Locke, Horace, and a Syllabus Errorum

Horace Barlow

Horace Barlow is retired Royal Society Research Professor of Physiology at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of the Royal Society. He graduated in Medicine at Cambridge in 1947 and stayed there doing research in vision until 1964. He then moved to the University of California at Berkeley, staying there until 1973 when he returned to Cambridge. His main interest has always been in vision, ...

HORACE —an artificial columnist

After a brief outlook on the field of random text generation, in particular on Andrew Bulhak’s Postmodernism generator, the present paper describes a program for generation of random, meaningless but grammatically correct text in Swedish. The program, named Horace, is intended to simulate the abstract reasoning of (some) literary columnists. Horace is written in Prolog using the DCG formalism. ...

John Locke and Modern Life

Horace Judson (1931–2011)

Scientists, I once heard, have an easier time of it than composers and artists. In a ‘‘new’’ field, such as molecular biology, anything that happened more than three weeks ago is ancient history (as Sidney Brenner once said). We bold scientific searchers, like born agains, rise each morning to fashion a new world, with our own discoveries in the form of facts, lots of them (check out the length...

Locke on Consciousness

Locke’s theory of consciousness is often appropriated as a forerunner of present-day Higher-Order Perception (HOP) theories, but not much is said about it beyond that. We offer an interpretation of Locke’s account of consciousness that portrays it as crucially different from current-day HOP theory, both in detail and in spirit. In this paper, it is argued that there are good historical and phil...