We’re happy to announce our first co-hosted talk! This week we are bringing you John Bickle from the MSU Weekly Chat series, a great lineup of talks put together by John and Antonella Tramacere. You can participate in the live talk and Q&A and/or find the talk on the Brains …
Hi there Brains Blog readers. Please see the call for participation below from Edouard Machery and Luis Favela. Call for Participants: Survey on The Concept of Representation in the Mind Sciences I am Dr. Edouard Machery, Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of …
Many in-person events have been canceled. Some have been moved online. However, many of these online events are either not recorded or not posted for asynchronous consumption, limiting their accessibility and impact. Where We Come In For over a decade, the Brains Blog has been dedicated to making scholarly content …
The Brains Blog, in partnership with Neural Mechanisms Online, is thrilled to announce the lineup for Neural Mechanism Online 2021! Details and instructions for accessing this fantastic series of talk can be found here. Friday Jan 22 – David Barack Friday Feb 5 – John Bickle Friday Feb 19 – …
A picture of continuity Some beliefs are epistemically innocent when they are irrational but provide epistemic benefits that would not be available otherwise. We already saw some examples: delusion, confabulation, and optimistically biased beliefs. Here I explain why I apply epistemic innocence to different types of beliefs across clinical and …
Powerful agents We are likely to overestimate our capacities and make exceedingly rosy predictions about our future. This widespread bias towards optimism is a robust finding in psychology. It is also a clear case of epistemic irrationality which has serious implications for risk assessment. According to a recent article, unrealistic …
Incurable confabulators Philosophers sometimes describe humans as rational animals. It would be more accurate to say that we are confabulating animals. The problem is that it is not always easy to distinguish our frequent practice of confabulation from the rare moments when we exercise our rationality. A provocative idea is …
