In a recent post, I criticized some passages from Alva Noe’s book, Out of Our Heads. I’d like to clarify some details. First, it was pointed out to me that my tone was disrespectful. I am truly sorry about that. My comments were only aimed at the quoted claims, not …
My review of recent literature on Computationalism has recently been published in Philosophy Compass. I hope it will help people get up to date as well as push the debate forward. If you are interested in the paper but your library does not subscribe to the journal, feel free to …
European scientists are building silicon chips containing large scale artificial neural networks (200,000 neurons and 50 million synapses, scalable to a billion neurons and 10 to the 13 synapses). (Thanks to Neal Anderson for the link.) IBM scientists and working on “cognitive computing”, an attempt to build a new generation of …
Stephen Wolfram, of New Kind of Science and Mathematica fame, is scheduled to make public a new tool next May. Wolfram Alpha is supposed to answer a vast number of questions in natural language by computing the answers from a large set of algorithms and databases. Sounds impressive. (Thanks to …
I just got back from the Eastern APA, where I chaired an interesting author-meets-critics session on Paul Smolensky and Geraldine Legendre’s book, The Harmonic Mind (MIT Press 2006). The critics were Bill Ramsey and (jointly) Terry Horgan and John Tienson. We all went to lunch after the session. Smolensky expressed surprise at …
Mmh… Probably not yet. (Link courtesy of Mike Ferreira.)
Corey Maley raised some doubts on Brain Hammer, and I offered my reasons for a (qualified) positive answer. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I’d be interested in hearing them.
