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What Emily Dickinson Can Teach Neuroscience

This from Evan Thompson. As Evan points out the phrase “Wider than the Sky” was first brought to wider attention by Gerald Edelman which I originally read as supporting material for my work on Hayek’s The Sensory Order. Cognitive neuroscienceCognitive scienceemily dickinsonEvan ThompsonExtended MindExternalismGerald EdelmanHayekneurosciencePhilosophy of mindPoetrythe sensory order

Superfluous Neuroscience Information Makes Explanations of Psychological Phenomena More Appealing

This in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. We conclude that the “allure of neuroscience” bias is conceptual, specific to neuroscience, and not easily accounted for by the prestige of the discipline. It may stem from the lay belief that the brain is the best explanans for mental phenomena. Brainbrain scansfmrimriNeuroimagingneuromanianeurosciencephilosophical psychologyPhilosophy of mindsituated cognitionsociology of…

Hayek: Cognitive Scientist Avant La Lettre

From Advances in Austrian Economics PROLOGUE It is probably no more justified to claim that thinking man has created his culture than that culture created his reason (Hayek, 1952/1979, p. 155). For Hayek, intelligence is manifest through a reciprocal coalition with the artifactual (social and physical), a causal integration that can take ontogenetic, phylogenetic, individual,…

Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness

Old review. Dennett wrote me that he thought it the best written review he’d gotten in yonks. It’s been reprinted along the my other Dennett review in Daniel Dennett, Edited by John Symons, Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. brain scienceCognitionCognitive neuroscienceCognitive scienceconsciousnessDaniel Dennettjohn symonsneurosciencephilosophical psychologyPhilosophy of mind

In Search Of A Science Of Consciousness

Alva Noë discusses Evan Thompson’s Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and consciousness in neuroscience, meditation, and philosophy. Alva NoëbeingBuddhismCognitionCognitive neuroscienceconsciousnessdistributed cognitiondistributed knowledgeEmbodied cognitionEvan ThompsonExtended MindExternalismmeditationneurophenomenologyNeurophilosophyneurosciencephilosophical psychologyPhilosophy of mindsituated cognitionthe self

Neuroscience Is Ruining the Humanities

This in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Is there a novelist today of whom we can we say, as someone said of Dostoevsky, he “felt thought”? To read Dostoevsky, as Michael Dirda pointed out, is to encounter “souls chafed and lacerated by theories.” Yes, Walker Percy Recent arguments about God or creationism are old hat, despite…

The phenomenology of depression

Through attempting a comprehensive portrait of existence through time, Heidegger displays a bigger cosmic backdrop against which the shreds of individual despair can be read. My brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated…