Walter Freeman’s Merleau-Pontian Neurodynamics

See Hubert’s Dreyfus conference at : Internet Archive – Movies

Our experience of the everyday world is given as already organized in terms of significance and relevance. Yet, all that the organism can receive is meaningless physical energy. How can such senseless physical stimulation be experienced directly as significant and acted upon? To suggest an answer to this basic question I will draw on Walter Freeman’s model of rabbit learning and of acting which resembles Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception and action.
To bring out the structural similarities and differences, I will consider two examples, one of convergence (Freeman’s account of learning new attractors and Merleau-Ponty’s description of what he calls the intentional arc), and one of possible divergence concerning the role of expectation in the perception/action loop. The question then will be: How does Freeman’s account of pre-reference relate to Merleau-Ponty’s account of maximum grip?

Emboddied intelligence – maybe cognition is not so much related to inference

This is something that Michael Polanyi would have loved to hear (think of his example with the blind man’s cane) :

“Don’t take that hammer for granted. Using tools may seem like second nature, but only a few animals can master the coordination and mental sophistication required. So how did primates learn to use tools in the first place? A new study in monkeys suggests that the brain’s trick is to treat tools as just another body part.” (see here)

Century of the Self

To many in both politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests? (taken from BBC 4 Documentaries – series description)

Episode One: Happiness Machines (details)

Episode Two: The Engineering of Consent (details)

Episode Three: There is a Policeman Inside All Our Head: He Must Be Destroyed (details)

Episode Four: Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering (details)

Pandora’s Box – by Adam Curtis

Pandora’s Box – Ep 1 – The Engineer’s Plot

Pandora’s Box – Ep 2 – To The Brink of Eternity

Pandora’s Box – Ep 3 – The League of Gentlemen

Pandora’s Box – Ep 4 – Goodbye Mrs Ant

Pandora’s Box – Ep 5 – Black Power

Ghost in the shell – 1,2, the series and Solid State Society

Last week I watched :

• Ghost in the Shell
• Ghost in the Shell 2 – Innocence
• Ghost in the Shell – Man/Machine Interface – the series
• Ghost in the Shell – Solid State Society

Ghost in the Shell is a extraordinary collection of movies that illustrate different philosophical problems like :

• personal identity :
  • what makes you a person – is it the body, you memories or your inner ghost (something like a cartesian soul)?
  • The memory approach is streched to the limit : i can download/upload/change/erase someones memories (the ghost hack scenario). Is he the same person or not?
  • The body approach has the same problems. Body duplication creates person duplication?

• philosophy of mind :
  • are we mind and body (do you have a ghost inside you?) or is there nothing more than a complex body?
  • We have people who keep a part of their biological brains but everything else inside them is replaced by cybernetic parts (some of them have replaced even their brain with a cyber-brain). They have a ghost in them. But what about the evolving AI’s (like the Project 2501) and the ones that help Section 9 in combat? Can a sufficient complex AI acquire a ghost, as the 2501 pretends?

For a more detailed philosophical discussion of the whole series see Wikipedia – Ghost in the Shell (philosophy).

Besides that, the animation and music is just brilliant. For anyone who didn’t watched … it’s a must see.