Videos on computational neuroscience – by me!

I haven’t been writing much, and that is partly because I have been organizing weekly meetings devoted to computational neuroscience. Between January and July, my friends and I did a series on dynamical systems theory in neuroscience. I created a YouTube channel for the videos.

Here’s the playlist for the dynamical systems series:

This month we started talking about Stephen Grossberg’s new book, ‘Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain’. Grossberg set up the department where I did my PhD, and his ideas suffuse how I think about mind and brain. I’m uploading the videos as they happen. Here’ the playlist:

A few announcements

I’ve decided to consolidate my various blogs in one place: yohanjohn.com

I’ll probably still cross-post philosophical musings here, but that will be my main online presence.

I’m also going to try out substack. For those who haven’t heard about it yet, it’s sort of like blogs+rss but you sign up by email and get posts delivered to your inbox.

Expect a magpie’s hoard of shiny bits from neuroscience, philosophy, history, music, and whatever else catches the light.

First post coming soon!

yohanjohn.substack.com

New Senses and New Selves – On Brain Implants

Implants + Internet = ImplanTelepathy™!

Intrinsic Incompleteness: Deacon on ‘ententional’ processes

This is the first in a planned series of posts on Terrence Deacon’s book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. I’m calling it the Deactionary, since Deacon is fond of coining new terms and redefining old ones.

Deacon outlines an ambitious goal: understanding the emergence of consciousness from insensate matter. Of course, not everyone thinks that mind emerged from matter in the first place. Dualists think mind is a separate substance from matter. Idealists think matter is a subset of mind, rather than the other way round. And panpsychists think that mind is an intrinsic property of all forms of matter, so it didn’t really emerge at all.

The Deactionary: A glossary of terms from Terrence Deacon’s ‘Incomplete Nature’

Terrence W. Deacon’s 2012 book Incomplete Nature is a bold attempt to conceptualize the emergence of life and mind using a consistent ‘physicalist’ framework. I put the term ‘physicalist’ in scare-quotes because one of the appealing quirks of the book — and perhaps one that isn’t given enough attention despite a length of 500+ pages — is that Deacon wants us to add something to the list of physical things, which typically only includes matter and energy. This something is… nothing. The incompleteness in the title seems to refer to this idea: a qualified nothing or absence is central to emergence.