Mind

New Scientist advises, “Bonobos use a range of tools like stone-age humans.” Indeed, they “demonstrate caveman skills.” The study shows that bonobos are capable of a wide range of tool use that puts them at least on a par with chimps, says Roffman. Their foraging techniques resemble those used by the earliest Stone-Age humans of the Oldowan culture. “When you give them the raw materials, they use them in correct and context-specific strategies,” Roffman says. However, captive bonobos, unlike their wild cousins, have plenty of time to experiment, says Francesco d’Errico of the University of Bordeaux in France. The captive animals’ actions may bear little resemblance to what happens in the wild. Still, says d’Errico, it shows the potential is Read More ›

Says new BBC feature: We once viewed ourselves as the only creatures with emotions, morality, and culture. But the more we investigate the animal kingdom, the more we discover that is simply not true. Many scientists are now convinced that all these traits, once considered the hallmarks of humanity, are also found in animals. If they are right, our species is not as unique as we like to think. In a rare, special tribute to common-sense, Brit Tax TV offers a look at the counter-argument as well. Not an especially insightful one. Which is probably what they wanted. But there is really no argument. It apparently never occurs to the people who write this sort of thing that, were it Read More ›

From Discover: If a signal is ‘space-time separable’, this means in effect that one can hold either space or time constant, and then measure the other. For instance, in an EEG experiment, we typically consider the signal from one particular electrode (i.e. holding space constant) and plot a graph of how it varies over time. In a task-based fMRI experiment, we hold time constant and plot the spatial extent of activity at that time point. By doing this, we are assuming that activity in the brain takes the form of standing waves. However, Alexander et al. say that while we can treat brain activity in this way, we shouldn’t, because brain activity is dominated by travelling waves, activations or deactivations Read More ›

Just add: Attention schema. Get published. Case you wondered. From Aeon: Artificial intelligence is growing more intelligent every year, but we’ve never given our machines consciousness. People once thought that if you made a computer complicated enough it would just sort of ‘wake up’ on its own. But that hasn’t panned out (so far as anyone knows). Apparently, the vital spark has to be deliberately designed into the machine. And so the race is on to figure out what exactly consciousness is and how to build it. I’ve made my own entry into that race, a framework for understanding consciousness called the Attention Schema theory. Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of consciousness? Follow UD News Read More ›

That is doubted in a new paper: Can we learn without being aware of what we’re learning? Many psychologists say that ‘unconscious’, or implicit, learning exists. But in a new paper, London-based psychologists Vadillo, Konstantinidis, and Shanks call the evidence for this into question. … Essentially, this suggests that the reason why only 21.5% of the studies detected a significant recognition effect, is that the studies just didn’t have a large enough sample size to reliably detect it. Vadillo et al. show that the median sample size in these studies was 16, so the statistical power to detect an effect of dz = 0.31 with that sample size is just 21% – which, of course, is exactly the proportion that Read More ›

From Frank Wilczek, How Physics Will Change-and Change the World -in 100 Years: Unification VI: Mind and Matter Although many details remain to be elucidated, it seems fair to say that metabolism and reproduction, two of the most characteristic features of life, are now broadly understood at the molecular level as physical processes. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA’s structure, put forward the “astonishing hypothesis” that it will be possible to bring understanding of basic psychology, including biological cognitive processing, memory, motivation, and emotion, to a comparable level. One might call that “reduction” of mind to matter. But mind is what it is, and what it is will not be diminished for being physically understood. I’d be thrilled to understand how Read More ›

A friend can’t make sense of this, from philosopher Keith Frankish in Aeon: Consciousness is a life-transforming illusion So, again, what is consciousness for? In his 2011 book Soul Dust, Humphrey proposes a novel idea. He argues that consciousness enriches life. It doesn’t add information; it adds interests and goals. Qualia are wonderful, magical things, and conscious creatures enjoy having them. They relish their sensations, and this relish gives them a deeper interest in their own existence. They also project qualia onto their surroundings and take a deeper interest in them too; and they come to think of themselves as having a self, which is of great importance to them. These developments, Humphrey argues, have great survival value and explain Read More ›

On the iconic lecture room psychopath, fFrom the British Psychological Society Research Digest: So the textbooks mostly won’t tell you about Gage’s rehabilitation, or provide you with the latest evidence on his injuries. Instead, you might hear how hear never worked again and became a vagrant, or that he became a circus freak for the rest of his life, showing off the holes in his head. “The most egregious error,” says Griggs, “seems to be that Gage survived for 20 years with the tamping iron embedded in his head!”. Does any of this matter? Griggs argues strongly that it does. There are over one and half million students enrolled in introductory psychology courses in the US alone, and most of Read More ›

Though Gary Marcus tells us it is, in “Face It, Your Brain Is a Computer”at the New York Times: … Finally, there is a popular argument that human brains are capable of generating emotions, whereas computers are not. But while computers as we know them clearly lack emotions, that fact itself doesn’t mean that emotions aren’t the product of computation. On the contrary, neural systems like the amygdala that modulate emotions appear to work in roughly the same way as the rest of the brain does, which is to say that they transmit signals and integrate information, and transform inputs into outputs. As any computer scientist will tell you, that’s pretty much what computers do. Of course, whether the brain is Read More ›

A friend writes that British novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, is very close to an ID understanding of intelligence and information: A choice, let us remember, is almost more of a negative than a positive. You embrace one thing; but you refuse a thousand. The most liberal profession imprisons many energies and starves many affections. If you are in a bank, you cannot be much upon the sea. You cannot be both a first-rate violinist and a first-rate painter: you must lose in the one art if you persist in following both. – Robert Louis Stevenson, On the Choice of a Profession (1916) Chatto & Windus, pp. Read More ›

A view from alternative medicine and a view from anti-alternative medicine. The row was touched off by the Mayo Clinic offering alternative therapies (linked at sites). One reason this is an unusually difficult problem is that the patient’s view of what is happening is part of what is happening. As great physicists have noted, the mind is real. The placebo effect is one of the most powerful effects in medicine, which is why drugs must be tested against placebo (control group). Not because placebo doesn’t work but precisely because it does. Thoughts welcome. See also: Neuroscience tried wholly embracing naturalism, but then the brain got away Follow UD News at Twitter!

Readers may remember philosopher of mind and proponent of direct realism John Searle (John Searle on the two big mistakes philosophers make). Here’s Los Angeles Review of Books on his new book, Seeing Things As They Are There is an external world, and it is full of things: tables, crocodiles, textures, etc. These things and this world exist whether I like it or not: their existence is independent of my beliefs, opinions, or preferences, and hence we say that such an existence — or, to use the technical term, such an ontology — is objective. There is also a subjective world, and it consists of internal states of mind. Such states are not ontologically objective, but subjective: they depend for Read More ›

Theodore Dalrymple here: Listening as I do every day to the accounts people give of their lives, I am struck by the very small part in them which they ascribe to their own efforts, choices, and actions. Implicitly, they disagree with Bacon’s famous dictum that “chiefly the mould of a man’s fortune is in his own hands.” Instead, they experience themselves as putty in the hands of fate. It is instructive to listen to the language they use to describe their lives. The language of prisoners in particular teaches much about the dishonest fatalism with which people seek to explain themselves to others, especially when those others are in a position to help them in some way. As a doctor Read More ›

Philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze on a reasonable understanding of methodological naturalism. Galileo was a methodological naturalist because he was not a methodological supernaturalist, the only other option. Galileo was interested in the natural world, specifically the movements of the planets and their moons. He studied these movements via natural methods, i.e., he observed them through a telescope. He did not use supernatural methods in his studies. What might “supernatural methods” be? He might have written his questions about the solar system on slips of paper and burned them with incense in expectations of receiving visions explaining everything. Of course that “supernatural methodology” sounds very silly. I’m not aware of any serious Christian thinker who ever used that method of Read More ›

From Prager University, here. From transcript of audio: Now, if all you are is a brain, an exhaustively physical system of neurons and synapses, then there’s no “you” that’s gonna be making a “choice” at all. Your thought processes are basically just a complex series of colliding electron-dominos crashing into one another. It’s just physical cause and effect, right — something that can be exhaustively understood in terms of physics and chemistry? There’s no “you” that’s an agent that’s deliberating, or choosing, or exercising free will. And that’s why, if you are just a brain, you cannot have free will. You would just be a physical machine — a very complex but programmed computer. But, if you’re something more than Read More ›