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]
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…
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…
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…
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 no relation between the concept CUP and cups in the world. The concept CUP has…
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 is.” According to Marr, the role of vision is to acquire knowledge about the geometric…
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 are being collected that point to underlying principles, and on the other hand…