Here is the Symphony of Science‘s latest music video – “Ode to the Brain”.
“Ode to the Brain” is the ninth episode in the Symphony of Science music video series. Through the powerful words of scientists Carl Sagan, Robert Winston, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Jill Bolte Taylor, Bill Nye, and Oliver Sacks, it covers different aspects the brain including its evolution, neuron networks, folding, and more.
We know that extended mind discussion is entering unlikley quarters. The same it seems is happening with embodiment. Check out this recent paper “Embodied economics: how bodily information shapes the social coordination dynamics of decision-making” by Olivier Oullier and Frederic Basso.
To date, experiments in economics are restricted to situations in which individuals are not influenced by the physical presence of other people. In such contexts, interactions remain at an abstract level, agents guessing what another person is thinking or is about to decide based on money exchange. Physical presence and bodily signals are therefore left out of the picture. However, in real life, social interactions (involving economic decisions or not) are not solely determined by a person’s inference about someone else’s state-of-mind. In this essay, we argue for embodied economics: an approach to neuroeconomics that takes into account how information provided by the entire body and its coordination dynamics influences the way we make economic decisions. Considering the role of embodiment in economics—movements, posture, sensitivity to mimicry and every kind of information the body conveys—makes sense. This is what we claim in this essay which, to some extent, constitutes a plea to consider bodily interactions between agents in social (neuro)economics.
These two items via Ken Aizawa’s blog.
1. Rob Rupert reviews Mark Rowlands’ latest
2. Ginger Campbell interviews Larry Shapiro (check out the companion episodes Ginger mentions)
Check out my chum and occasional collaborator Chris Onof’s paper Moral Worth and Inclinations in Kantian Ethics just published at Kant Studies Online. There are few philosophers around today that write with such exacting precision, such intimacy with their topic and with such philosophical breadth that Chris Onof does.
I chanced upon this freely available review of Rorty’s notorious PMN (30th anniversary edition). It reminded me that I’d read PMN long before reading Oakeshott and that coming across Rorty’s invocation of Oakeshott’s conversational metaphor had no resonance for me. Even though I’m not in sympathy with Rorty and Oakeshott’s relativism I’m amazed at the kerfuffle it engenders.
My visit to Merleau-Ponty’s grave coincided with the 50th anniversary of his death. It was Andy Clark who first brought Merleau-Ponty to my attention (Phenomenology of Perception) in his seminal book Being There, the latter, for me at least, one of those books that presented a seismic shift to my thinking. My interest in M-P is in his phenomenology, not his Marxism which I had no knowledge of. (The guy in the Jim Morrison T-shirt was a Père Lachaise guide that tracked down M-P’s grave without whom I wouldn’t have found it.)
I chanced upon this online version of arguably my favourite philosophical book. The opening paragraph should be something every student should read and have posted above ones desk:
An interest in philosophy is often first aroused by an irrelevant impulse to see the world and ourselves better than we find them. We seek in philosophy what wiser men would look for in a gospel, some guidance as to le prix des chooses … And it is some time, perhaps, before we discern that philosophy … has certainly never offered its true followers anything which might be mistaken for a gospel. Of course, some so-called philosophers afford pretext enough for this particular misunderstanding. Nearly always a philosopher hides a secret ambition, foreign to philosophy, and often it is that of the preacher. But we must not follow the philosopher on these holiday excursions.
Rumelhart was enormously important in the 1980s in reviving this neural network approach to language and cognition
Steven Pinker
Derek Parfit’s latest book On What Matters is about to hit the shelves. I guess this must qualify as a major philosophical event if like me you were taken by the astounding philosophical imagination of Reasons and Persons. Below is a shot of Parfit at his dashing peak taken in Oxford by the late Susan Hurley.
The topic of economics is not within my usual ambit (I do retain a tangential epistemological interest) but it’s certainly timely and Steve Horwitz always brings an astringency of good sense (however unfashionable that might be) to the knee-jerk economic issues of the day. Because of my passionate interest in New Orleans Steve’s thesis has a great deal of resonance:
New Orleans has had a relatively low unemployment rate since 2005, but I don’t think you can convince anyone there that another Katrina is the path to prosperity.
The perversity of the broken window fallacy finds its analog in a so-called “Keneysian” approach to war. The idea is this. War must surely be the generator of technological innovation while simultaneously attenuating unemployment. Blistering barnacles as Captain Haddock would say.
manwithoutqualities 