This is the new webpage for this blog, Brains. The blog has existed since December 2005 at https://brainbrain.blogspot.com/. All the old content has been transfered to this website, and all new content will be published here.Many thanks to John Gabriel for his help in transfering the blog.
Philosophers’ Carnival #33 here.Augenblick reports on various interesting things, including the following:The “brain box,” a new computer that attempts to mimick the fault-tolerant characteristics of the brain, is being built by scientists at the University of Manchester.The first neurons to develop in the brain have been identified by researchers at …
Check it out at Zeno’s Coffehouse.
Courtesy of Ben Ricker:“The BBC web site posted several thought experiments that are/were in vogue in ethics and requested votes on what you would do. Some food for thought. Check it out here. After you vote, you see the total tallys.”
It is sometimes noticed that Wilfrid Sellars’s work in the 1950s is the origin of functional role semantics, contains the language of thought hypothesis, and has a lot in common with functionalism generally. So, it is natural to speculate the Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, when they formulated functionalism in …
Jaegwon Kim is a prolific and influential writer on the topic of higher-vs.-lower level properties and mental causation. Many of his arguments may be seen as raising the following dilemma: either higher level properties reduce to lower level ones (i.e., their causal powers are identical to the causal powers of …
Curtis Brown, “Computation, Representation, and Teleology,” presented at E-CAP 2006, June 2006.I just found the online (long) abstract of Brown’s talk. Brown defends two necessary conditions for computation: it must operate on representations (semantic condition) and it must have the function to calculate (teleological condition). I agree with Brown that …
