Here is the intro to Don’s paper: This essay concerns the role of economics in the interdisciplinary study of social cognition. Increasingly many economists believe that economics has such a role. Most who hold this opinion do so because they think that, to some extent, important parts of microeconomics should collapse into psychology. They think this…
Yet more EM. Artificial intelligenceCognitionCognitive neuroscienceCognitive scienceCollective intelligencecollective intentionalitycomplexityconsciousnessdistributed cognitiondistributed knowledgeExtended MindExternalismPhilosophy of mindsituated cognitionsocial epistemology
This from Wired. During the 130 million years or so that ants have been around, evolution has tuned ant colony algorithms to deal with the variability and constraints set by specific environments. Ant colonies use dynamic networks of brief interactions to adjust to changing conditions. No individual ant knows what’s going on. Each ant just…
The intro to Liane’s paper. Other papers in this issue explore how cognition is shaped by the social matrix in which it is embedded. In this paper the reader is invited to take a step back and consider the dynamics that emerge when cognitive agents do not just learn from one another, but ‘put their own…
Here is Searle, still the master performer after all these years. He hasn’t dimmed an iota since I saw him in London in 1989. Artificial intelligenceChinese RoomCognitionCognitive neuroscienceCognitive sciencecomplexityconsciousnessdualismEmbodied cognitionExtended Mindneurosciencephilosophical psychologyPhilosophy of mindqualiasearle
Since I missed marking the birth of Simon on the 15th, here’s a belated posting of an obituary by his student Edward A. Feigenbaum. (I’m pleased to report that my co-edited project with Roger Frantz commemorating the centenary of HS’s birth is coming together very nicely. HS’s daughter has been incredibly responsive towards the project). Herbert…
Photos from the conference: an unqualified success. Complex adaptive systemcomplexitycosmos & taxisdistributed cognitiondistributed knowledgeemergent orderSpontaneous order
Today marks the start of the Cosmos & Taxis conference to launch the associated journal. In attendance will be philosophers, economists, political scientists, sociologists, English profs, complexity theorists, computer scientists, urban geographers and more besides from North America, the Far East, Australasia, and Europe. Please consider submitting a paper, a review or discussion piece to…
This from the WSJ “The Road to Serfdom.” Hayek’s book, he explains, was originally translated into Chinese in 1962 as “an ‘internal reference’ for top leaders,” meaning it was forbidden fruit to everyone else. Only in 1997 was a redacted translation made publicly available, complete with an editor’s preface denouncing Hayek as “not in line…
The power team of Barnier, Sutton, Harris, and Wilson. Paradigms in which human cognition is conceptualised as “embedded”, “distributed”, or “extended” have arisen in different areas of the cognitive sciences in the past 20 years. These paradigms share the idea that human cognitive processing is sometimes, perhaps even typically, hybrid in character: it spans not only…
manwithoutqualities 