Active Externalism

...the human organism is linked with an external entity in a two-way interaction, creating a coupled system that can be seen as a cognitive system in its own right. All the components in the system play an active causal role, and they jointly govern behavior in the same sort of way that cognition usually does. If we remove the external component the system's behavioral competence will drop, just as it would if we removed part of its brain. Our thesis is that this sort of coupled process count...

 NBIC: Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno

There's no one silver bullet technology that's going to make us all into superbeings. The trick is in the mix of different technologies. NBIC stands for nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. Look at it this way: with nanotechnology and biotechnology, we stand to gain control over inorganic and organic matter. With advanced information technology, we get not just the horrendous data glut that's now tormenting us (and our National Security Agency), but d...

 Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)

The goal of this new manual, as with all previous editions, is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology. While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart diseas...

 The Neccessity of Selective Attention

Three decades ago, cognitive scientist Colin Martindale advanced the idea that each of us has several subselves, and he connected his idea to emerging ideas in cognitive science. Central to Martindale’s thesis were a few fairly simple ideas, such as selective attention, lateral inhibition, state-dependent memory, and cognitive dissociation. Although there are billions of neurons in our brains firing all the time, we’d never be able to put one foot in front of the other if we were unable t...

 How Science Can Progress the Humanities

Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to the commercialization of our universities. But an honest appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness. And they have failed to define a progressive agenda. Several university presidents and provo...

 The Future History of Uplift

The active pursuit of uplift really took hold as a scientific field during the great flowering of transhuman culture, an era that also gave us the widespread settlement of space, extensive human genetic modification, nanotech, cognitive science, and the digital emulation of consciousness. It is in fact the convergence of these fields, and the feedback loops spawned between them, that enabled the uplift project to make so much headway so quickly. It’s easy to see uplift as a breathtaking cu...

 Psychology Studies Sample WEIRD Humans

[This paper is] about another exotic group: people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD)societies. In particular, it’s about the Western, and more specifically American, undergraduates who form the bulk of the database in the experimental branches of psychology, cognitive science, and economics, as well as allied fields(labeled the “behavioral sciences”). [...] Who are the people studied in behavioral science research? A recent analysis of the top journa...

 The Human Cognome Project

The Human Cognome Project was an academic research venture to reverse engineer the human brain, paralleling in many ways the Human Genome Project and its success in deciphering the human genome. The HCP was a multidisciplinary undertaking, relevant to biology, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind. Funded and supported by scientific and corporate entrepreneurs and early transhumanist groups, the HCP developed the fundamentals of digitizi...