(Caveat: for the sake of exposition, at times I articulate past views in slightly anachronistic terms; I do my best to capture the gist of what Alan Turing and others meant in terms that contemporary readers should find perspicuous.) The computational theory of cognition says that cognition is largely explained …
The Brains blog is excited about the next Neural Mechanisms webinar this Friday. It is free. Find information about how and when to join the webinar here: neuralmechanisms.org/blog/february-12th-2019 (and below).
[The following is Part I in a two-part guest post by Will Bridewell and Alistair M. C. Isaac. — JS] We live in an age of post-truth rhetoric, fake news, and misinformation; consequently, questions of how to accurately identify deceptive communication and to appropriately respond to it have become increasingly …
Last time, I argued that there are substantive open questions about whether the theoretical constructs of formal linguistics play any role in the psychological processes underlying language use. Let’s now address those questions. When people talk about “the psychological reality of syntax”, there are (at least) two importantly different types …
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 …
Theoretical Computer Science has a broader import than its name suggests. To appreciate it, remember what Turing proved: that a certain hypothetical machine would be able to compute every recursively definable function in a finite amount of time. If we supplement that theorem with a plausible assumption about physics then …
A lot of philosophers think that consciousness is what makes the mind/body problem interesting, perhaps because they think that consciousness is the only part of that problem that remains wholly philosophical. Other aspects of the mind are taken to be explicable by scientific means, even if explanatorily adequate theories of …
