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Category: Mind

Relying on AI could reshape your entire identity without you realizing

Relying on AI could reshape your entire identity without you realizing

Muriel Leuenberger writes: Your phone and its apps know a lot about you. Who you are talking to and spending time with, where you go, what music, games, and movies you like, how you look, which news articles you read, who you find attractive, what you buy with your credit card, and how many steps you take. This information is already being exploited to sell us products, services, or politicians. Online traces allow companies like Google or Facebook to infer…

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Linguistic relativity holds that your worldview is structured by the language you speak. Is it true?

Linguistic relativity holds that your worldview is structured by the language you speak. Is it true?

James McElvenny writes: Anyone who has learned a second language will have made an exhilarating (and yet somehow unsettling) discovery: there is never a one-to-one correspondence in meaning between the words and phrases of one language and another. Even the most banal expressions have a slightly different sense, issuing from a network of attitudes and ideas unique to each language. Switching between languages, we may feel as if we are stepping from one world into another. Each language seemingly compels…

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Why the mind is more than a machine

Why the mind is more than a machine

Bobby Azarian writes: Before Kurt Gödel, logicians and mathematicians believed that all statements about numbers — and reality more generally — were either true or false, and that there must be a rule-based way of determining which category a specific statement belonged to. According to this logic, mathematical proof is the true source of knowledge. The Pythagorean theorem, for example, is a mathematical conjecture that is true: It has been proved formally, and in more ways than one. With many…

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The way music moves us shows that the mind isn’t just a machine

The way music moves us shows that the mind isn’t just a machine

Jenny Judge writes: The 55 Bar in Greenwich Village, with its bulging ceiling tiles and strings of fairy lights taped haphazardly to the walls, looks more like the clubhouse of a rural Irish sports team than a New York City jazz venue. Yet some of the musical experiences I’ve had in that dingy basement have bordered on the otherworldly. When I’m pinned to the back of my seat by the mind-warping rhythms of a drummer, or the harmonic ingenuity of…

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Lessons my terminal cancer has taught me about the mind

Lessons my terminal cancer has taught me about the mind

David J. Linden writes: When a routine echocardiogram revealed a large mass next to my heart, the radiologist thought it might be a hiatal hernia—a portion of my stomach poking up through my diaphragm to press against the sac containing my heart. “Chug this can of Diet Dr. Pepper and then hop up on the table for another echocardiogram before the soda bubbles in your stomach all pop.” So I did. However, the resulting images showed that the mass did…

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I think, therefore I make mistakes and change my mind

I think, therefore I make mistakes and change my mind

Daniel Ward writes: Suppose that error could be abolished. What would someone who never makes a mistake be like? There are two very different responses to this question. One is to think of a superhuman, god-like being. The poet Alexander Pope’s line – ‘To err is human; to forgive, divine’ – is based on that thought. God might pardon but He cannot Himself make mistakes. Infallibility would seem to go hand in hand with omniscience and infinite wisdom. The other…

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The illusion of reason

The illusion of reason

Robert A Burton writes: In wondering what can be done to steer civilization away from the abyss, I confess to being increasingly puzzled by the central enigma of contemporary cognitive psychology: To what degree are we consciously capable of changing our minds? I don’t mean changing our minds as to who is the best NFL quarterback, but changing our convictions about major personal and social issues that should unite but invariably divide us. As a senior neurologist whose career began…

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Feminists never bought the idea of the computational mind set free from its body. Cognitive science is finally catching up

Feminists never bought the idea of the computational mind set free from its body. Cognitive science is finally catching up

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Sally Davies writes: We are shackled to the pangs and shocks of life, wrote Virginia Woolf in The Waves (1931), ‘as bodies to wild horses’. Or are we? Serge Faguet, a Russian-born tech entrepreneur and self-declared ‘extreme biohacker’, believes otherwise. He wants to tame the bucking steed of his own biochemistry via an elixir of drugs, implants, medical monitoring and behavioural ‘hacks’ that optimise his own biochemistry. In his personal quest to become one of the ‘immortal posthuman gods that…

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If reason exists without deliberation, it cannot be uniquely human

If reason exists without deliberation, it cannot be uniquely human

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By Justin E H Smith Philosophers and cognitive scientists today generally comprehend the domain of reason as a certain power of making inferences, confined to the thoughts and actions of human beings alone. Like echolocation in bats or photosynthesis in plants, reason is an evolved power, but unlike these, the prevailing theory goes, it emerged exactly once in the history of evolution (porpoises and shrews also echolocate, cyanobacteria photosynthesise). Reason is exceedingly rare, a hapax legomenon of nature, and yet this…

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Theory of predictive brain as important as evolution — an interview with Lars Muckli

Theory of predictive brain as important as evolution — an interview with Lars Muckli

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Our brains make sense of the world by predicting what we will see and then updating these predictions as the situation demands, according to Lars Muckli, professor of neuroscience at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Glasgow, Scotland. He says that this predictive processing framework theory is as important to brain science as evolution is to biology. Horizon magazine: You have used advanced brain imaging techniques to come up with a model of how the brain processes vision – and…

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Nabokov’s experiments with time

Nabokov’s experiments with time

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Michael Wood writes: Language has many forms of quiet kindness, refusals of stark alternatives. “Never” can mean “not always,” and “impossible” may mean “not now.” Insomnia may mean a shortage of sleep rather than its entire absence, and when Gennady Barabtarlo writes that “Nabokov typically remembered having his dreams at dawn, right before awakening after a sleepless night,” or indeed calls his own book Insomniac Dreams, we are looking not so much at a paradox as a touch of logical…

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We develop the capacity to reason before we can speak

We develop the capacity to reason before we can speak

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The Verge reports: One-year-old babies may not be able to speak, but they are able to think logically, according to new research that shows the earliest known foundation of our ability to reason. Legendary psychologist Jean Piaget believed that we didn’t have logical reasoning abilities until we were seven, but scientists scanned the eyes of 48 babies and found that they’re able to reason through the process of elimination. The research was published today in the journal Science. The type…

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Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?

Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?

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Frans de Waal asks: are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? Just as attitudes of superiority within segments of human culture are often expressions of ignorance, humans collectively — especially when subject to the dislocating effects of technological dependence — tend to underestimate the levels of awareness and cognitive skills of creatures who live mostly outside our sight. This tendency translates into presuppositions that need to be challenged by what de Waal calls his “cognitive ripple rule”:…

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Plants, people, and decision-making

Plants, people, and decision-making

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Laura Ruggles writes: Plants are not simply organic, passive automata. We now know that they can sense and integrate information about dozens of different environmental variables, and that they use this knowledge to guide flexible, adaptive behaviour. For example, plants can recognise whether nearby plants are kin or unrelated, and adjust their foraging strategies accordingly. The flower Impatiens pallida, also known as pale jewelweed, is one of several species that tends to devote a greater share of resources to growing…

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