A. Syropoulos, Hypercomputation: Computing Beyond the Church-Turing Barrier. New York, Springer, 2008.There is now a wide range of proposals for physical (more or less) systems that purportedly compute functions that are not computable by Turing machines. This new book reviews many proposals from the hypercomputation literature, such as infinite time …
To celebrate the publication of my book, Doing without Concepts (OUP, January 2009), the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh organizes a symposium with Barbara Malt (psychology, Lehigh) and Jesse Prinz (philosophy, UNC), March 5, 2009. They comment, I reply, we take some questions! Information here. If …
Readers of this blog might be interested in the following post-doctoral fellowship position. We are particularly interested in folks working in history and philosophy of science and medicine, which I’m sure includes many of the participants here and their students. This ad is included in the November issue of the …
That’s the title of Larry Abbott’s recent perspective piece in Neuron (you can find the full article here). It starts with an excellent discussion of the roll of theory in neuroscience, and proceeds with a selective overview of the main insights gained from modeling over the last 20 years. Note …
Here.The carnival links to my previous post but contains a slight misunderstanding. I wasn’t trying to argue that “cognition is computation plus X”; rather, I was arguing that the most plausible version of computationalism is that cognition is computation plus X. I was being neutral on whether computationalism holds.
I just read a paper by Bob Gordon entitled “Simulation Without Introspection or Inference from Me to You” (in Mental Simulation, ed. M. Davies and T. Stone, Blackwell, 1996). Bob argues that introspection (looking inside your mind/perceiving your mental states/observing the qualitative aspect of your mental states) is unnecessary for mental state …
My book Mental Causation: The Mind/Body Problem is out and available (you can get the paper copy from Columbia University Press or Amazon or Barnes&Noble for about $23 USD). The book works its way up to a solution to a certain class of mental causation problems, roughly the ones picked …
