After providing all the funding for The Brain from Top to Bottom for over 10 years, the CIHR Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction informed us that because of budget cuts, they were going to be forced to stop sponsoring us as of March 31st, 2013.

We have approached a number of organizations, all of which have recognized the value of our work. But we have not managed to find the funding we need. We must therefore ask our readers for donations so that we can continue updating and adding new content to The Brain from Top to Bottom web site and blog.

Please, rest assured that we are doing our utmost to continue our mission of providing the general public with the best possible information about the brain and neuroscience in the original spirit of the Internet: the desire to share information free of charge and with no adverstising.

Whether your support is moral, financial, or both, thank you from the bottom of our hearts!

Bruno Dubuc, Patrick Robert, Denis Paquet, and Al Daigen




Wednesday, 24 July 2024
How Andy Clark’s career path mirrors that of cognitive science over the past 40 years

This week I’m just going to copy and paste a paragraph from a chapter of my book ( to be released in French on October 1, 2024 ) in which I describe the career of Andy Clark, an important philosopher of cognitive science, and draw your particular attention to his latest book, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, which he discusses in this stimulating interview.

I will start by just briefly describing the career of Andy Clark, a philosopher of cognitive science whom I like a lot, and his encounter with Karl Friston. Because Clark’s career path, all on its own, sums up the major trends in cognitive science over the past 40 years that I talked to you about at our first meeting. First, in keep with the cognitivist paradigm that prevailed at the time, he studied symbolic artificial intelligence, also known as computationalism. Then he became interested in connectionism— in virtual neural networks, thus more closely approximating the human brain, which can learn by modifying its internal connections. After that, he jumped aboard the train of embodied cognition, thus including the entire body in the equation of our cognitive processes, and even the objects in our environment (the concept of extended cognition, of which is he one of the most ardent proponents). And lastly, he made important contributions to the Karl Friston’s bold ideas about predictive processing, the principle of free energy and active inference—in short,all of the concepts whose broad implications I will now discuss.

 

From the Simple to the Complex, From Thought to Language | Comments Closed