by Andreas Keller I’ve had a background interest in the sense of smell since reading Luca Turin’s The Secret of Scent back in the day. I found it compelling because the complexity of olfaction seemed to exceed the capability of the receptor paradigm However, that was before my recent encounter with …
The Feeling of Life Itself by Christof Koch Note: many of the quotes use the term consciousness, which I think that has implications beyond what is actually implied — a better term would be awareness Koch presents a broad, generous view of organic consciousness. He delineates 5 necessary properties of …
I’ve often used the term weaponized cuteness to refer to “cute” the products coming out of Japan. Hello Kitty and the PARO Therapeutic Robots being particularly good examples(the PARO robot especially. If you ever get a chance to see one in person, be sure to check it out. The videos …
Prompted by reading The Oxford Handbook of Causation I’m not going to talk too much about the book itself, except to say that it was way too short. Although it’s possibly strange to say that about an 800+ page book, causation is a huge topic and each approach to it …
Down Girl is a deeply impressive book. At first, reading her discussion of misogynist actions vs misogynists, I was thinking: “yes, makes complete sense, but reminds me of Jay Smooth’s How To Tell Someone They Sound Racist video” (which didn’t appear to be referenced). However, she proceeded to expand on it in ways …
Epistemic Angst by Duncan Pritchard This book is a somewhat unusual in that it is a book length treatment of radical skepticism. Radical skepticism, simply stated, is the claim “we can’t be certain that we aren’t just a brain in a vat, and if we can’t be sure of that, …
The Conscious Mind is a 20+ year old book, which I got vectored back to recently. I’ll admit that left me cold, so much so that I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. I got bogged down in the Can Consciousness Be Reductively Explained section, and even granting his ground …
This book has been out for over a decade, but only recently hit my radar. It begins with the assumption that we are unlikely to (ever) get a fully detailed causal explanation of human scale events, e.g., a full up quantum level analysis of why bumping the table with your …
“Radical” is an understatement. This book isn’t just cognitive science with digital computers and no explicit symbolic thought. This is cognitive science via coupled oscillators — without even a hint of anything that could look like a predicate, a concept or even an explicit variable (Implicit variables are OK, since the …
Thought in Action by Barbara Gail Montero is the dual of many of the books I’ve discussed on this site. Where the others could be characterized by “in contrast to our beliefs that the bulk of our daily lives consists of conscious activity, it is actually primarily unconscious”, her work …