brain was a hierarchically self-organized system that, in its ensemble, constituted what we now call a complex adaptive system. Clearly he was using a methodology very similar to the one he had been using with respect to socio-economic systems. This is most apparent on reading his earlier 1937 paper, Economics and Knowledge, of which he always spoke very fondly.
What Hayek did not say in The Sensory Order, because it was not yet known when he wrote it, is that his hypothetical “maps,” which we now call cognitive networks or cognits, interconnect profusely with one another through nodes of common linkage. In other words, that all the items of memory and knowledge in our brain constitute a massive system of relational encoding and communication. Most importantly, that knowledge is dispersed and distributed in the cerebral cortex much as it is in the marketplace among individuals. Further, that it makes sense, metaphorically, to speak of a cerebral marketplace of knowledge. This would be the cognitive counterpart of the sub-cortical marketplace of values and rewards that Ainslie et al. (2004) hypothesize.
In both “marketplaces” the unit of exchange would be synaptic strength. Thus, with more empirical knowledge, Hayek could have extended to the brain concepts very similar to those he used to explain the relationships between marketplace participants and between price and cost. He could have applied those concepts more explicitly than he did in his book to the cybernetic relation between perception and action, as encapsulated in the PA cycle. My presumptions are the more plausible if we view his stance on the role of subjective factors in the behavior of complex economic systems.
Thus current cognitive neuroscience not only confirms Hayek’s hypotheses on the brain/mind relation, but also incorporates gradually into the cerebral cortex some of the same principles of operation that he and other liberal economists tell us govern the behavior of individuals in an economic system as complex as the human brain. Indeed, there is in the cortex an endless competition between cognits for action. Cognits are, after all, self-organized units of information that is incomplete by definition — insofar as it is subjective. Out of that competition emerge, spontaneously, not only the sensory but also the action order. And the PA cycle engages the self with the environment in a dynamic cybernetic interplay much as the one that governs market transactions. In neither of the two is a “central executive” necessary.
Thus the brain dynamics between perception and action is more than a metaphor of market dynamics, not only because the former underlies the latter, but also because both serve the continuous regulation toward adaptive equilibrium that characterizes the dynamics of all open adaptive systems in biology as well as human society. Feedback and self-correction are essential components of adaptive systems. Central design and planning are generally blind to both, and therein is the cause for failure of many self-sustained bureaucracies and multi-annual plans.
For proper operation, a cybernetic cycle needs built-in feed-forward as well as feedback. Here is where Hayek’s “foresight” in an economic system appears essential to deal with what he called “imperfect competition,” in the brain as in the market. Much as in the latter, the cortical cognitive system, where cognits compete with estimates of risk and success in the PA cycle, contains within it a substrate of executive cognits or “enablers.” They reside in the prefrontal cortex on top of the cycle, which collects the information available to it in preparation of action and expectation of outcome. For this reason we can rightfully envision the prefrontal cortex as the organ of pre-adaptation of the cognitive system, which through its PA cycle ever strives for maximal future success with minimal risk.
Finally, our cortex serves our individual goals with more knowledge than we are aware of. Unconsciously, we can intuit probabilities of risk and benefit a great deal better than any conscious “central planner” inside our brain could ever do. Much of our decision-making is laden with the imponderable yet beneficial force of intuition. Inasmuch as we may derive individual benefit from intuitive knowledge, and inasmuch as our intuitive knowledge may serve our fellow humans, it is entirely possible that there is in our brain an “invisible hand” sustaining that larger one that Adam Smith (1976) proposed for society at large.
Christmas in New Orleans
Alan Ryan’s On Politics: A History of Political Philosophy
Nice review in The Economist. I’ve always liked Ryan’s work especially his edited Social Explanation and Russell: A Political Life.
It is also important that, as Mr Ryan puts it, “long-dead writers often speak to us with greater freshness and immediacy than our contemporaries.” James Madison has the best advice for Egyptian liberals who want to prevent Muhammad Morsi from turning democracy into dictatorship. John Stuart Mill (pictured centre) has the best arguments against Michael Bloomberg and the “soft despotism” entailed in his soft-drink regulations. Immanuel Kant has the best insights into the gay-marriage debate—he argues that, once you have stripped away the nonsense, marriage is nothing more than a contract for the mutual use of the sex organs. Mr Ryan’s historical approach helps us at the very least to look at our problems from new angles, and at best to harness the help of history’s sharpest minds in producing policies.
Mr Ryan’s approach to political theory is thoroughly old-fashioned—and all the better for it. In recent years historians and political theorists have been busily undermining the Western canon—dissolving the great political theorists in their wider intellectual contexts or discovering seminal thinkers in the rest of the world. This has produced some admirable results in the skilful hands of Quentin Skinner and John Pocock, but it has also threatened to rob the great tradition of its greatness. Mr Ryan is happy to put the greatness back in. He treats Hobbes and company as thinkers to be grappled with rather than historical figures to be contextualised.
Oakeshott on Aesthetic Experience
Excerpts from Corey Abel’s essay on aesthetics
Commentators agree that “The Voice of Poetry” is important but disagree on whether Oakeshott wrote a theory of aesthetics. Most think “The Voice of Poetry” establishes poetry’s distinction from practice, as it does, forcefully. But in his remarks on childhood, friendship, and love, Oakeshott seems to rejoin poetry and practice. He also seems, in On Human Conduct, to rejoin poetry and practice in claiming that a religion’s dignity resides, in part, in the “poetic quality” of its images.
Aesthetic theories often seek criteria for good art. The tendency is to blend empirical description, psychological observation, and ethical counseling. But Oakeshott never tried to tell scientists or historians how to proceed. In aesthetics he is not trying to dictate norms, analyze the participants’ psychology, or describe the appearances but—as elsewhere—indicate the postulates of the experience.
Reviewing a Rothko exhibition, Simon Schama relates Rothko’s work to his struggles as a Russian Jew (“a scar on his nose . . . put there by a Cossack whip”); highlights his “melancholic temperament”; discovers his social context (“never really an American painter”); claims that Rothko would “bite your head off” if you took a formalist approach to his work; and observes his emotions (“he felt European calamity viscerally”). Apparently, to understand artists we must consult their feelings, their beliefs about aesthetics, their biography, and their political context. The paintings are mere vessels for psychosocial and historical messages.
Since poetry is not about anything, titles are “never of any significance.” It is not that titles are per se invalid, only titles that purport to tell us poems are statement-making utterances. Similarly, “the table of contents of a book of musical compositions often (and not inappropriately) consists of the opening bars of the compositions themselves” (RP, 526). Different arts may vary in the degree of aesthetic security of their images: “A musical image is more secure than a pictorial image” (518). Oakeshott’s theory makes this clear since music is neither making statements about nor depicting the world.
The Swarm Lab
Swarm enthusiasts would do well to check out Simon Garnier’s new interdisciplinary initiative Swarm Lab run under the auspices of the Department of Biological Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Captain Beefheart/Don Van Vliet
I’m doing a non-hypnotic music to break up the catatonic state
Remembering one of the great American one-offs who died on this day. Here is a documentary about Don and last but no means least two recordings that best show off his salty voice.
Willie the Pimp
Muffin Man
EPISTEME 9.4 now available
This marks the first year we have published on a quarterly cycle and compared with most journals, we are up to date with no backlog: contents and abstracts
EVIDENCE AND INTUITION
Yuri Cath
Many philosophers accept a view – what I will call the intuition picture – according to which intuitions are crucial evidence in philosophy. Recently, Williamson (2004, 2007: ch. 1) has argued that such views are best abandoned because they lead to a psychologistic conception of philosophical evidence that encourages scepticism about the armchair judgements relied upon in philosophy. In this paper I respond to this criticism by showing how the intuition picture can be formulated in such a way that: (i) it is consistent with a wide range of views about not only philosophical evidence but also the nature of evidence in general, including Williamson’s famous view that E = K; (ii) it can maintain the central claims about the nature and role of intuitions in philosophy made by proponents of the intuition picture; (iii) it does not collapse into Williamson’s own deflationary view of the nature and role of intuitions in philosophy; and (iv) it does not lead to scepticism.
REGULARITY REFORMULATED
Weng Hong Tang
This paper focuses on the view that rationality requires that our credences be regular. I go through different formulations of the requirement, and show that they face several problems. I then formulate a version of the requirement that solves most of, if not all, these problems. I conclude by showing that an argument thought to support the requirement as traditionally formulated actually does not; if anything, the argument, slightly modified, supports my version of the requirement.
THREE FORMS OF INTERNALISM AND THE NEW EVIL DEMON PROBLEM
Andrew Moon
The new evil demon problem is often considered to be a serious obstacle for externalist theories of epistemic justification. In this paper, I aim to show that the new evil demon problem (‘NEDP’) also afflicts the two most prominent forms of internalism: moderate internalism and historical internalism. Since virtually all internalists accept at least one of these two forms, it follows that virtually all internalists face the NEDP. My secondary thesis is that many epistemologists – including both internalists and externalists – face a dilemma. The only form of internalism that is immune to the NEDP, strong internalism, is a very radical and revisionary view – a large number of epistemologists would have to significantly revise their views about justification in order to accept it. Hence, either epistemologists must accept a theory that is susceptible to the NEDP or accept a very radical and revisionary view.
JUSTIFICATION AS ‘WOULD-BE’ KNOWLEDGE
Aidan McGlynn
In light of the failure of attempts to analyse knowledge as a species of justified belief, a number of epistemologists have suggested that we should instead understand justification in terms of knowledge. This paper focuses on accounts of justification as a kind of ‘would-be’ knowledge. According to such accounts a belief is justified just in case any failure to know is due to uncooperative external circumstances. I argue against two recent accounts of this sort due to Alexander Bird and Martin Smith. A further aim is to defend a more traditional conception, according to which justification is a matter of sufficiently high evidential likelihood. In particular, I suggest that this conception of justification offers a plausible account of lottery cases: cases in which one believes a true proposition – for example that one’s lottery ticket will lose – on the basis of probabilistic evidence.
EVIDENCE OF EVIDENCE AND TESTIMONIAL REDUCTIONISM
William D. Rowley
An objection to reductionism in the epistemology of testimony that is often repeated but rarely defended in detail is that there is not enough positive evidence to provide the non-testimonial, positive reasons reductionism requires. Thus, on pain of testimonial skepticism, reductionism must be rejected. Call this argument the ‘Not Enough Evidence Objection’ (or ‘NEEO’). I will defend reductionism about testimonial evidence against the NEEO by arguing that we typically have non-testimonial positive reasons in the form of evidence about our testifier’s evidence. With a higher-level evidence principle borrowed from recent work on the epistemology of disagreement, I argue that, granting some plausible assumptions about conversational norms, the NEEO is unsound.
THE DANGERS OF USING SAFETY TO EXPLAIN TRANSMISSION FAILURE: A REPLY TO MARTIN SMITH
Chris Tucker
Many epistemologists hold that the Zebra Deduction (the animals are zebras, so they aren’t cleverly disguised mules) fails to transmit knowledge to its conclusion, but there is little agreement concerning why it has this defect. A natural idea is, roughly, that it fails to transmit because it fails to improve the safety of its conclusion. In his ‘Transmission Failure Explained’, Martin Smith defends a transmission principle which is supposed to underwrite this natural idea. There are two problems with Smith’s account. First, Smith’s argument for his transmission principle relies on a dubious premise (§1). Second, even if his transmission principle is true, Smith shows neither that it prevents the Zebra Deduction from transmitting knowledge to its conclusion, nor that it secures the natural idea (§2). I suspect that the failures of Smith’s account will be instructive for anyone who wants to connect transmission failure with a failure to enhance the safety, reliability or probability of one’s conclusion.
7 Restaurants to Watch in New Orleans
Fodor’s used to be (maybe still is) the benchmark of uncritical stuffiness but Alexis Korman does a fine job of not falling into that smug mindset.
New Orleans restaurants revive Creole ‘reveillon’
The elaborate meals, which stem from the old French tradition of eating a lavish meal after midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, have become a popular draw for visitors to New Orleans during the holiday season.
manwithoutqualities 