Culture Dish comments on a fascinating finding by Swiss researchers, published in Nature and reported by the National Geographic. “[A]s a result of focal electrical stimulation of the left temporoparietal junction,” … they induced “[t]he strange sensation that somebody is nearby when no one is actually present”.
John Sutton @ Macquarie just passed on the following information, which some of you may not know of and to whom it will be of interest: Max Coltheart has written a heavy critique of imaging (Max Coltheart, ‘What has functional neuroimaging told us about the mind (so far)?’, Cortex 42 …
On my long, long list of “Things I Don’t Really Have Time to Think About But Wish I Did” is the following simple question: Does dualism make a difference to one’s overall view of the mind? Since some might assume that the obvious answer to the question is an obvious …
I was interviewed for a column appearing in today’s Wall Street Journal on an intriguing case of possible conscious states in a vegetative patient (“There May Be More To a Vegetative State Than Science Thought” by Sharon Begley). In the case in question, scientists recorded brain activity in a vegetative …
new web page dedicated to the philosophy of neuroscience
Barsalou, Glenberg, Prinz, Damasio and other neo-empiricists have theoretically and experimentally challenged the once dominant view that representations in higher cognitive processes are amodal (eg, Fodor, Pylyshyn). They have renewed a century-old perspective on the mind, according to which representations in perceptual processes and representations in higher cognitive processes are, …
I apologize for the long post. It’s inspired by an email exchange I’ve had with Anna-Mari Rusanen. One recurring theme in philosophy of cognitive science is David Marr’s distinction of computational, algorithmic, and implementational levels (from his book Vision, 1982). Sometimes people assimilate Marr’s computational level to Chomsky’s competence. …
