I want to consider two books that address knowing things in the world Tyler Burge’s Origins of Objectivity and Andy Clark’s Surfing Uncertainty Although they are both books by philosophers and deal with similar topics, it would be difficult to imagine them being any more different. Burge’s brief is backward looking …
This book is a pretty thorough takedown of our subjective feelings of conscious control. Using figure 1.3 as a reference: Figure 1.3: Conditions of human action. “ The upper left quadrant shows the expected correspondence of action and the feeling of doing—the case when we do something and feel also …
Things and Places by Zenon Pylyshyn In keeping with my current goal of pushing the requirements for “conscious thought” down to an absolute minimum, I picked up (downloaded) a copy of Pylyshyn’s Things and Places. Pylyshyn is a long time vision researcher and this book serves as summary of his …
As others have noted, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter is a significant book — it’s what I was looking for when I started down the OOO path (which admittedly reflects more upon me than upon OOO or Vibrant Matter (VM)). VM is sort of the dual of OOO: whereas OOO is …
This post was provoked by New Aesthetics, New Anxieties that was provoked by the new aesthetics movement. I will start with a few comments on the book (which I highly recommend BTW). One point that the book clarified for me, even though NA isn’t explicitly mentioned, is that the “algorithmic …
A Universe of Consciousness by Edelman and Tononi — this is the third Edelman book I’ve read, the others being: The Remembered Present, and Neural Darwinism. The central idea in Edelman’s work is neuronal group selection, shown below (figure 7.2 from the book — I’m reproducing this, since wikipedia doesn’t adequately capture …
While reading this Ambient Commons I bounced between thinking Cool this is someone who’s using data/being the environment without the digital detox meme to No, he just wants us to drop our phones to No, this really is a different take. Upon finishing the book I settled on the idea …
My feelings about Strangers To Ourselves are colored by my having read it after Beyond The Brain (BTB). I have a difficult time giving it appropriate credit since much of its content was subsumed by BTB, even though the book has a lot going for it: interesting examples, good writing, etc. …
Here’s a short note on Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind. My immediate reaction is that the mechanisms he’s positing are not all that surprising: I would expect that any task we do frequently would be accompanied by various physical affordances that reduce our cognitive load, sometimes these affordances are inherent …
I just finished Guerrilla Metaphysics (GM) by Graham Harman. The core of GM interrogates the way in which objects interact — in this, GM complements other OOO ( object-oriented ontology) books such as the the democracy of objects which I feel take the form of interaction as a given. GM isn’t …