I’m writing up a series of posts at my neuroscience blog on the creationists’ recent discovery of consciousness. The first post is here. I’ll be looking at consciousness from many angles, but always through a neuropsychological lens. Since this is a philosophy forum, I’ll quote the bit that offended my …
That’s the title of Larry Abbott’s recent perspective piece in Neuron (you can find the full article here). It starts with an excellent discussion of the roll of theory in neuroscience, and proceeds with a selective overview of the main insights gained from modeling over the last 20 years. Note …
Does anyone know of any studies that have done something like the following, or know a reason it shouldn’t work? Imagine a population of computer agents that spit out sequences of sentences, random well-formed formulas of first-order logic. Selection acts not at the genetic level, but the agents are able …
What follows is a working definition of how some people in neuroscience use the term ‘representation,’ and a brief examination of that usage.
Definition of biorepresentation:
A biorepresentation is an internal structure whose role is to carry information about what is happening in the world, a structure that is used by downstream processes to guide behavior with respect to those bits of the world that it carries information about.
Penelope Maddy’s book Second Philosophy is exhilarating in its scope and content. She advocates a brand of methodological naturalism she denotes ‘Second Philosophy.’
The first section of the book is Maddy’s exposition of The Second Philosophy. She doesn’t define it explicitly. Rather, she explores the principles via a series of historical clashes. First, how would the second philosopher (SP) respond to Descartes’ arguments in the Meditations? She then goes on to tackle radical skepticism, Hume, Kant, Carnap, Quine, and Putnam’s anti-realism in the voice of the SP.
More summary and analysis below the fold.
Below is a reference to a recent paper showing specific ways in which (some) data collected using a certain data acquisition system (Plexon) are not trustworthy (from the Journal of Neuroscience Methods). This is significant, as a very large number of labs use Plexon. This could be an interesting case …
Below the fold is part of an ongoing argument that logical truths (and rules of inference) can sit comfortably within a naturalistic worldview. It was inspired in part by reading the wonderful articles Is logic a theory of the obvious? and Logical consequence: an epistemic outlook by Gila Sher (UCSD), who beautifully pushes the Quinean thesis that even those logical axioms in the center of our web of belief are open to revision based on empirical and conceptual factors.
The topic doesn’t have a lot directly to do with brains, but is part of my ongoing attempt to fit logic within a naturalist framework. If we can establish some plausibility for the claim that logical truths are open to revision, then I will feel more free to explore how logic fits into a more general story of how brains (and the logics they endorse) help us get about in the world. It will also help me think more clearly about how advocates of informational semantics can handle logical truths, which is something that (to my knowledge) hasn’t been addressed by the Dretskians.
