Daniel Weiskopf (Georgia State University) is the author of this third post in this book symposium for the edited volume Neural Mechanisms: New Challenges in Philosophy of Neuroscience (Springer 2021). Neuroimaging has seen major advances in experimental design and data analysis in recent decades. Among these are new methods, provocatively referred to …
Mazviita Chirimuuta (Edinburgh) is the author of this second post in this book symposium for the edited volume Neural Mechanisms: New Challenges in Philosophy of Neuroscience (Springer 2021). Science is a project of domestication in which the wild forces of nature are tamed and set to work for human advantage. We need …
The Neural Mechanisms Online Team (Fabrizio Calzavarini & Marco Viola) is grateful to the managing editors of The Brains Blog for the opportunity to present (a selection of chapters from) our edited collection throughout this week. * * * Drawing on the experience and on the network of the homonymous …
We are thrilled that some authors of the new edited volume Neural Mechanisms: New Challenges in the Philosophy of Neuroscience (Springer, 2020) will be sharing and responding to comments this week. You can find a new post each day or find everything in one place here (as it becomes available). …
A picture of continuity Some beliefs are epistemically innocent when they are irrational but provide epistemic benefits that would not be available otherwise. We already saw some examples: delusion, confabulation, and optimistically biased beliefs. Here I explain why I apply epistemic innocence to different types of beliefs across clinical and …
Powerful agents We are likely to overestimate our capacities and make exceedingly rosy predictions about our future. This widespread bias towards optimism is a robust finding in psychology. It is also a clear case of epistemic irrationality which has serious implications for risk assessment. According to a recent article, unrealistic …
Incurable confabulators Philosophers sometimes describe humans as rational animals. It would be more accurate to say that we are confabulating animals. The problem is that it is not always easy to distinguish our frequent practice of confabulation from the rare moments when we exercise our rationality. A provocative idea is …
