word/taste synaesthesia
The NY Times Nov 23 front page has an article about word/taste synaesthesia: there are 10 people known who experience tastes when they hear (or read) words.
The Necker cube
Hi everyone, You probably know these lines from Vision: “… To be sure, part of the explanation of [the Necker cube’s] perceptual reversal must have to do with a bistable neural network (that is, one with two distinct stable states) somewhere inside the brain… ” (Marr, 1982 p.25-26) How do the current …
Science against Religion?
Today’s NY Times has an interesting report on a recent conference discussing whether scientists should challenge religion more aggressively.
Pittsburgh, HPS: A new area of concentration in the History & Philosophy of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Psychiatry
It’s time to apply for grad school in philosophy. So, this may be of interest to some readers of this blog. The department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh has a new area of concentation in the History & Philosophy of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Psychiatry. …
Knobe on the Continuity between Science and Common Sense
Joshua Knobe was kind enough to write me as follows (reproduced with permission):I was happy to see that you wrote up a description of oursession [two weeks ago at the PSA Meeting], and I’m glad that you are bringing attention to these important questions about the relationship between common sense andscientific …
Philosophy of Neuroscience at ISHPSSB
Given that there is no society for the philosophy of neuroscience, I would like to propose that we try to make ISHPSSB https://www.ishpssb.org/ (Ishkabibble, among frriends) a temporary home for the philosophy of neuroscience https://artsci.wustl.edu/%7Eneuro/index.html community. ISHPSSB is the largest philosophy of biology organization in the world, and it attracts …
Given what we know about the lower level …
Scientists often give arguments of the form, “Given what we know about some lower high thing, some higher level thing is not possible.” Perhaps the most famous case of this for cognitive science is the 100-step rule that connectionists have alluded to. (This goes, very roughly: given what we know …