More Brain Blogs
The website Online Education Database has compiled a list of 100 “fascinating” Brain Blogs, including ours. (Their title says “101 Fascinating Brain Blogs”, but as far as i can tell, they only list 100 blogs. Go figure.)
Author: Gualtiero Piccinini
Sociology and Economics as Branches of Physics
Mark Buchanan, The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You, New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Buchanan is an American physicist and former editor of Nature. In his latest book, he argues that the collective behavior of human beings can be understood …
Philosophers' Carnival #83
Here.
Philosophers’ Carnival #82
Here.
A Review of the Hypercomputation Literature
A. Syropoulos, Hypercomputation: Computing Beyond the Church-Turing Barrier. New York, Springer, 2008.There is now a wide range of proposals for physical (more or less) systems that purportedly compute functions that are not computable by Turing machines. This new book reviews many proposals from the hypercomputation literature, such as infinite time …
Philosophers’ Carnival #81
Here.The carnival links to my previous post but contains a slight misunderstanding. I wasn’t trying to argue that “cognition is computation plus X”; rather, I was arguing that the most plausible version of computationalism is that cognition is computation plus X. I was being neutral on whether computationalism holds.
Self-Knowledge without Introspection
I just read a paper by Bob Gordon entitled “Simulation Without Introspection or Inference from Me to You” (in Mental Simulation, ed. M. Davies and T. Stone, Blackwell, 1996). Bob argues that introspection (looking inside your mind/perceiving your mental states/observing the qualitative aspect of your mental states) is unnecessary for mental state …