For the last day of blogging my book The Emotional Mind, I’m going to skip straight to the last chapter on mental architecture. This is where propose a control theory of the mind as a whole. It is perhaps the most ambitious and speculative chapter of a book that is …
John Schwenkler kindly asked me to blog about my new book, Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account. I am grateful for the invitation. The original motivation for the research that led to the book was to make progress on the vexed question of whether cognition involves computation. That seems to require …
You may (or may not) have noticed that Pete Mandik and Richard Brown (me) have started a podcast, called SpaceTimeMind, where we talk about tax law updates for 2014, uh, I mean, er, we talk about space and time and mind! The first episode is up now (and has been …
This paper (co-authored with theoretical and experimental neuroscientist Sonya Bahar) is what I’ve been aiming at during all these years. This is why I made this big fuss over developing an adequate non-semantic account of computation. I think the paper is finally ready to submit, but I’d love to get some …
19-21 May 2011San Jose (Andalucia, Spain)2nd call for papersResearchers are invited to submit full papers or long abstracts for 40-minute presentations on conceptual, empirical or modeling issues that arise in the treatment of the systematicity challenge from post-connectionist approaches such as behavior-based AI, ecological psychology, embodied and distributed cognition, dynamical …
In other Aizawa-relevant news, Steven Philips and Williams Wilson have a new theory of the systematicity of thought based on category theory. With their publication, they have joined an elite group of academics who have referred to my book, The Systematicity Arguments. (Fodor mentions it in LOT 2 and …
In a previous post, I briefly discussed the relationship between connectionism and associationism. Thanks in part to the helpful feedback I received, I have now revised the relevant section of the paper I am working on. I’d be interested in any additional comments or references that anyone might have. The text of the paper …
Yes! Some people don’t realize this. Someone recently objected to me that since McCulloch and Pitts were studying the brain, they must be offering only a theory of neural activity, on the same level as, say, Hodgkin and Huxley. How can I say that McCulloch and Pitts had a theory of cognition? Although …
I’m a big fan of grandmother cells, myself… doi:10.1037/a0014462
