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]
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…
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….
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. 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…
The idea of a primeval order or design is central to Indo European cultures – it is there in the Rig-Vedic corpus in the notion of Rta, and it is there in Plato when he talks about ideas. Someone like Thomas McEvilley would argue that these notions have circulated within the ancient world for a…
There are two ways of understanding the physical world. The first is a view from “nowhere,” a God’s eye view of the world. Physics, for the most part, has taken this line of understanding. However, it is also possible to describe the physical world from a particular perspective, that of an ant or an elephant….
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…
I am arguing that regularities are a powerful framework for understanding the world of organisms. That said, it is important when we are exploring a new concept or framework that we try not to capture everything under the universe within it’s ambit. So what is not a regularity? Mechanisms aren’t regularities. Consider the circulatory problem…
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…