How Ordinary Cognition Informs Petitionary Prayer

Losing our brainless minds: how neuroimaging informs cognition.

How G. Bateson informs dogs

Purpose – To show how Bateson’s difference which makes a difference can be interpreted from a cybernetic view, i.e. in terms of control theory. Design/methodology/approach – Depending on the observer’s choice of the system boundaries, communication or structural coupling may be recognized. With the help of Bateson’s example he uses to explain his term of information the paper demonstrates how t...

How mirror-touch informs theories of synesthesia.

Ward and Banissy provide an excellent overview of the state of mirror-touch research in order to advance this field. They present a comparison of two prominent theoretical approaches for understanding mirror-touch phenomena. According to the threshold theory, the phenomena arise as a result of a hyperactive mirror neuron system. According to the Self-Other Theory, they are due to disturbances i...

Philosophy plugged : How robotics informs ethics ∗

Designers of artificial moral agents (AMA’s) or ethical (ro-)bots will be informed by this book. However, it will also challenge moral philosophers and anyone involved in teaching ethics. Indeed, an alternative subtitle: “teaching ethicists right from wrong” would be quite appropriate. The book demonstrates quite convincingly that “you don’t really know how something works if you can’t build it...

Explanation and categorization: how "why?" informs "what?".

Recent theoretical and empirical work suggests that explanation and categorization are intimately related. This paper explores the hypothesis that explanations can help structure conceptual representations, and thereby influence the relative importance of features in categorization decisions. In particular, features may be differentially important depending on the role they play in explaining o...