The Kindle made ebooks popular, but the ipad and other mobile devices are making us question both… [more]
I gave a TEDx talk last Saturday on the future of learning, which, like the past and the present, is… [more]
I gave a talk at NIAS on M-Theories, which is my approach to the intersection of mind, metaphysics and… [more]
Modern technology offers new ways of story telling and of combining images narrative and other media.… [more]
Learning should be Continuous, Contextual and Creative. Instead it is Discrete, Disconnected and Dull. I… [more]
2011-2012 has seen many exciting developments in online education. One of the most promising ones is Stanford’s - and nowUdacity’s and Coursera’s- online courses in AI and Machine Learning that consist of free online lectures, exercises and other material. While most courses have concentrated on CS and AI topics, I am particularly excited about Scott Page‘s is teaching a class on Model Thinking. This…
There are two seemingly contradictory views about the mind: Mental processes are fundamentally independent of their physical instantiation. For example, there is a traditional view that reasoning and logic are essential features of the mind. Now consider the argument that says that from A → B and B → C we can always conclude that A…
Mice could roar but they don’t. There is nothing preventing a small organism from growling; we have horns in India that do it all the time. A roaring mouse is improbable but not impossible. Similarly, a cloud shaped object could be hard, but is unlikely to be so. The relation between clouds and fluffiness is…
Mice could roar but they don’t. There is nothing preventing a small organism from growling; we have horns in India that do it all the time. A roaring mouse is improbable but not impossible. Similarly, a cloud shaped object could be hard, but is unlikely to be so. The relation between clouds and fluffiness is…
Many posts on this site use the terms Umwelt, Affordances and Regularities. While they are often used interchangeably, there is a hierarchical relationship between the three, which can be summarized as: Umwelts → (The world of) Affordances → (The world of) Regularities. Umwelts are life-worlds, the world as experienced by me as a subject or by a…
Organisms are both physical as well as experiential beings and it always useful to be accurate about when we are talking about one or the other. For example, it is well known that we have a blind spot in our visual field, where the optic nerve meets the retina. As far as the physical being…
Regularities are not permanent markers of the world; often they are a ledge to rest before climbing onwards. To take the most obvious example, walking is nothing other than controlled falling. Each time you lift one foot, you are falling forward except that you land the other foot before you keel over. Balancing on one foot is…
It is easy to think of a regularity as a platonic ideal, an eternal form that regulates a particular phenomenon or process. However, the platonic regularity is not the view I have in mind. In fact, a regularity is a pattern that regulates the response of an organism to its surroundings in the here and…
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 Psychology. However, the corresponding advances in theory have not materialized. Some of the disciplines within…
The Inner-Outer dyad is a regularity that shows its trace in many domains of human thought and action. Many fields of inquiry base themselves on a cognitive core involving a mapping between the microcosm and the macrocosm. Consider mystical traditions: despite their different emphases, the unitive experiences of Jewish, Islamic, Christian, Hindu and Buddhist provenance…