Why an organism is not a “machine”
I just came across a nice article explaining why the metaphor of organism as machine is misleading and unhelpful. The machine conception of the organism in development and evolution: A…
“Conscious realism”: a new way to think about reality (or the lack thereof?)
Interesting interview in the Atlantic with cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman: The Case Against Reality "I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view.…
What’s the deal with “brainwaves”?
I was asked this question on Quora recently: Why does the brain have waves? The brain has neurons which approximately perform function evaluations on their inputs. How would this cause…
The “Streetlight Effect”: a metaphor for knowledge and ignorance
Here's the beginning of my latest 3QD piece: There is a story that I think anyone interested in human knowledge ought to know. It comes in many forms. Here is…
The Emotional Gatekeeper — a computational model of emotional attention
My paper is finally out in PLoS Computational Biology. It's an open access journal, so everyone can read it: The Emotional Gatekeeper: A Computational Model of Attentional Selection and Suppression…