When I write, I often choose my words very carefully in order to remove any opportunity the reader might have to make a quick judgment about the content of what I am saying. I’m hoping they will keep thinking about what I am saying. The unexpected pairing of words often accomplishes this, and in this […]
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In last weeks post, I reported on the work of a computer scientist (Jürgen Schmidhuber’s artificial curiosity) and neuroscientist Gerald Edelman. I would like to follow-up a bit with more about Edelman’s work and perspective, in part because I was captivated by a story he told (in more than one venue) to illustrate the fact […] If you’ve been reading my posts, you’ve probably figured out that this blog is motivated, to a large extent, by my fascination with what mathematics can help us see about the source, targets and bewildering range of human cognition. My expectations rest on the idea that what we have come to call the human mind […] A recent Radiolab episode brought some interesting things together by exploring loops, repetitions, and self-referencing phenomena. Among other things, they told the story of Melanie Thernstrom (The Pain Chronicles) who, in trying to manage her pain, investigated the self-inflicted pain of religious rites. She later did some work with neuroscientist Sean Mackey. Mackey had seen […] I recently listened to a radiolab podcast (from this past November!) that featured two authors: Steven Johnson (author of Where Good Ideas Come From) and Kevin Kelly (author of What Technology Wants). The thrust of the argument, that both authors defended, was that the things we make (from tools to gadgets to computers) are an […] I found myself tied a bit to the theme of last week’s blog when my attention was brought to a very recent article in PLoS Biology called Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology. In it a team of biologists, psychologists and philosophers from the Netherlands, the United States and Scotland, suggest that the […] There are countless ways to explore what may be called the two faces of mathematics – algebra and geometry. Modern mathematical systems have their roots in both algebraic and geometric thinking. Like the organs of the body which are built on the redirected sameness of cells, algebra and geometry live in all manner of relationship […] It happens many times in class that I say, “in mathematics when you see something you don’t know, you try to figure it out using something you do know. And, recently, in the context of thinking about the generalizations that blossomed in late 19th and early 20th century mathematics, I’ve also wondered how it is […] I’ve thought that one of the reasons it’s difficult to resolve questions about the nature of mathematical reality is that we’re not exactly clear on what it means to ‘perceive’ something. Trying to establish whether or not even the data of our senses is somehow independently ‘real,’ has fueled centuries of philosophical debate. I found […] Let’s ask again, “What is the nature of the bridge between sense perceptions and concepts? It’s a simple question to ask, but a fairly difficult one to answer. Raphael Nunez contributed a chapter to the Springer book, Recasting Reality: Wolfgang Pauli’s Philosophical Ideas and Contemporary Science. A pdf of the chapter can be found here. […] |
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