The Brains blog is excited about the next Neural Mechanisms webinar this Friday. It is free. You can find information about how and when to join the webinar below or at the Neural Mechanisms website—where you can also join their mailing list to be notified of their webinars, webconferences, and …
In the previous post, I have remarked that the existing forms of SR do not use the full capacity of their logical frameworks to account for a substantial relation between the structure of the scientific theories and reality. If we regiment the structure of scientific theories into formal frameworks that …
The next Neural Mechanisms webinar is Friday (22nd) 8-10 Greenwich Mean Time: Karen YAN (National Yang-Ming University) presents “Evaluating the Success of Causal Investigative Strategies in Neurophysiology”. Find out about the paper and how to join the webinar in this post.
Weakness of will is a traditional puzzle in the philosophy of action. The puzzle goes something like this:
FOLK PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY: If, at time t, an agent judges that it is better to do A than B, and she believes she is free to do A, then, provided she tries to do either at that time, she will try to do A and not B.
WEAKNESS OF WILL: An agent judges that it is better to do A than B, believes that she is free to do A, but tries to do B.
But taken together, these statements are inconsistent. FOLK PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY precludes the possibility of weakness of will (as characterized in WEAKNESS OF WILL), but WEAKNESS OF WILL asserts that it occurs. So can WEAKNESS OF WILL be possible, and if so, how?
There were some really good papers last month. The three I picked to summarize all involve error-based learning on fast time-scales. One involves the cerebellum in monkeys, the other involves the songbird system in…songbirds. One reason I like these examples is because they illustrate how deeply error-sensitivity is knitted into …
I’ll be posting summaries each month of high-quality, general-interest papers from the systems neuroscience literature (usually there are one to five such papers a month). I plan to post them in the middle of the following month (depending on what else is going on here at Brains). Efference copy: from …
Yesterday, I gave a general overview of my forthcoming book. Today, I’ll lay out the foundations on which the rest of the book builds: the general and particular elements of perception. Chapter 1 addresses the particular elements of perception, Chapter 2 its general elements. The phenomenon of perceptual particularity …
