Posted by: balthusbemusedbycolor on: April 26, 2009
Francis Bacon’s doctrine of the idols remains one of the most concise analyses of the cognitive biases that impede our understanding of nature and lead to a breakdown of inductive inference. Idols of the Tribe: cognitive biases that are inherent in human nature — “the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays [...]
Posted by: balthusbemusedbycolor on: April 25, 2009
If you are interested in studying how the human brain processes information in vivo, neuro-electric oscillations provide one of the richest data mines. A key point is that the capacity to characterize cognitive processing in time is more important than localizing it in space and the cost in spatial resolution incurred by electroencephalographic (EEG) methods [...]
Posted by: balthusbemusedbycolor on: April 21, 2009
In 1947, Vladimir Nabokov wrote to his friend, the famous American literary critic, Edmund Wilson, that he was working on ‘a new type of autobiography–a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back all the tangled threads of one’s personality…’ Vladimir’s autobiography, finally published in 1966 under the title “Speak, Memory” is a literary masterpiece that [...]
Posted by: balthusbemusedbycolor on: April 21, 2009
The central error of Western thought, according to the British political philosopher John Gray, is a belief in the possibility of progress emerging through history. This is the main thesis that Gray develops in “Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals” (his attack on all forms of humanism) and more recently (and from a [...]
Posted by: balthusbemusedbycolor on: April 21, 2009
One way to winnow down the variety of different approaches to the study of consciousness is to organize them according to how they relate to the ‘hard problem’. The hard problem, fortunately for us, can be stated rather succinctly: how do the physico-chemical processes in the brain give rise to subjectively experienced mental states? For [...]
