The Brains Blog — Since 2005, a leading forum for work in the philosophy and science of mind

Efficient Cognition—The Evolution of Representational Decision Making

I want to thank John Schwenkler for inviting me to blog about my new book, Efficient Cognition—The Evolution of Representational Decision Making. I am excited to be sharing with you all the reasons why I find the evolution of representational decision making such a fascinating research project. I also look …

Now Featured

John Schwenkler March 18, 2018 May 30, 2018 books

Thanks to Armin Schulz for blogging this week on Efficient Cognition: The Evolution of Representational Decision Making (MIT Press, 2018). To view his posts on a single page, please click here.

Reasoning About Deceit: 2. Political Discourse

John Schwenkler March 16, 2018 March 15, 2018 Epistemology / Ethics

[The following is Part II in a two-part guest post by Will Bridewell and Alistair M. C. Isaac. — JS] Part 1 approached the problem of deception from a computational perspective, arguing that, in order to reason effectively about deception, an agent must be able to represent not only the …

Reasoning About Deceit: 1. The Computational Perspective

John Schwenkler March 15, 2018 March 15, 2018 AI / computation AI

[The following is Part I in a two-part guest post by Will Bridewell and Alistair M. C. Isaac. — JS] We live in an age of post-truth rhetoric, fake news, and misinformation; consequently, questions of how to accurately identify deceptive communication and to appropriately respond to it have become increasingly …

Upcoming Events at the Brains Blog

John Schwenkler March 12, 2018 March 12, 2018 Events

I am pleased to announce the content that will be featured at Brains in the coming weeks: From March 19-23, Armin Schulz will contribute a series of posts on Efficient Cognition: The Evolution of Representational Decision-Making, published earlier this year by The MIT Press. From March 26-30, Edouard Machery will contribute a series …

Evidence

Susanna Schellenberg March 8, 2018 March 9, 2018 Epistemology / perception / Susanna Schellenberg: The Unity of Perception

This is my last day blogging on my forthcoming book here at Brains. Thanks to all who checked in and commented and thanks for the comments you sent me via email. A big thank you also to John Schwenkler for doing such an amazing job managing this blog. On Monday, …

Consciousness

Susanna Schellenberg March 7, 2018 March 8, 2018 Consciousness / perception / Susanna Schellenberg: The Unity of Perception

On Monday, I gave a general overview of the main ideas in my forthcoming book The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence. The key idea developed in the book is that perception is constituted by employing perceptual capacities—for example the capacity to discriminate and single out instances of red from …