Freud is never mentioned in my intellectual community; of course, his ideas about repression and unconscious desires have been transformed into universal metaphors, but he’s no longer an influence in the circles I frequent. Part of the problem is that…
There are at least three kind of arbitrary relations in the mind sciences: Between concepts/language and the world Between the mind and the body Between form and substance (which might include the above) For example, we feel that there is…
I am giving a talk at NIAS tomorrow on what I am calling the cognitive synthesis. Cognition and it’s cognates such as mind, thought etc are now among the most important topics of investigation in the sciences and in philosophy.…
The traditional approach to modeling in the cognitive sciences starts with the identification of the problem — let us say, causal explanation patterns — and then moves on to a a representational framework in which that problem can be addressed (let us say Bayesian…
The last fifty years have seen a great expansion of our knowledge of the mind/brain and it relationship to the external world. Significant advances have been made on the experimental front, in areas as diverse as Psychophysics, Neurophysiology and Cognitive…
Perception and cognition are traditionally considered as sources of knowledge. Consider the opening paragraph of Marr’s book on Vision (Marr 1982), which says “Vision is the process of discovering from images what is present in the world, and where it…
My work on the cognitive foundations of mind is guided by the underlying intuition that the study of the mind is at a stage similar to chemistry in the late nineteenth century — on the one hand large amounts of new data…