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]
According to the cognoscenti biology is the science of the 21st century just as physics was the science of the 20th. Within biology itself, neuroscience is rising fast and becoming the go-to science. Donors, funding agencies and newspapers seem to agree. Even science fiction movies have shifted from space exploration, i.e., Star Wars and Star…
When human beings investigate their own nature, they ask two seemingly different questions: Who are we? Who should we be? The first is the province of psychology, cognitive science and increasingly, biology. The second is the province of ethics, arts and philosophy. One of the most interesting developments in modern scholarship is how the two…
Science has mostly been an analytic pursuit; we try to break the universe into its constituent parts and analyze these parts for what they are. This method is also often called reductionism, but one can be analytic without being a reductionist. Engineering on the other hand is synthetic; while an engineer does analyze cars in…
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. We a learning more and more about the biological and psychological roots of cognition. At…
In my previous post I introduced the idea of a concrete universal and asked if it wasn’t a contradiction in terms. The critic might argue that a concrete entity, like this computer in front of me has shape and size and heft, while universals like “computer-ness” is not located anywhere and has neither shape nor…
This post is partly a response to Sartaj’s post from a few days ago. He starts his post with a rather remarkable quote: “Colors are an artefact of perception.” This one line captures four hundred years of western investigations of the mind. One line of inquiry summarized in this quote goes as follows: If experiential…
There was a time in the 1960′s and 70′s when mathematical psychology was considered an important field. One of the defining tomes produced in that era is the three volume Foundations of Measurement by Krantz, Suppes, Luce and Tversky. Measurement is a particularly tricky problem in the study of the mind. There are two sub-questions…
Every corporeal being is bound to classify the world into two extremely basic categories: That which can be grabbed (or grabbed by) That which cannot be reached. More generally, for each sense, we classify the world into That which is immediately available to that sense. That which needs to be indexed into, in order to…
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 probabilities) followed by theories that seek to explain experimental data (say…
1. Introduction. The goal of this essay is to analyze the cognitive structure of beliefs. While beliefs vary tremendously, from sacred beliefs that are codified in texts to scientific hypotheses about the cosmos, I want to understand the structure of beliefs as encoded in the common sense of various human cultures. For that purpose, I…