Group items tagged

Artist and researcher Mitchell Whitelaw wrote an interesting and in-depth article on the links between audio-visual fusion art and synaesthesia for the Senses and Society journal. Whitelaw has just put the piece online, has illustrated it with embedded videos of some of the stunning pieces he references, but also discusses the neuroscience of synaesthesia with considerable care and insight. (Mind Hacks)

Robots.net recently featured the Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap (pdf) produced by the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

A world-famous patient with a brain injury that restricts his vision can see coloured stars in his blind field - but only when stimulated with an electromagnetic coil. (28 October 2008 - New Scientist)

Wired Science has an interesting preview of an upcoming study that used hypnosis to induce colour-number synaesthesia in highly hypnotisable participants. (Mind Hacks)

Carruthers defends the idea that our knowledge of our own attitudes results from turning our mindreading capacities upon ourselves, not from introspection for propositional attitudes. (Deric Bownds' MindBlog)

"At any given moment, the cortex is riven by disagreement, as rival bits of tissue contradict each other. Different brain areas think different things for different reasons; all those mental components stuffed inside our head are constantly fighting for influence and attention. In this sense, the mind is really an extended argument." The Frontal Cortex

A growing number of scientists argue that human culture itself has become the foremost agent of biological change. (Seed)

YouTube

"Dennett has various targets in his book; they all seem to get lumped together, but in fact some seem distinct from others. Here are three that it might be useful to distinguish." Curtis Brown

"The central "Cartesian" claim Dennett targets is that there is a specific location in the brain "arrival at which is the necessary and sufficient condition for conscious experience" (p. 106). His argument consists mainly in denying that there's always a fact of the matter about when, exactly, an experience occurs, if one considers events at very small time scales (on the order of tenths of a second). He appears to draw from this argument what seems to be the fairly radical anti-"Cartesian" conclusion that there are, in general, no definitive facts of the matter about the flow of conscious experiences independent of the changing "narratives" we construct about them." The Splintered Mind

Discussion Board on Dennett's thesis

" Dennett is the great demystifier of consciousness. According to him there is, in the final analysis, nothing fundamentally inexplicable about the way we attribute intentions and conscious feelings to people. We often attribute feelings or intentions metaphorically to non-human things, after all. We might say our car is a bit tired today, or that our pot plant is thirsty. At the end of the day, our attitude to other human beings is just a version - a much more sophisticated version - of the same strategy. Attributing intentions to human animals makes it much easier to work out what their behaviour is likely to be. It pays us, in short, to adopt the intentional stance when trying to understand human beings. "

"Dennett maintains that cognitive discriminations need only be made once. The information does not then need to travel to any special area of the brain in order to become conscious. Without the 'theatre', there is no need for such a 'presentation' to take place." - Philosophy, et cetera

- NYTimes.com

Dennett, D. "Who's On First? Heterophenomenology Explained" Journal of Consciousness Studies, Special Issue: Trusting the Subject? (Part 1), 10, No. 9-10, October 2003, pp. 19-30

Draft for Phenomenology and Cognition (2006); Dennett replies to critics

YouTube video on human evolution. « Neuroanthropology

Chalmers reviews