I just culled together a bunch of putative examples of downward causation, some from advocates, some from detractors. Particularly interesting and promising is the article by Robert Bishop, Downward causation in fluid convection, and Bechtel/Craver’s article Top-down causation without top-down causes, for which brief quotes will not do justice. (Note …
Today’s NY Times has a nice article on recent evidence that contrary to popular belief (especially among philosophers), some animals have a form of episodic memory and the ability to plan for future events.
This may be old news to those who are up on the vision neuroscience literature, but I found it interesting and surprising so I thought I would share. It appears that within the human population, individuals vary in the number of red-cone genes (from 1 to 4) and green-cone genes …
Philosophers, both at Brains and elsewhere in the philosophical blogosphere, seem to like participating in and reading polls, so how about another one here? Is the property of having dichromatic color vision multiply realized in humans? If so, why? If not, why not I say “yes”. There are three familiar …
Alerted by Arnold Trehub, I just discovered Science & Consciousness Review, an interesting group blog devoted to reviewing work on the science of consciousness. Incidentally, Arnold has a quick review of Annti Revonsuo’s book, Inner Presence and one of Velmans and Schneider’s Blackwell Companion to Consciousness.
My colleague Bob Gordon is the originator of the simulation theory, one of the two main theories of folk psychology (the other being the theory theory). Aside from being an influential theory in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, in recent years the simulation theory has had a large impact on social robotics.Bob …
EPSA07: 1st Conference of the European Philosophy of Science AssociationContributed papers are invited to the 1st Conference of the newly founded European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA). The conference will take place at Complutense University, Madrid, from 15-17 November 2007.For details of the Association (EPSA) and the Conference (EPSA07) see: …
