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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …