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 …
Ehud Shapiro and Yaakov Benenson, “Bringing DNA Computers to Life: Tapping the computing power of biological molecules gives rise to tiny machines that can speak directly to living cells,” Scientific American, May 2006 issue.Jeff Dauer noticed the above article and kindly sent me the link.Ehud Shapiro is a great guy …
Anna-Mari Rusanen told me about this story. Kati Lepisto is a Finnish former model who is now almost completely paralized. She communicates by spelling words with her eye movements, and the best reader of her eye movements (and guesser of what she is trying to say) is her mother. Some …
Greg Frost-Arnold has two interesting posts (first, second) on Sue Barry, a real neuroscientist who recently acquired stereoscopic vision. Her story is told in the latest New Yorker.
