With “Perceptual decision making: drift-diffusion model is equivalent to a Bayesian model” (2014) Blitzer et al. have taken the Bayesian approach to the problems that exist when we approach the world as a percepting decision maker. Their target of attack with this paper is the drift-diffusion model of perception, or...
I’ve been hearing talk that another election would cost us €40 million euros, everyone is saying it. It came from Noonan so it must be true (leaving aside that he is not the expenditure minister) and that the caretaker government of the moment were perfectly capable and comfortable enough to...
In this piece I use Gelman and Shalizi’s (subsequently GS) “Philosophy and the practice of Bayesian statistics” (2012) to look at the difficulties involved in the interpretation of statistics, what it means for the falsity and falsification of statistical models. I develop upon the consequences of the authors insight regarding...
Honneth (1995) constructs a constrained model of autonomy, based upon strong claims regarding linguistic determinism and also the nature of the unconscious. His claims about the unconscious are presented as empirical facts. Research which precedes Honneth’s “Decentered Autonomy” held that these were not uncontested facts. Should Honneth’s claims regarding the...
The circumstances under which neuroplasticity may occur and its impact on cognitive functioning. It was Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s great intuition to notice that the spines that appeared to be upon the neurons of cortical matter were not merely artefacts of the staining method but structural features of the neurons...
Politics is a particularly contested domain when it comes to our processes of cognition. Political opinions can define our personalities, our social status, our familial relations, our employment, and sometimes our freedom. Those from the political science domain have gotten as far as agreeing that we do not act in...
Implicit bias is a phenomenon which is problematic in terms of what it means to be rational self-aware beings, and also with how we look at ourselves as individuals. It is relatively trivial to spot the biases of others, that your mother always decides to walk another block if the...
Each of the papers which I have decided to examine for this exercise consider the domain of social learning: “Social Learning in Complex Networks: The Role of Building Blocks and Environmental Change” by Barkoczi & Galesic presented at CogSci 2013: 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society “Understanding social...
Generally speaking the DLPFC is believed to be involved in tasks which require working memory, strategizing, planning, social cognition, and also deception. The DLPFC is involved in a wide range of higher order cognitive processes, it has been found to be involved in generalised intelligence (Barbey, Colom and Grafman 2012),...
Carruthers in his “The evolution of consciousness” (2000) attempts to produce a “successful explanatory account of p-consciousness” (p256) through Higher Order Relations (HORs) in order to bolster the case against mysterianism. Relying on other works to form the negative argument against mysterianism, Carruthers presents his dispositionalist HOT argument as an...