I recently finished Between Word and Image by Dennis J. Schmidt. Overall, I liked the book, but the part that really stuck with me was this: Here I am referring to the quiet truth of a gesture, namely, that in looking at a gesture, one is addressed by that gesture. …
I guess it has become a truism that “real intelligence” requires embodiment (some random pointers: why alphago is not ai; another good place to start is the AI section of the wikipedia embodied cognition entry) I’ve been a firm believer in this for decades, since a non-embodied system requires explicitly …
The Structure of Objects by Kathrin Koslicki Just a quick note on this important mereology work, which takes what I’d call a deeply simple approach to the problem of what is a “whole object” She makes three main moves Parts need to be arranged in a structured manner to form a …
I recently read Ecumenicism, comparability, and color, or: How to have your cake and eat it, too by Jonathan Cohen. The situation he discussed is based on the classic color perception experiment in which a gray square surrounded by a lighter color is perceived as being darker than the same …
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 …
I recently discovered Sally Applin’s work, having been vectored there by Rethink Robotics blog posts. I’m intrigued by her ideas on blended/augmented reality experiences, and want to capture some thoughts on them. Her papers posit that we’re at the cusp of an inflection point of how our experience of reality …
Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene Lots of interesting stuff here — what I found most intriguing were his descriptions of tests involving borderline cases in which the subject switches from paying conscious attention to one thing to paying conscious attention to another thing. In brain imaging studies, this …
I usually use this blog to capture my evolving thoughts on consciousness, cues and human activity. I don’t have any expectation that people are reading it, but I make it public since that encourages me to tighten up the writing and thinking. For this post, I want to pivot a …
This was prompted by David Rose’s Enchanted Objects — he breaks what I’d loosely characterize as computational assistance into four categories: Terminal World — slabs (phones, tablets), and more conventional computers. You come to them in their world, they don’t genuinely inhabit yours. This becomes clearer when contrasted with the …
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 …