Important breaking news from America’s finest news source, The Onion. Psychology Comes To Halt As Weary Researchers Say The Mind Cannot Possibly Study Itself ISSUE 50•30 • Jul 31, 2014 Psychologists caution that it is a grave folly to believe anything objective can be learned about the human mind given that the object of observation … Read more
Vince Horn speaks with neuroscientist David Vago in part one of this two-part Buddhist Geeks Podcast. Good stuff. BG 329: A Neuroscience of Enlightenment by David Vago Podcast: Download Episode Description: David Vago is a contemplative neuroscientist and Jake Davis is a philosopher and Buddhist practitioner. Together they have authored an article proposing the question … Read more
Quentin Ruyant posted this article on the possible relevance of quantum mechanics to a philosophy of mind and consciousness. While he seems convinced (as are many neuroscientists and philosophers) that QM is not scientifically relevant to a philosophy of mind, he allows that there may be some metaphysical reasons to examine a possible connection. Posted … Read more
It’s weird to see David Chalmers with short hair. For as long as I have been aware of him, he has had long hair that made him look like a member of Whitesnake’s reunion tour, not a world renowned philosopher. Be that as it may, in this TED Talk from TED2014, Chalmers talks about the … Read more
Is consciousness some ineffable force that can never be understood by science, or is it completely within our ability to one day understand and perhaps even replicate? Paller and Suzuki argue in a new paper that we need more and better research, but that an understanding of consciousness is fully within our reach. Unfortunately, the … Read more
From Nautilus, Kelly Clancy takes a look at the increasing evidence for chaos in the brain and nervous system. The nervous system is literally overwhelmed by incoming sensory data, so much so that much of it never makes it into consciousness. On the other hand, the brain stem and its adjacent structures, a collection of … Read more
This is a 10-part series from The Open University, featuring Professor Russell Stannard exploring the BIG questions – What is consciousness? What is free will? What caused the Big Bang? What is time? Each “episode” is relatively short, between 7 and 14 minutes, so these are bite size examinations of the big questions. The Boundaries … Read more
Thomas Roberts is the author of The Psychedelic Future of the Mind: How Entheogens Are Enhancing Cognition, Boosting Intelligence, and Raising Values (2013) and Psychedelic Horizons (2006), among other works. The paper below is posted at Academia.edu – it looks at re-visioning our understanding of consciousness from a singlestate model to a multistate model. As … Read more
A couple of weeks ago, on ABC’s Radio National (Australia), All in the Mind featured a discussion about new technologies in “building” a brain that is comparable to a human brain. Most of the research seems to be taking a bottom-up approach, building from neurons to networks to modules. I’m skeptical. Perhaps we build … Read more
This is last week’s episode of The Philosopher’s Zone podcast, with guest Daivd Papineau, professor at King’s College in London. Papineau has worked in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophies of science, mind, and mathematics. His overall stance is naturalist and realist. He is one of the originators of the teleosemantic theory of mental representation, a … Read more