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Guest Post: Could Laboratory Created Brains in the Future have Moral Status?
In his blog, Pugh concludes that the Pong playing minibrains are not sentient. This is because in his view they do not possess phenomenal consciousness and thus are unable to experience pain or pleasure. To some the property of phenomenal…
Rational Powers in Action V: Instrumental Virtues
Although “virtue of practical judgment”™ is a technical term in the book, the corresponding vices are easily recognizable. The person who needs very specific and strict policies manifests the vice of inflexibility; these are the people who cannot carpe the…
The Computational Theory of Cognition: From Turing Machines to Neurocognitive Mechanisms
McCulloch and Pitts’s idea had enormous ramifications. It contributed to the origin of computational psychology (computational models of cognition), connectionism (artificial neural network models of cognition), contemporary computational neuroscience (models of neural computation), artificial intelligence, and more. The modern computational…
Cognitive Ontologies, Task Ontologies, and Explanation in Cognitive Neuroscience, by Dan Burnston
Databasing tools such as The Cognitive Atlas and Neurosynth collect and systematize results from fMRI studies. The databases collect activation results from across studies, and index them by the cognitive faculties they are supposed to measure. So, a given study…
Book Symposium: Declan Smithies’ The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (2)
Suppose that your belief “It is raining in Shanghai” is due to wishful thinking, and your total evidence is entirely neutral with respect to this matter. Given your evidence, it could either be true or false that it is raining…
Parliament Psychedelic
Evidence for psychedelic moral bioenhancement Clearly there is much more research to be done before we can draw any solid conclusions here, but if it turned out that psychedelics were effective and safe moral enhancers, what would follow from that?…