MetaFilter posts tagged with philosophy and cognition

Extending the Mind

homunculus — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:50:55 -0800

How Google Is Making Us Smarter: Humans are "natural-born cyborgs," and the Internet is our giant "extended mind."

Consider my opinion changed.

fantabulous timewaster — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:58:48 -0800

Dopamine

homunculus — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:30:25 -0800

A New State of Mind. "New research is linking dopamine to complex social phenomena and changing neuroscience in the process."

Chick Sexing

parudox — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:14:53 -0800

"Over and over he scoops up a chick with his left hand, expels its droppings with a squeeze of his thumb, opens its vent with his fingers, peers through the magnifying lenses attached to his spectacles and determines its sex." It's a dirty job (YT). Sexing chicks early is important so that the cockerels can be separated and culled^ or fed to be broilers^. The obvious differences take weeks to develop, so when the vent sexing method was developed in Japan in the 1920s, professional chicken sexers became sought after. After years of training, they can sex a thousand day-old chicks an hour with 99% accuracy. In many cases the sexer cannot say why he made a particular decision. The method is learned mostly empirically and is not open to introspection, which has made it of considerable interest to philosophers and cognitive scientists. Vent sexing is in decline, however, owing to development of feather sexing (i.e. using breeds with differences in feather length or color). Would you like to learn to sex chicks? There are plenty of resources, such as A Guide to Sexing Chicks (1935). Better yet, The Specialist Chick Sexer is a modern treatment (there is an extract and another poultry essay available). You can sex all fowl, actually. Cognitive scientists, philosophers, and psychologists all like chicken sexing. Biederman (of geon^ fame) and Shiffrar showed (PDF) that novices can be trained to decent accuracy with explicit perceptual clues. There's a discussion of chicken sexing in the defunct PSYCHE-B cognitive science listserv (more useful archive here). Scroll down to see it, particularly Bruce Mangan's post. (There was an earlier post, and the main link is good if you can get access.)

Philosophy Lectures

Wolfdog — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 15:07:25 -0800

Online videos of philosophical lectures. Chomsky, Pinker, Dennet, Hofstadter, Searle, the Churchlands...

I am John's brain.

cohappy — Mon, 23 Jun 2003 23:14:47 -0800

I am John's brain. Amusingly written, yet astutely raising an important point. What exactly are we to do about consciousness? Although clearly different theories a b o u n d, one must still ponder whether or not the problem is even solvable in the first place. Where then can we turn to for our solution? Why, bicamerality, of course.