The Brain Abstracted – Overview and Precis

This week the Brains Blog is hosting a symposium on Mazviita Chirimuuta’s new book The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (Open Access: MIT Press). Today’s post from Chirimuuta provides a precis and overview of the content of the book. Through this week, we will have …

Wu, Movements of the Mind. Post 5: Deducing and Introspecting

(See all posts in this series here.) I conclude with Chapters 6 and 7 of the book, which apply the theory to reasoning and introspecting consciousness. Investigating these as forms of attending, mental actions, illuminates. Chp. 6 examines deducing a conclusion from the premises that entail it. Given that every …

Wu, Movements of Mind. Post 4: Biased Attention as Implicit, Automatic Bias.

(See all posts in this series here.) Philosophers have been debating implicit biases for some time. In Chapter 5 of MoM, I argue that automatic attention provides a scrutable type of implicit bias, scrutable because we understand well automatic attention across various domains and the automatic biases that engender it. …

Wu, Movements of the Mind. Post 3: Intention, Memory for Work and Working Memory.

(See all posts in this series here.) Intention is a type of memory. I argue that research on working memory reveals the dynamics of intention as embodying the agent’s control in action. This is a new perspective argued for in Chapters 3 and 4 of MoM. Elizabeth Anscombe noted that intentional …

Wu, Movements of the Mind. Post 1: The Structure of Agency.

(See all posts in this series here.) Movements of the Mind (MoM) is about the structure of agency. It also gives a theory of attention. Indeed, it also provides a theory of psychological bias. For good measure, it argues that intention is a type of memory, linking it to working …

Back to Top