Sublime

Darwin’s “strange inversion of reasoning” and Turing’s equally revolutionary inversion were aspects of a single discovery: competence without comprehension. Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless c

Emergentists, in contrast, believe that complex, dynamic systems cannot always be explained in terms of their constituent parts. It’s not simply a matter of peering into the brain with MRIs and discovering a particular area or system that is responsible for consciousness. The mind is instead a kind of structural pattern that emerges from the comple

Finally, there are the Gregorian creatures, named in honor of Richard Gregory, the psychologist who emphasized the role of thinking tools in providing thinkers with what he called “potential intelligence.” The Gregorian creature’s Umwelt is well stocked with thinking tools, both abstract and concrete: arithmetic and democracy and double-blind studi

Symétrie

we typically use the imagery of relatively concrete domains of experience to form intuitions about more abstract domains, especially in the social, political, and ecological realms.

Mark’s field of time is harder to survey; because, since he is, at root, still an infant, his future is not yet something that cannot change. He believes there’s some simple, radical difference about him. He hopes it’s genius, fears it’s madness. Magda knows it’s neither. She knows that in truth Mark is just a radically simple person, wildly noncom

Albert Einstein possédait un énorme gyrus angulaire

Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2012), Damasio shows how images, both abstract and concrete, are “the main currency of our minds.”14 In this, he associates images and minded awareness. Mind is more than the ability to think in words; it is also the ability to imagine and create images of all kinds in tandem with bodily knowled