Group items tagged

"My goal is subversive. I am out to overthrow an idea that, in one form or another, is "obvious" to most people--to scientists, philosophers, lay people. My quarry is frustratingly elusive; no sooner does it retreat in the face of one argument than "it" reappears, apparently innocent of all charges, in a new guise." Found in in A. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds, Consciousness in Modern Science, Oxford University Press 1988. Reprinted in W. Lycan, ed., Mind and Cognition: A Reader, MIT Press, 1990, A. Goldman, ed. Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, MIT Press, 1993.

"A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion." Originally "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

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

- NYTimes.com

"Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is extraordinarily hard to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from neural processes in the brain? These questions are among the most intriguing in all of science." From Scientific American, December 1995, pp. 62-68.

"One of the great scientific challenges is to understand the design principles and origins of the human brain. New research has shed light on the evolutionary origins of the brain and how it evolved into the remarkably complex structure found in humans." Science Daily

Response to Glicksohn and Salter in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 18, no. 4, 1995, pp. 810-11. "We have learned that the issues we raised are very difficult to think about clearly, and what "works" for one thinker falls flat for another, and leads yet another astray. So it is particularly useful to get these re-expressions of points we have tried to make. Both commentaries help by proposing further details for the Multiple Drafts Model, and asking good questions. They either directly clarify, or force us to clarify, our own account. They also both demonstrate how hard it is for even sympathetic commentators always to avoid the very habits of thought the Multiple Drafts Model was designed to combat. While acknowledging and expanding on their positive contributions, we must sound a few relatively minor alarms. "

"The new field of experimental philosophy introduces a novel twist on this traditional approach. Experimental philosophers continue the search to understand people's ordinary intuitions, but they do so using the methods of contemporary cognitive science (see also here and here)-experimental studies, statistical analyses, cognitive models, and so forth. Just in the past year or so, a number of researchers have been applying this new approach to the study of intuitions about consciousness. By studying how people think about three different types of abstract entities-a corporation, a robot and a God-we can better understand how people think about the mind." (Scientific American)

"Philosophy of mind and the philosophical issues arising in the allied domain of cognitive sciences constitute a fast developing territory, which is very well introduced by a number of excellent web resources...."

"Palaeoanthropologists at the Max Planck Institute, in collaboration with scientists at 454 Life Sciences Corp., of Branford, Connecticut, have begun a two-year project to sequence the neanderthal genome. The start of the Neanderthal Genome Project coincides with the 150th anniversary of the discovery of the specimen-type Homo neanderthalensis fossil in the Neander valley near Dusseldorf, Germany." (Neurophilosophy)

Cognitive Evolution and the Definition of Human Nature. Philosophy of Science Monographs, Morris Foundation, Little Rock, Arkansas, 2000, 31pp.

by Trevor Stone, University of Colorado, Boulder Issues and Methods in Cognitive Science, Spring 2002; completed Spring 2003

Damasio, A. (2003) "Feelings of Emotion and the Self," Annals of the New York Academy of Science 1001, 253-261.

"From Silicon Valley via Aspen, Bill Joy wants to call the police. On science. On technology. On the industry that made him rich. The Left is OverJoyed." Originally published in The American Spectator, March 2001. Published on KurzweilAI.net July 25, 2001.

"Not many people think about what it's like to be a bat, but for those who do, it's enlightening and potentially groundbreaking for understanding aspects of the human brain and nervous system. Cynthia Moss, a member of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science program at the University of Maryland, College Park, Md., is one of few researchers who spend time trying to get into the heads of bats."

On March 27, 2009 the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin Madison held a symposium titled "What is Human?" devoted to "exploring the limits and excesses of the human across the division of the humanities and the sciences." These are some of the talks from that seminar.

The ways the Internet supposedly affects thought are as apocalyptic as they are speculative, since all the above are supported by anecdote, not empirical data. So it is refreshing to hear how 109 philosophers, neurobiologists, and other scholars answered, "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" That is the "annual question" at the online salon edge.org, where every year science impresario, author, and literary agent John Brockman poses a puzzler for his flock of scientists and other thinkers.

In its 2 October 2009 issue, Science presents 11 papers, authored by a diverse international team, describing an early hominid species, Ardipithecus ramidus, and its environment. These 4.4 million year old hominid fossils sit within a critical early part of human evolution, and cast new and sometimes surprising light on the evolution of human limbs and locomotion, the habitats occupied by early hominids, and the nature of our last common ancestor with chimps.

David Chalmers gave a talk today (at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson) arguing that it is fairly likely that sometime in the next few centuries we will create artificial intelligence (perhaps silicon, perhaps biological) considerably more intelligent than ourselves -- and then those intelligent creatures will create even more intelligent successors, and so on, until there exist creatures that are vastly more intelligent than we are. The Splintered Mind