Carl Craver (Explaining the Brain, 2007) argues that what it is for an object doing X (micro variable) to be a working component of a mechanism doing Y (macro variable) is (i) for the former to be a part of the latter and (ii) for the two of them to …
I’ve rarely posted about politics on this blog. In an old, rare exception, I defended the modern Italian right from the accusation of being fascist or inclined towards fascism while simultaneously accusing Italian political institutions of lacking proper checks and balances (in part as a heritage from the fascist regime). I left …
GUEST EDITOR Gualtiero Piccinini, University of Missouri – St. Louis INTRODUCTION Cognitive neuroscientists routinely explain cognition in terms of neural computations over neural representations. Yet some critics argue that cognitive neuroscience does not need the notions of neural computation and representations or, worse, that these notions are untenable. Whether or …
Lately I’ve become interested in moral responsibility, an area where there’s been a lot of interesting recent work at the intersection between ethics and cognitive science. One good place to learn about new ideas in this area is a the moral responsibility blog, by moral responsibility theorist Michelle Ciurria (UNSW).
The 7th International Workshop on Physics and Computation (PC2016) (A satellite workshop to Unconventional Computation & Natural Computation 2016) 11-15 July 2016 …
Sonya Bahar and I have recently contributed to a large volume collecting arguments against the afterlife, edited by Michael Martin and Keith Augustine. William Hasker just reviewed it for NDPR. IMHO the review is not up to the usual NDPR standards. Hasker dismisses the portion of the volume where our essay …
Kriegel, ed. (2014), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind, Routledge. I just used this volume in my Phil Mind class, hoping to find useful introductions to some current debates. The volume has five parts. Each part contains two essays. Ideally, the two essays would present opposite points of view so …
