my mind on books

Cognitive Computing 2007 was a two-day event held earlier this month in Berkeley, sponsored by CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society). The event was billed as “a multi-disciplinary synthesis of neuroscience, computer science, mathematics, cognitive neuroscience, and information theory.” “Engineering the mind by reverse engineering the brain” is one slogan for the theme. One of the speakers was Roger Shepard, Professor Emeritus from Stanford, whose presentation was entitled “Principles of cognition as adaptations to the world.”

Videos are available here.

Celebrities in Cognitive Science from Martin Ryder at University of Colorado at Denver is a great list with lots of links, some overlap with the Conversations on Consciousness crowd I posted on recently. The cognitive science list starts with Charles Babbage and ends with Ludwig Wittgenstein, with names in between such as Douglas Hofstadter, George Lakoff, and Hilary Putnam.

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has made his book ‘God’s Debris’ available as a free ebook. The link to download is available here: http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/godsdebris/

“Synopsis

Imagine that you meet a very old man who—you eventually realize—knows literally everything. Imagine that he explains for you the great mysteries of life—quantum physics, evolution, God, gravity, light, psychic phenomenon, and probability—in a way so simple, so novel, and so compelling that it all fits together and makes perfect sense. What does it feel like to suddenly understand everything? God’s Debris isn’t the final answer to the Big Questions. But it might be the most compelling vision of reality you will ever read. The thought experiment is this: Try to figure out what’s wrong with the old man’s explanation of reality. Share the book with your smart friends then discuss it later while enjoying a beverage.”

Some key figures in consciousness studies:

based on the book Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore – not a comprehensive list, but a good starting point.

Susan Blackmore – homepage

Bernard Baars – http://vesicle.nsi.edu/users/baars/
includes link to ebook “A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness”
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/GWorkspace.html

Ned Block – http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/

David Chalmers – http://consc.net/chalmers/

Patricia and Paul Churchland – http://philosophy.ucsd.edu/EPL/Pat.html

Francis Crick – http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/crick-koch-cc-97.html

Daniel Dennett – http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettd.htm

Susan Greenfield – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Greenfield

Richard Gregory – http://www.richardgregory.org/

Stuart Hameroff – http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/

Christof Koch – http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/

Stephen LaBerge – http://www.lucidity.com/ (The Lucidity Institute)

Thomas Metzinger – http://www.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/metzinger/

Kevin O’Regan – http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/

Roger Penrose – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose

V.S. Ramachandran – http://psy.ucsd.edu/chip/ramabio.html

John Searle – http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jsearle/

Petra Stoerig – http://cajal.unizar.es/eng/part/Stoerig.html

Francisco Varela – http://www.enolagaia.com/Varela.html

Max Velmans – http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/departments/psychology/staff/velpub.html

Daniel Wegner – http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/%7Ewegner/Home.html

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n10/fodo01_.html

“Strawson has the kind of expansive metaphysical imagination that used to be at the heart of philosophy, but which positivism and analysis succeeded for a long while in suppressing.”

The book reviewed is Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?

Galen Strawson’s homepage includes a link to the 2006 article ‘Realistic monism: why physicalism entails panpsychism’ (a 29-page pdf ).