Inside out comes from this appleworld post Which, although it’s in reference to something a bit different (head mounted mixed reality displays), captures a fundamental aspect of this newest set of technological affordances. If we think in terms of the skin as being a boundary layer between us and the …
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 …
Extending Cognition to Include Other Minds I’ve discussed extended cognition here previously and recently read a paper by Slaby & Gallagher that “extends the extension” to include other minds, specifically those involved in a community of scientific practice. This is reminiscent of Hardwig’s Epistemic Dependence paper which discussed the implications of …
“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 …
After finishing my last post There’s Something Out There, I reread The Connectome of a Decision-Making Neural Network by Travis A. Jarrell et al. , which I found dovetailed nicely with it — consider this a note added in proof From the abstract Here, we present the wiring diagram of the …
In my last post, I was trying to unpack a bit of what we mean when we use the term conscious. My expectation was that this follow up post would be about an active, purposeful processes focussed and driven by emotion. Upon further consideration I’ve also come to the position …
Aka How important is it that our thought experiments plausibly reflect the developmental paths implicitly necessary for their postulates to hold? I was kicked into this train of thought after reading Berit Brogaard’s The status of consciousness in nature, which discusses the Mary in a room thought experiment and has …
When I was writing about Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene, I was struck by the question is it possible that impairments that we think of as impairments of consciousness, are actually impairments in some of these necessary preconditions which occur via preconscious/subliminal processes This is of special concern …
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 …