Bodies, Technologies and Action Possibilities

Genetic technologies: scientific possibilities and ethical principles

Perception, Categories, and Possibilities for Action

Beer’s approach to addressing questions about embodiment, situatedness, and dynamics is to investigate an evolved model agent capable of exhibiting the most basic form of behavior that one might call “cognitive.” One “minimally cognitive behavior” performed by Beer’s agent is the discrimination between circles to catch and diamonds to avoid. Indeed, it is often assumed that the ability to perce...

Possibilities for global governance of converging technologies

The convergence of nanotechnology, modern biology, the digital revolution and cognitive sciences will bring about tremendous improvements in transformative tools, generate new products and services, enable opportunities to meet and enhance human potential and social achievements, and in time reshape societal relationships. This paper focuses on the progress made in governance of such converging...

Attending to the possibilities of action.

Actions taking place in the environment are critical for our survival. We review evidence on attention to action, drawing on sets of converging evidence from neuropsychological patients through to studies of the time course and neural locus of action-based cueing of attention in normal observers. We show that the presence of action relations between stimuli helps reduce visual extinction in pat...

Joint action: bodies and minds moving together.

The ability to coordinate our actions with those of others is crucial for our success as individuals and as a species. Progress in understanding the cognitive and neural processes involved in joint action has been slow and sparse, because cognitive neuroscientists have predominantly studied individual minds and brains in isolation. However, in recent years, major advances have been made by inve...