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What Do Ants Know That We Don’t?

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…

Cosmos & Taxis: Launch

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…

A conceptual and empirical framework for the social distribution of cognition: The case of memory

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…

Hayek

Born on this day in 1899. It’s to analytical (social) epistemology’s (and philosophy of mind’s) impoverishment and shame that Hayek is not that well-known beyond the tiresome caricatures. For all my Hayekana see here. The featured image was very generously given to me by the highly exceptional Walt Weimer. Austrian Schoolcomplexityconsciousnessdistributed cognitiondistributed knowledgeEconomicsFriedrich Hayekphilosophical psychologyPhilosophy…

Sage Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences

My chum Byron Kaldis’ big project has been brought to fruition. Bravo! My contribution: Hayek and the “Use of Knowledge in Society”. As you will see there is a terrific lineup – this is an exciting area to be in these days what with CogSci meeting social science – another project of Byron’s in the works.…

Cosmos & Taxis

I want to bring your attention to a new journal that has just been launched. Complex adaptive systemComplex systemscomplexitycomplexity studiescosmos & taxisdistributed cognitiondistributed knowledgeEconomicsHayekphilosophy of economicsphilosophy of social sciencesocial epistemology