Neurophilosophy and the cognitive sciences suggest that the way things are and the way we claim to know them as they are two phenomena that require our careful, critical attention and reflection. Michale Eysenck and Mark Keane argue in Cognitive Psychology (Hove, East Sussex: Psychology Press, 1995, p. 52): ‘There is compelling evidence that different kinds of information are involved in visual object recognition. It is reasonable to distinguish amond visual knowledge, semantic (associative and functional) knowledge, and object naming, and studies on brain-damaged patients indicate the value of these distinctions.” Let’s consider these points from the perspective of two fundamental philosophical questions: “Who am I?” and “What is this?”. But let’s look at these questions precisely as knowledge issues from the perspective of brain-damaged patients as the citation suggests:
Triple A Learning IB Blogs
March 25, 2010
To be or to seem to be – the brain is the question!
All knowledge begins in experience. All knowledge begins in experience but is not limited to experience. Some knowledge proceeds from reason alone. The list of possibilities could go on. However, recent contributions from the cognitive sciences and from neurophilosophy seem to indicate that we might do well to take a closer look at how the brain, strictly as a physiological organ, operates in arriving at what we tend to call ‘knowledge’. Consider the following short video:
March 21, 2010
self portrait triptych: photos and reality
Don’t call me warped! That hurts! It’s only my own photo I could play with, since my friends aren’t volunteering their faces.
This photoplay was prompted by a very good article, “Photoshop and Photography: When is it real?”, passed on to me by my dear friend Lena Rotenberg. Written by David Pogue in the New York Times (Feb 25), it deals splendidly with the choices that a photographer makes in creating an image of the world. The article links to images in a contest run by Popular Photography magazine, a contest whose winners in two categories submitted images that Pogue calls “Photoshop jobs”.
