Brain Hammerings 05/26/2011

• Impossible colors - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  tags: other colors

• Imaginary color - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Impossible color

  tags: other colors

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

photo: malware

photo by Pete Mandik

Useful Obviously False Beliefs

"You've got to believe!" That's the advice professional magician Mark Mitton gave at his recent talk in the CUNY Cognitive Science Symposium. Here's the idea: in order for an illusion to be believable to the audience, the magician has to believe it too. This is, of course, puzzling for all of the sorts of reasons familiar to philosophers debating doxastic voluntarism and self-deception. How do you make yourself believe something that you know you don't?

I've been thinking about something similar to self-deception since Mark's remark. There's a kind of advice given in all sorts of areas of human performance, music and sports to name two, that involves believing (or pretending?) something obviously absurd but is efficacious nonetheless. Here's a quick list:

• Vocal coaches tell their singers stuff like "breath out of your back" or "quit singing out of the top of your head." Or so I hear.
• In martial arts, if you are going to punch someone really hard in the solar plexus, it helps to aim for their back, as if your fist can just bore right through.
• In ball sports (you know, sports with balls?) there's this stuff about "following through" which I guess is something like throwing the ball after it's already been thrown. I dunno, I hate sports.
• Acting? Maybe this is like the magic thing? I dunno, I'm not an actor (but I've played one on TV).

Anyway, hammer-heads are hereby invited to multiply examples and submit pointers to work done in the relevant areas. That would be awesome. You'd better believe it!

Re Portugal

I'm back in NYC from a week of sun, beer, neuroscience, qualia, and zen in lovely Lisboa at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown.

Zach Mainen, director of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme, ran a week-long course on consciousness and first-person methodology for the 2010 class of students in the International Neuroscience Doctoral Programme (with assistance from 2008 student Scott Rennie). Brian Keeley (who knows Zach from like a million years ago when they were together at University of California, San Diego) and I were brought on board to hang out in general as well as provide neurophilosophical overviews of consciousness, free will, and personal identity.



Each morning, the class kicked off with a half-hour of meditation led by monks from a local zen dojo. Then we set off to do things like coach opposing teams of students in constructing arguments about whether the self was something that could survive teleportation.

Thursday afternoon I presented "Does the neuroscience of consciousness need to care about qualia?" in the Neuroscience Seminar Series (abstract and answer here). It was fun to see so many neuroscientists get passionate about qualia!



Saturday afternoon, Brian and I took a teleporter to Cascais, where someone accidentally hit the "receive" button too many times.





(Photos from my flickr set, Lisbon 2011: Neuroscience Programme at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown)

Pete to Portugal

This looks pretty cool.

Next week, my good buddy Brian Keeley and I are heading to Lisbon to help run a week-long course on consciousness for the Neuroscience Programme at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown. While there, I'll also be giving a talk, "Does the neuroscience of consciousness need to care about qualia?" More news, plus the answer to that titular question, when I get back to NYC later in May.

Brain Hammerings 04/27/2011

• Lemmings: Color Workshop and Conference

  "The deadline for early career participants in our deviant color workshop and conference in Vancouver in August has been extended. Go ahead and apply."
  
  I hope the phrase "deviant color" catches on.

  tags: other colors

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Dennett's Kinds of Things—Towards a Bestiary of the Manifest Image

Kinds of Things—Towards a Bestiary of the Manifest Image

Daniel C. Dennett final draft for SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY AND METAPHYSICS. Edited by Don Ross, James Ladyman & Harold Kincaid. Oxford U.P. March 25, 2011

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/kindsofthingsfin.pdf

The main goal in the rest of this paper is simply to draw attention to the riotous assembly of candidate things that we find in the manifest image. Wilfrid Sellars (1963) “discovered” the manifest image much the way Columbus discovered the western hemisphere, but he, like Columbus, was more the explorer than the systematic cartographer, and, as just noted, our Mercator has yet to appear. But what about a Linnaeus, a systematic taxonomist of all the things we find in this new, if all too familiar, world? Ontology, it seems to me, has been resolutely reductive and minimalist in its attempts to come up with an exhaustive list of kingdoms, classes, genera and species of things. No doubt the motivation has been the right one: to prepare the disheveled cornucopia for scientific accounting, with everything put ultimately in terms of atoms and the void, space-time points, or (by somewhat different reductive trajectories) substances and universals, events and properties and relations, As is well known, these procrustean beds provide metaphysicians with no end of difficult challenges, trying to fit all the candidates into one austere collection of pigeonholes or another. Where do we put numbers, or melodies, or ideas, for instance? Do numbers even exist, and are there different kinds of existence? Instead of attempting any answers of my own to these oft-asked questions of systematic taxonomy, I am going to push, informally, in the opposite direction, like the bestiarists of yore, recounting with as much ontological tolerance as I can, a few of the neglected candidates for thinghood that everyday folks have no trouble countenancing in their casual ontologies. Metaphysics as folklore studies, you might say.

My review of Cave's Do Llamas Fall in Love?

The THE

My review of Peter Cave's Do Llamas Fall In Love? 33 Perplexing Philosophy Puzzles is out now in the latest Times Higher Education [link to electronic version].

Excerpt:

Do Llamas Fall in Love? has almost nothing to do with llamas, but plenty to do with love, especially that love of wisdom that is philosophy. This smart and funny jaunt through philosophy's core issues serves as a fine introduction for the phi-curious and the wonderers about wisdom who may have had no prior exposure to philosophy. It is also a delightful read for those who may already have a bunch of philosophy under their belts.

The highly abstract nature of philosophy often leads to dry and inaccessible expositions. Attempts to overcome this problem often result in dumbing-downs that are effectively useless in accurately conveying what's really going on in the field. Peter Cave masterfully balances the need to inform and the need to entertain.

The 33 "perplexing puzzles" that he discusses in 33 short chapters manage to cover many, if not most, of philosophy's key topics: ethics, rights, knowledge, mind, rationality, aesthetics, logic, law, politics, metaphysics, language and religion. The chapter titles are quirky and intriguing, enticing one to keep on reading to find out what could possibly be intended. Here are a few: "A goat with gaps"; "Time for zoological investigations - from the bedroom"; "Creamy philosophers: who knows who knows..."; and "Preferences: avoiding the money pump".

[...]

So, what's the deal with the llamas? As explained in the chapter "Addicted to love", many non-human animals form monogamous pair bonds. In their outward behaviour at least, they resemble people who are deeply in love. And there are certain biochemical similarities between the nervous systems of humans in love and these animals. But are such similarities sufficient to ascribe similar mental states to humans and non-humans? And if such similarities don't suffice to justify treating animals as psychologically similar to humans, what similarities would suffice?

Third Online Consciousness Conference: The Papers

Richard Brown says:

The Online Consciousness Conference begins in one week on Friday February 18th and will last until Friday March 4th. The papers for this year's conference are now available here: http://consciousnessonline.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/co3-papers/

Please help me in spreading the word by forwarding this to any interested parties. Thanks! 

Richard Brown, Conference Organizer

NOVA | How Does the Brain Work?

Just watched this last night. It was pretty darn entertaining.

NOVA | How Does the Brain Work?