Philosophers' Carnival #113
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The Demise of "Cognitive Science"
For several years, I’ve felt that cognitive science as it was originally conceived is being progressively replaced by cognitive neuroscience. By “cognitive science as it was originally conceived,” I mean primarily the alliance between traditional cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence (either “classicist” or “connectionist”), supplemented by contributions from linguistics, philosophy of …
Check out Philosophy TV
Philosophy TV is a Bloggingheads kind of deal just for philosophy. It is run (I think) by some grad students at Wisconsin. It apparently goes live on September 6 with Peter Singer and Michael Slote. Then on September 9 it is Andy Egan and Josh Knobe. Alas, it hits a …
Realistic [?] Routes to Substrate Independent Minds
Susan Schneider sent me this interesting article about a new group apparently devoted to unifying efforts to build artificial minds. Incidentally, the article contains a nice series of confused non sequiturs about computation and the brain: “When it comes to the brain and the mind, the strong neuroscientific consensus is …
Best Blog Post of the Year
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Two fronts against Chalmers
In the following I look at two fronts on which you might battle Chalmers’ arguments against physicalism about consciousness. The first is from Polgar’s recent paper (recently discussed by Richard Brown) in which he briefly critique’s Chalmers’ implicit theory of reduction. The second is the more common strategy of attacking him for assuming he can conceive of zombies in the first place. I argue that the second strategy is better, though they are not mutually exclusive.
Identifying the Identity Theory
Cross-Posted @ Philosophy Sucks! While I was perusing the new entries over at PhilPapers yesterday I came across Tom Polger‘s forthcoming paper inPhilosophical Psychology Are Sensations Still Brain Processes? The paper is very interesting (disclaimer: I have a special interest in this stuff; see for instance The Identity Theory in 2-D) and I thought I would …