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The mathematics of common sense

I will be joining a few colleagues for a symposium at CogSci2014 and I’ve been gathering some notes for my talk. The talk will focus on the impact of embodiment theories on a philosophy of mathematics. As I looked again at some of the things I’ve chosen to highlight in my blogs, I came upon […]

Savants, neurons, and ants

Jason Padgett, author of the book Struck by Genius, appeared on CBS This Morning on April 24. On May 5, livescience also did a piece on him and his book. Padgett was assaulted in 2002 and suffered a severe concussion. But, following this head injury, he acquired an extraordinary facility for seeing mathematics. He is, […]

What the experience of mathematical beauty could imply

Back in September, 1992 Semir Zeki wrote an article for what was then a special issue of Scientific American called Mind and Brain. In it he described what was known about how the brain produces visual images. I have referred back to the article many times because it highlights the philosophical implications of our current […]

A continuum of senses

I was intrigued by a paper that came to my attention in the December 2013 issue of Philosophical Studies by Anna Farennikova in which she argues that we ‘see’ absence. In other words, seeing that something is not there is as much a product of our visual system as seeing an object. The example with […]

What does our experience have to do with mathematics?

This is something of a follow-up to my last post. I checked out a series of links related to Max Tegmark in the last few days, having heard about the release of his first book Our Mathematical Universe. But I was also motivated by having observed that the latest conference organized by the Foundational Questions […]

Wasps, bees, faces and mathematics

An article in the December issue of Scientific American gave me a new insect behavior to ponder and one that might reveal, in the insect’s biology, a distant cousin to the mathematical idea we call mapping. It seems that there are insects that have a talent for recognizing faces. Their talent has much in common […]

Thinking as a churning, swarming activity

The Atlantic Monthly just did an interesting piece on Douglas Hofstadter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gödel, Bach and Escher. Hofstadter’s 1979 book investigates the nature of human thought processes by looking at common themes in the work of the mathematician Gödel, the musician Bach and the artist Escher. In particular, it addresses the question of […]

New questions about infinity and how mathematics sees things

New Scientist published an article by Amanda Gefter in their August 15 issue which describes how and why the notion of infinity has come into question again. The distinction between a potential infinity (the process of something happening without end), and an actual infinity (represented, for example, by the set of real numbers) was disputed […]

Numerosity, vision, language and mathematics

Understanding the neural functions that contribute to the birth of mathematical structure and meaning is an active subject of research in cognitive science. A significant amount of work has been done to identify an innate ability we share with other creatures, namely the ability to perceive quantity. This is sometimes called our approximate number sense. […]

The thought behind it

The most recent issue of New Scientist has an article called Thoughts: The inside story. In it, philosopher Tim Bayne begins with a survey of all of the things we mean by the word ‘thought’ – the mental activity that accompanies perceptions, problem solving, the integration of various perceptions, the uncontrolled associative train of connected […]