Corey J. Maley

You’re so welcome Brett. You deserve the best.

Defending the medium‐independence of computation The computational properties of a system are generally thought to be independent in some sense from its physical properties, in virtue of the fact that computation is a formally characterized concept...

Zoe Drayson says “yes”:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I say “no”:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

And Danielle Williams says “it depends on what you mean”:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Read all about it!

Is computation necessarily independent of its physical implementation? Now there’s a whole symposium on this question in the journal Mind & Language!

Declaring independence from medium independence Computation is widely assumed to be necessarily medium independent, meaning that it is not defined in terms of any physical properties, but only by abstract automata (or something similar). I argue f...

New paper is live! It’s part of a symposium with Danielle Williams and Zoe Drayson. It’s open access, so you can actually read it.

doi.org/10.1111/mila...

I’m excited to read this!

Great talk by Danielle Williams (@okaydaniellle.bsky.social) at SPAN (@socphilneuro.bsky.social). on the historical context in which computing and computational concepts were introduced into neuroscience.

ANNUAL MEETING | SPAN

The 1st Society for Philosophy & Neuroscience @socphilneuro.bsky.social meeting was outstanding! I'm so sorry I have to miss the last day. Thanks to the organizers for putting together such an amazing lineup - great to see so many folks working at the intersection.

Great, reflective talk by Joe LeDoux at @socphilneuro.bsky.social

Exclusive: NSF stops awarding new grants and funding existing ones US science funder also plans to screen grant applications for compliance with ‘agency priorities’.

BREAKING: NSF has frozen all grant funding, as of yesterday. It's unclear when they will resume funding awards, or why the pause has been put in place. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Usually when I read an academic paper that seems like it’s making a really stupid point, I give the author(s) the benefit of the doubt and check to see whether maybe it’s me—not them—who’s missing something. Because who knows? Maybe *I’m* wrong, and I can actually learn something.

So did you eat the microphone? Or did it really just absorb into your face? 😂

Rule 110 -- from Wolfram MathWorld Rule 110 is one of the elementary cellular automaton rules introduced by Stephen Wolfram in 1983 (Wolfram 1983, 2002). It specifies the next color in a cell, depending on its color and its immediate n...

mathworld.wolfram.com/Rule110.html

It doesn’t take much for a system to be interpretable as implementing all TM-computable functions, like the rule 110 cellular automaton. We need more constraints on what counts as the system actually computing, vs. being describable via some automaton.

historyfacts.com/science-indu...

AI Summit Registration: $350 SPONSORED BY: Google is a trademark of Google LLC. Join us as we wrestle with the big questions that come with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in our society.

This is a fascinating event. I’m glad I could attend.

www.purdue.edu/events/ai-su...

If you’ve not yet heard the good news (or you’re not convinced) about analog computation, here’s a new publication for you!

doi.org/10.1002/wcs....

#philsci #cogsci

Live in Cincinnati! One night only!

#philsci #STS

Congratulations @coreymaley.net ! 🎉
#philsci

New Orleans philosophy people: I’m on stage live, two nights only! I’d love to see you. #philsci

I’m now the proud owner of one of the coolest books about analog computers, published in 1960. The illustrations are fantastic, both in terms of how well they help explain complex mechanical components, and their Mad Men-esque aesthetic.

Yeah!

The classes I’m teaching this semester are in Grissom Hall. Very cool.

Nice to see you here!

Friends: what are some gluten-free versions of normally gluten-full foods y’all like?

“How much depends on the way things are presented in this world can be seen from the very fact that coffee drunk out of wine glasses is really miserable stuff, as is meat cut at the table with a pair of scissors.”

— G.C. Lichtenberg

Right, but the neural “circuitry” itself is not necessarily a literal circuit?

Does a neural circuit have to be “closed” in any sense to be functional, the way an electrical circuit must be? The wires of an electrical circuit must be loops, but the connections of a neural circuit don’t need to be, right?

A modest proposal: let’s replace talk of “courser/finer grain” with “lower/higher resolution.”

My article criticizing Gualtiero Piccinini's account of computation is now out in Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy. Check it out here:

doi.org/10.3998/ergo...