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There’s Something About Mary

Galen Strawson revisits Frank Jackson’s thought experiment in a final draft made available here. For those not familiar with this thought experiment, Galen sets it up quickly and clearly. If this line of thought is right, the mistake on both sides is—to repeat—to confuse materialism or physicalism with physics-alism. The mistake is a mistake whether…

The Enactive Approach

Notice too that although the choice of processes under study is more or less arbitrary and subject to the observer’s history, goals, tools, and methods, the topological property unraveled isn’t arbitrary. — The Brains Blog Cognitive scienceenactivismEvan ThompsonExtended MindFrancisco Varelamarvin minskymerleau-pontyPhilosophy of mindsituated cognition

Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind

Publisher’s blurb: “How is it that thoroughly physical material beings such as ourselves can think, dream, feel, create and understand ideas, theories and concepts? How does mere matter give rise to all these non-material mental states, including consciousness itself? An answer to this central question of our existence is emerging at the busy intersection of…

Shakespeare: memory and modern cognitive science

Here is someone doing interesting interdisciplinary work as an English don without plying the usual woolly pseudo-inquiry tripe. See article here. distributed cognitionEmbodied cognitionEvelyn TribbleExtended MindExternalismMemoryphilosophical literaturePhilosophy of mindshakespearesituated cognition

Why you shouldn’t blame lying on the brain

Two thinkers I greatly admire are having a dust-up — well at least, Jerry Coyne has taken Richard Gunderman to task concerning his article (I’m familiar with Richard’s work on the philosophy of philanthropy and classical sense of liberality). I trust that if this spat gets energized, that it will remain civil. brain imagingdualismjerry coyneMindPhilosophy of…

Complexity + Stupidity

Sam Harris chats with David Krakauer head of the complexity mecca — Santa Fe Institute. SFI offers some free programmes of real substance and difficulty well worth signing up for in an attempt to offset the illiteracy of philosophers on unavoidable matters of complexity. complexitycomputational intelligencecomputational modelingDavid KrakauerethicsneurosciencePhilosophyPhilosophy of mindPhysicssam harrissanta fe institutescience