Archive for the ‘philosophy’ Category

Software, Affordance, and our Collective Nature

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

Here is an interesting project . Computers are introduced into the wild (a rather romantic notion). Slum kids (who?) in India are exposed to computers without the benefit of any further guidance. No adults. No instructions. In an experiment repeated several times now, they go through several ...

From a grass’s point of view….

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

Michael Pollan offers a brief talk on TED that describes how different the world looks if one adopts a grasses point of view.  The move is akin to Dawkins' famous adoption of the gene's point of view.  The Pink Monkey Farm idea is similar.  Following the thesis presented at PworldRworld.com, ...

What the brain is for

Monday, April 14th, 2008

Allow me a small moment of hubris. We have been fundamentally wrong about what kind of thing the brain is. We have worked with the notion that it was some kind of a controller. This produces the embarrassing question of who is doing the controlling. No. Brains bring forth ...

Experiencing our collective nature

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

In this remarkable talk at TED, Jill Bolte Taylor describes the phenomenology of a stroke.  She gives a very moving and spirited account of what it felt like for her to suffer a major stroke which essentially knocked out the left half of her brain.  The experience was essentially mystical ...

Accuracy of perception: a pernicious myth?

Monday, February 25th, 2008

I'm reading a very short note in this months Scientific American (so short it doesn't warrant a counterpart on their website, so no link. Sorry). In treats of people with body dysmorphic disorder, in which sufferers perceive themselves as flawed based on very little evidence. Functional MRI has ...

Enaction and the PMF

Monday, February 25th, 2008

More and more, I find that the vision of being I am outlining here and in the sister site is one that aligns well with the enactive approach in Cognitive Science.  I try not to read too much ahead of me, but when I do read in this area, things ...

Werner Heisenberg and the evolutionary transformation of human consciousness

Sunday, December 23rd, 2007

I quote this in toto. The page I found it on is a weird mixture of quantum physics and nekkid ladies. Ain't the interwebs great? Throughout the last decade, apocalyptic visions have abounded in response to the increasing fragmentation of knowledge, dehumanization of the individual, and generalized disruption that ...

Dennett vs me on Consciousness

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

I'm listening to an interview with Dan Dennett by Susan Blackmore. I like Dennett a whole lot, though we often disagree. I often find he takes a first promising step towards genuine insight, only to veer off at the last minute, thereby avoiding upsetting the apple cart. So here are ...

Happiness

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007

... is a good guide, a good thing to seek. If happiness is in rough correspondence with what a pink monkey needs, then it is a good thing to seek for in one's life. (I'm calling this the 150 effect: being liked by about 150 people would feel ...

From Post Secret:

Sunday, October 14th, 2007

(Found between the pages of a A Lifetime of Secrets [Vienna, VA.])