There’s little or no reason to believe there is any ‘mind-stuff’, material or supernatural, unless you simply wish to dogmatically assert that matter isn’t adequate as the foundation of our thoughts and feelings. Brain-scientists, geneticists, and evolutionary theorists are researching the workings of the human mind (and human nature more generally) and are producing remarkable … [Read more…]
I really don’t know much about neural networks which are organized in space and certainly can’t make much comment upon the discovery that they can be organized through “multiple timescales” as well, yet, I’m hardly surprised. See this article, Robots Show That Brain Activity Is Linked To Time As Well As Space, for a summary … [Read more…]
Nearly ten years ago, I wrote the first version of a dark comedy (sample chapters can be downloaded from A Man for Every Purpose) in which the protagonist, a formerly respectable professor of philosophy, seems to be in a rather confused state of mind. I’ll ruin part of the surprise, assuming it’s ever published in … [Read more…]
In a recent post New Forms of Human Mind and New Forms of Human Civilization, I discussed the Thomistic teaching that the human mind shapes itself in active responses to its environments in the context of cultural transitions. Recently, I was reading Political Theory & Modernity by William E. Connolly and his discussion of Nietzsche … [Read more…]
In this summary article, Psychologists Show Experience May Be The Best Teacher For Infants, we read: Researchers have found that infants who had an opportunity to use a plastic cane to get an out-of-reach toy were better able to understand the goal of another person’s use of a similar tool than were infants who had … [Read more…]
There was once a strange tint to the philosophizing of some modern biologists and philosophers working in that field. They set up unidirectional structures of control from DNA to soma and from brain to physical limbs while also setting up one way flows of perception, including that of pain, from physical limbs to brain. The … [Read more…]
This article, Immaturity Of The Brain May Cause Schizophrenia, talks about one of the possible causes of a disease which may actually be “several biologically distinct heterogeneous populations,” that is, a set of symptoms caused by various diseases. This was the case for ‘consumption’ in the 1800s — TB or lung cancer or some variety … [Read more…]
A while ago I’d read that some wildlife biologists had speculated that there’s a regulatory gene for size in grizzly bears and that the mother could change the setting on that gene, setting it to BIG when there was plenty of food and grizzlies were dominant and to a lesser setting when the conditions were … [Read more…]
Einstein, Feynman, and perhaps other major scientists have made the claim that “philosophers of science” have contributed nothing that’s useful to scientists. While not sure exactly what the contexts of their comments really were, I’d generally say in response, “Yes, and why would anyone expect anything different?” I would think philosophers of science move in … [Read more…]
In my reviews of Gerd Gigerenzer’s Adaptive Minds, beginning with A Review of “Adaptive Minds: Part I”, I discussed Professor Gigerenzer’s analyses of the ‘discoveries’ in the latter half of the 20th century that human beings don’t think very clearly. Beginning in the 1950s or so, Economists and psychologists and others tested the common folk … [Read more…]