Simon Bowes

@moonbeeaam Douglas Adams, probably.

i wonder which fiction writers are cited the most by philosophers

Michael Silberstein @MichaelSilbers2 at @SussexCOGS - arguing for neutral monism, enactivism, and contextual emergence as the way forward for a (new) science of consciousness (talk list here, including a previous one by @drmichaellevin: sussex.ac.uk/cogs/seminars)

@PaulleyTicks Beautiful

BREAKING: Antifa members broke into the Detroit Economic Club's AV room and changed the intro song for Donald Trump's speech, earlier this evening.

@_fernando_rosas Maybe it's that people are used to talking about laws of motion as if they are real, whereas actually they are also abstract principles that systems act as if they are being governed by. So it's not that people should start talking about minimisation of action as real, but...

One thing I really don’t understand is why equations of motions are usually taken as the real deal of what is going on, while the minimisation of action is taken as a mere “as if”

@GalleseVittorio Isn't this a version of the dark room problem? I think they've dealt with that - we're built to expect the unexpected (if we only expected the expected, we wouldn't survive long, or create much, which is itself key to our ability to adapt to diverse environments).

"PP, which, on a neuroscientific view, conceives of the mind as set up to avoid surprise, will not be able to explain improvisation if it remains true to its own principles." journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/27…

@WiringTheBrain Because the past has been, and the future is yet to be?

The laws of physics are either time reversible, or, at best, explain why time has a *direction*. But along that timeline what distinguishes *the present* as the time we all experience? The time we actually *live in*?

Why is it always now?

@DrTomFroese @NorthoffL Is this the same as when Descartes distinguished mind from matter by saying the latter has extension? An entity that exists, in that it makes a difference in the world, can be an extended dynamic pattern of relations not located in the same way it's parts are.

What I appreciated most about @NorthoffL’s The Spontaneous Brain is its insistence that science benefits from ontological distinctions when addressing the mind-body problem. Key upshot: the neural traces of mind making a difference in the world must be dimensionless quantities.

@philipcball I think there was a step after the demise of vitalism, namely the failure of British Emergentism to explain the appearance of ontological novelty. There is still resistance to emergence, because it denies physicalist reductionism, which some see as allowing mysterious forces back

@PessoaBrain @WiringTheBrain But for meaningful discussions about non-basic entities, we can start with our vague understanding of the structure of the and refine it iteratively as we go. No need to insist on having a clear definition as price of entry to discussion.

@PessoaBrain @WiringTheBrain That said, I'd also say that the requirement of having a definition on pain of being accused of not knowing what we are talking about is not always legitimate. Dictionaries have lexical definitions for all words, and physical sciences have formal definitions for basic entities...

"How would you define mind?" Love open-ended discussions with neuroscientists of all types but last week late after dinner in front of a group of scientists and philosophers @WiringTheBrain lands this one out of nowhere: "We were wondering how you would define "mind"? I froze😯

@philipcball but now I think it's more about treating organisms as things to which mechanistic causal explanations are valid of, as we move away from reductive, micro-physical explanations being considered the only proper kind.

@philipcball I don't think it is a metaphor anymore. Treating organisms as things that could be reverse engineered by human-style design (decomposition into individual parts with defined functions) is not feasbible, although as an anti-vitalistic movement was necessary...

@DoctorSpurt Sprinkle it on salad.

John Oliver, "The Conservatives have had 5 different prime ministers over the past 14 years.. It's worth briefly revisiting all of them" 1⃣"David Cameron.. Austerity.. Brexit" 2⃣"Theresa May.. More austerity, two child cap" 3⃣"Boris Johnson.. His time in office was a shambles.. Britain left the EU on the same day of the first case of the corona virus was announced.. His handling of covid was an unmitigated disaster" "For the record there is only one actual f*ckpig in Downing Street.. David Cameron.. As a student at Oxford he once put his d*ck in a dead pig's mouth" 4⃣"Liz Truss who had the shortest tenure of any British prime minister in history.. Her budget full of tax cuts for the rich which caused a mini economic crisis" 5⃣"Sunak the wet.. A man who literally does not have the sense to get in from the rain" "Brexit created red tape that has grown exponentially.. Trading goods with the EU is now so onerous that many businesses have chosen to relocate into mainland Europe which is not good news for the UK" "Brexit is estimated to be costing the economy about £100 billion a year" "While Brexit makes the news, austerity is the legacy of Cameron and his successors because it has in so many ways obliterated public services" "Take the NHS, years of under investment have left it gutted and understaffed.. Wait lists for NHS treatment have exploded.. More than 7.5 million waiting for non emergency treatment, that's over 2.5 million when the Conservatives came in in 2010"

Wonderful

Always clueless. Suella Braverman "I don't know what that was all about." Finally realises 30 seconds later. "It was a spoof, that's going to go viral now." Make it viral.

@_fernando_rosas I've got a title for you - Moving forward in strange circles

@simon_c_bowes Thanks Simon, that is a great question! One I feel I should answer in a dedicated paper tho

Verbatim statement from a grant review: “This field of complexity, emergence etc has existed for a long time and so far failed to make obvious and key explanatory contributions to neuroscience” Do you agree?

Today (4/6) at 4pm UK time, @SussexCOGS seminar: Jesse Prinz on Epistemic Emotions. On campus: Pevensey 1 A6 Online: Zoom ID: 933 2605 6070, Passcode: 308004