"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." -Ludwig Wittgenstein

Patricia S. Churchland and Terrence Sejnowski The Computational Brain A nice collaboration between a philosopher and a neuroscientist.

Paul Churchland The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul A nice introduction to neural network models as used in some types of AI research. See links in the AI books section.

Ned Block, an editor of and contributor to: The Nature of Consciousness : Philosophical Debates
Some comments provoked by Ned Block's article On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness

Owen Flanagan author of The Science of Mind, also an editor of and contributor to the above mentioned collection on consciousness with Dr. Block.
A nice historical tour of mind/brain from Descarte to James to Freud to Skinner to Piaget cognitive science and AI to E. O. Wilson and sociobilogy to modern attempts to deal with consciousness by people like Edelman. My comments.

Daniel C. Dennett.
Consciousness Explained. A real service to the world of philosophy from a philosopher who can follow the modern sciences of cognition and explain the implications to other philosophers. Some elegant analogies such as "The Joycean Machine" description of how the brain filters the conscious from a wealth of unconscious brain activity. Review by Danny Yee. Also, Dennett has a great book on Free Will called Elbow Room....."What is philosophy for? It is for enlarging our vision of the possible, for breaking bad habits of thought."
Go here for comments on two more Dennett books, Kinds of Minds and Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

Georges Rey
Contemporary Philosophy of Mind. Rey provides a journey through some popular approaches to Philosophy of Mind: Dualism, Behaviorism, Eliminativism, Functionalism. Can Philosophers of Mind define a Mind Algorithm which is general enough to encompass impamentations in biological and robotic brains? Can such a research program also serve to unify the Philosophy of Mind, Artificial Intelligence Research, Biological studies of brain, and Folk Psychology? My View.

Go here for some comments on Wittgenstein, such as a a discussion of how similar his ideas on sensations were to Edelman's views on qualia. More thoughts stimulated by Wittgenstein.

A psychologist's approach to mind (my comments) that ends up very close to Gerald Edelman's thinking: Representational Content in Humans and Machines by Mark H. Bickhard

some philosophical discussions

Return to the main index of book topics.

Join a discussion of books and enter your own comments about these or other books.

Discussion group for Philosophy and Science of Language.

Philosophy by sartre [ Join Now | Ring Hub | Random | << Prev | Next >> ]