Brain regions might carry out well-defined functions— edge detection in primary visual cortex, “error monitoring” in the anterior cingulate cortex, and so on. But regions don’t function alone, so when they combine in functional circuits or networks, the behavior of the circuit/network might lead to emergent behaviors, as discussed in …
Emergence might be incontrovertible to physicists or mathematicians, but not in neuroscience. Why is it so controversial? One reason seems clear. It’s fair to say that neuroscience follows what could be called Herbert Simon’s dictum: we’re interested and indeed comfortable in taking on research problems and domains that involve near-decomposable …
Neuroscience tends to study parts of the brain separately. The Entangled Brain promotes the idea that, instead, we need to understand the brain as a complex, entangled system. Accordingly, the business of a brain region needs to be situated in the context of multi-region circuits: What does a brain region …
Ruey-Lin Chen Professor, Department of Philosophy National Chung Cheng University Photo credit: 胡儀婷 Professor Lin, Cheng-Hung (1938-2022), according to a young philosopher’s impression, is the teacher of almost all philosophical teachers in Taiwan. He unfortunately passed away on 3 June, 2022. He left a cherish legacy for the philosophy, especially …
Welcome to the Brains Blog’s Symposium series on the Cognitive Science of Philosophy. The aim of the series is to examine the use of diverse methods to generate philosophical insight. Each symposium is comprised of two parts. In the target post, a practitioner describes their use of the method under …
Guest editors: Mirko Farina (Innopolis) & Witold Pedrycz (Alberta) Machine learning (ML) is a branch of Artificial Intelligence that focuses on using data and algorithms to mimic the way humans learn. ML has the potential to deeply transform our societies and our economies. As the OECD recently reported: ‘it promises …
We are very grateful to Jesper Aagaard, Gloria Andrada, Lucy Osler and Jennifer Windt for providing such insightful questions, suggestions, and considerations on our paper. The commentaries address two themes: a set of conceptual questions about the descriptive and normative dimensions of extended mind-wandering, and a set of questions about …
