philosophy
-
The Mysterious Power of Naming in Human Cognition
Taoism, boundaries, infinity, and computational daemons
Of all the fairy tales I encountered as a child, Rumpelstiltskin always struck me as the most peculiar. The story revolves around a girl who must spin straw into gold or face death at the hands of the king. A dwarf appears out of nowhere, and spins the straw into gold — for a price.…
-
Soup Vs Dumplings: a Metaphysical Meal
Or, what an absurd game can teach us about the shape(s) of thought
Some years ago, a friend of mine introduced our hivemind to a sort of word game or thought experiment. It works thusly: Every food item is either soup or dumpling. There are no other options. You are not allowed to say “neither” or introduce new categories. So each ‘player’ works through various examples of food…
-
‘Representing’ means exactly what you think it means
The continued defense of a much-maligned placeholder
I. The evocative intermediary In the previous post, I offered a potted history of the debate surrounding neural and/or mental representations, and tried to expand the scope of the typical genealogical narratives, which tend to begin in the post-WWII era, at the birth of cognitive science. I also argued that representations are usually placeholders, especially…
-
Intrinsic Incompleteness: Deacon on ‘ententional’ processes
This is the first in a planned series of posts on Terrence Deacon’s book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. I’m calling it the Deactionary, since Deacon is fond of coining new terms and redefining old ones. Deacon outlines an ambitious goal: understanding the emergence of consciousness from insensate matter. Of course, not everyone…