Neuroscience: Thought experiment

Notes on Leibniz thought experiment

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology (1714), §17 [1]: “Besides, it must be admitted that perception, and anything that depends on it, cannot be explained in terms of mechanistic causation – that is, in terms of shapes and motions. Let us pretend that there was a machine, which was constructed in such a way as to give rise to thinking, sensing, and having perceptions. You could imagine it expan...

Cog as a thought experiment

In her presentation at the Monte Verità workshop, Maja Mataric showed us a videotape of her robots cruising together through the lab, and remarked, aptly: "They're flocking, but that's not what they think they're doing." This is a vivid instance of a phenomenon that lies at the heart of all the research I learned about at Monte Verità: the execution of surprisingly successful "cognitive" behavi...

Introduction: the cognitive neuroscience of thought.

Human thought has been a puzzling subject among philosophers for the major part of our recorded history, most famously encapsulated in Descartes' Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). Although our knowledge of thought and its benefits has come a long way since Descartes, it is only in recent times that empirical investigations into theneuroscientific bases of thought and cognition have been...

Nuclear War in Europe: A Thought Experiment

A thought experiment with clocks in static

In order to directly demonstrate that in static gravitational field the rate of clocks increases with their distance from the source a simple thought experiment is proposed.