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…
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…
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….
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…
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…
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…