You might want to take a look at the Forum that George Johnson (FIRE IN
THE MIND recently, IN THE PALACES OF MEMORY earlier, working on a bio
of Gell-Mann currently) runs at the New York Times web site:
http://www.nytimes.com/comment/index.html
The general topic is Mysteries of the Universe, subsection
The Mind-Brain Connection
There's a lot of discussion of the brain-related science stories that
the NYTimes runs, as well as more general topics. John McCarthy (he who
invented the term "AI") has been mentioning the need for self-awareness
in robots. The Tucson consciousness conference is a topic, and some of
us have been discussing the Penrose-type confusions of levels of
explanation and mechanism, common to those outside neuroscience.
Fogging memories via head injury and electroshock treatments was even
discussed at a mechanistic level.
You have to register and get a password. But, if you are using the
newer web browsers, the NYTimes web server recognizes your computer and
skips the login request on subsequent occasions.
--
William H. Calvin WCalvin at U.Washington.eduhttp://weber.u.washington.edu/~wcalvin/
