On-line Consciousness Conference

artificial intelligence, cognition, cognitive science, consciousness, philosophy of mind, psychology, qualia, richard brown, the "hard" problem

I’d like to bring your attention to what promises to be a fascinating experiment, the brain-child of Richard Brown who has one of the most entertaining and provocative philosophy blogs around. The on-line consciousness conference pretty much follows the conventional conference format though with some small amendments. The papers are anticipated to be much shorter than usual which I think is a very good thing. I have participated in on-line symposia the modus operandi being an email correspondence circulated to those that signed up – I found this to be very awkward. An on-line consciousness course that I thought very successful was one held by the Center for Consciousness Studies at Arizona – I see that Bernie Baars is again running the phenomenology webcourse.

 

The only thing missing from these virtual events is the boozing and schmoozing! But, we can usually make up for it if and when we have the occasion to meet in person. Good luck Richard – I think it’s a terrific idea. 

The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott

Aristotle, civil conversation, conservatism, Debra Candreva, Eric Kos, George Feaver, Gerhard Wolmarans, hegel, hobbes, idealism, inference to the best explanation, Josiah Lee Auspitz, Keith Sutherland, kenneth minogue, liberalism, liberty, martyn thompson, oakeshott, philosophical jurisprudence, philosophy, philosophy of history, philosophy of social science, political philosophy, relativism, Richard Friedman, Richard Rorty, robert grant, social constructivism, social epistemology, Spinoza, terry nardin, timothy fuller, Wendell John Coats Jr

A rather belated plug for this book. The follow up is currently being edited.

Top of the Cognitive Systems Research Pops

cognitive science, cognitive systems research, neurobiology, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, psychology, social cognition, sociocognition, sociology, swarm intelligence

This is sad, I know – it reminds me of when the “Top of the Pops” actually meant something to us 70s kids! Anyway, I was pleased to learn that 11 of the 13 articles from the themed double issue of Cognitive Systems Research (“Perspectives on Social Cognition“) have appeared in the top 25 most downloaded articles from Cognitive Systems Research over the first quarter.  Indeed, 4 papers occupy the top 4 slots.

Bad science story picked up the NYT

cognitive science, criminal verdicts, csi, episteme, epistemology, Forbes, forensic science, forensics, John Tierney, justice, new york times, Radley Balko, Roger Koppl, social epistemology

The Roger Koppl story that I’ve been plugging for a few months has been picked up by the New York Times.

The Caricatured Hayek

hayek, Kevin Rudd, Oliver Hartwich, The Road to Serfdom

There’s an article in The Australian taking Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to task for his rather crude take on Hayek. Oliver Hartwich does a good job in rebutting Rudd’s views. Of course we expect the vulgarization of first-order thinkers by politicians. There are still many in academic circles who fall into the same stance when it comes to Hayek.

Scribd platform

document repositories, Scribd

I want to give a plug to the Scribd platform. I have papers listed with several document repositories and none are as flexible, easy to negotiate and as “good looking” as Scribd. It has some nice features including tracking traffic for each document and the ability to leave comments (which I’ve chosen to disable). I would highly recommend Scribd as part of a strategy to get your work out there – subject of course to the usual copyright restrictions.  To see an example, check out my Scribd holdings.

Follow up to: What’s Wrong With CSI

criminal verdicts, csi, epistemology, Forbes, forensics, Radley Balko, Roger Koppl, slate, social epistemology, testimony

Here’s an article in Slate “hot off the press” by Roger Koppl and Radley Balko. It makes for a nice follow up to the earlier Forbes story (and Koppl article) I drew attention to.

Andy Clark and Cyborgs

Andy Clark, cognitive science, consciousness, cyborgs, distributed knowledge, embodiment, emergence, extended mind, Heidegger, neurophilosophy, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, psychology

Fans of the work of Andy Clark and in particular his views on cyborgs will be pleased to note that his writing about cyborgs is the focus of a special issue of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

Steve Fuller on the Dover Trial

complexity, Dover Trial, epistemology, evidence, evolution, intelligent design, philosophy of science, relativism, science, science wars, social constructivism, social epistemology, sociology, Steve Fuller

Here is a post on John Wilkins’ Evolving Thoughts bog that picks up on Sahotra Sarkar’s review of Steve Fuller’s latest book in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. The conflict between Fuller and his critics is sure run and run with ever increasing bitterness.

A minor point. Sarkar writes that: “He [Fuller] is widely credited for the subject and journal of Social Epistemology.” The latter is true; the former is most certainly false. 

The Expert Mind

chess, cognition, cognitive science, connectionism, consciousness, memory, philosophy of mind

There’s a nice article in Scientific American entitled “The Expert Mind: Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well.” What struck me was the excerpt below which seems to be grist for the connectionist mill in that the expert is not confronted with absolute novelty, unlike the weaker player that inevitably searches a “storehouse” of options. The expert through experience has a relational memory thereby not only coming up with a resolution quicker but by-passing a whole swarth of less salient options. This also brings to mind the Heidegger-Dreyfus line of our well-honed tacit expertise as opposed to explicit inferential capacity.  

 

Recent research has shown that de Groot’s findings reflected in part the nature of his chosen test positions. A position in which extensive, accurate calculation is critical will allow the grandmasters to show their stuff, as it were, and they will then search more deeply along the branching tree of possible moves than the amateur can hope to do. So, too, experienced physicists may on occasion examine more possibilities than physics students do. Yet in both cases, the expert relies not so much on an intrinsically stronger power of analysis as on a store of structured knowledge. When confronted with a difficult position, a weaker player may calculate for half an hour, often looking many moves ahead, yet miss the right continuation, whereas a grandmaster sees the move immediately, without consciously analyzing anything at all.