Hey Brainers, Eric’s post the other day about conceivability arguments got me thinking about Jackson’s (1982) thought experiment about Mary the color scientist–in particular, about a conversation with Justin Sytsma that I had at the PSA this past Fall. Here is a sketch of the Mary case: Mary is a …
After an excellent SSPP run by Gualtiero (who deserves great thanks!), I thought a modestly humorous post from here in Savannah was in order: Here is a question, which I think suggests a funny criticism: if simulation does play a prominent role in mindreading (the attribution of mental states to …
Gualtiero’s recent post “Classicism, Connectionism, and the Harmonic Mind” has produced some great discussion, and I thought I would pick up a challenge that Edouard made in one of the comments, namely: providing a concrete example where we seem to know a lot about “how the representations involved in higher …
I recently read a very interesting opinion in Nature by Tu & Knight titled “Metabolic cycles as an underlying basis for biological oscillations” (2006). The main idea of the paper is that many periodic processes in organisms, specifically, the circadian cycle, hibernation cycle, and sleep-wake cycle, can be partially explained in terms …
