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]
The end of anthropocentrism is one of the signature achievements of science; starting with Copernicus, we have progressively shifted the center of the universe away from human beings. As of now, we are just yet another species in yet another planet in yet another solar system in yet another galaxy (not yet another universe, though…
In traditional ideas about information, it really doesn’t matter whether one is talking about apples or oranges; the content of the information is entirely abstracted out. A bit can represent a telephone directory entry, an image or birdsong. Regularities aren’t abstract in the same way; in fact we want regularities to have meaning and content….
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…
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…
1. Introduction. Emotions are everywhere, or so it seems. Antonio Damasio talks about the importance of emotion for reason. Martha Nussbaum talks about the importance of reason for emotion. Yet, there are reasons to think that emotions are the most private, the most inner of our experiences. A pain or a colour can be pointed…
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…
Every theory of the mind is (ultimately, if not immediately) a theory of human and nonhuman experience. One can study ion channels and neurotransmitters as if they were like any other biological or biochemical substance, but the study of the mind is not the same as the study of the pancreas. While we might invoke…