On the surface, a surreal and fantastical story about the intertwining narratives of a teenage boy running away from home to escape an Oedipal prophecy, and the journey of an elderly mildly retarded man who can talk to cats, doesn’t seem exactly like the kind of material I normally post about on this blog. But…

In my last post I discussed the problem of the Chinese Room, which is a way to think about language use and human cognition. The thrust of the argument is that seemingly intelligent behavior does not necessitate conscious understanding or awareness. If a program, or a robot, or an english speaking human locked inside a…

Today I’m going to use a famous philosophical thought experiment to help elucidate one of the most significant problems in cognitive science. Before I get into it though, let me set the stage. There are various competing theories of cognition in the field of cognitive science. Some explain human cognition and thought through the manipulation…