Commentary from Mark Sprevak on today’s post from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (MIT Press). I very much agree with the book’s main claim that abstraction and simplification are essential theoretical virtues in the cognitive and brain sciences. Often a simple model – one good enough for our specific …
Post 2 of 5 from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (Open Access: MIT Press). The idea in my project to foreground the question of interpretation is loosely inspired by work in the philosophy of physics which takes the empirical success of e.g. quantum field theory for granted but debates …
This week the Brains Blog is hosting a symposium on Mazviita Chirimuuta’s new book The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (Open Access: MIT Press). Today’s post from Chirimuuta provides a precis and overview of the content of the book. Through this week, we will have …
(See all posts in this series here.) I conclude with Chapters 6 and 7 of the book, which apply the theory to reasoning and introspecting consciousness. Investigating these as forms of attending, mental actions, illuminates. Chp. 6 examines deducing a conclusion from the premises that entail it. Given that every …
(See all posts in this series here.) Philosophers have been debating implicit biases for some time. In Chapter 5 of MoM, I argue that automatic attention provides a scrutable type of implicit bias, scrutable because we understand well automatic attention across various domains and the automatic biases that engender it. …
(See all posts in this series here.) Intention is a type of memory. I argue that research on working memory reveals the dynamics of intention as embodying the agent’s control in action. This is a new perspective argued for in Chapters 3 and 4 of MoM. Elizabeth Anscombe noted that intentional …
(See all posts in this series here.) In Chapter 2 of MoM and an earlier book (second edition forthcoming), I have defended the selection for action view of attention. A subject attending to target T is the subject mentally selecting T to guide their action. Attention guides behavioral response in …
