Hi everybody, my name is Paul Mertens and I’m from a village in the south of NL. I had some great high-school teachers there who got me interested in exact science, philosophy and language. I studied psychobiology at the UvA because I wanted to understand the mind, describe consciousness and find the free will. At the end of my bachelor the faculty was moving to the new building, and because of that there were little internships available for me. So I joined the evolutionary biologists and did my bachelor thesis on dispersal patterns in the spider mite Tetranychus urticae, which was different.
However, my main interest remains the organization of cognitive functions and information. In a broad sense I am interested in the apparent division of our conscious and subconscious and more specifically I am interested in the functioning of neural networks. I hope to be able to work on neural network modeling during my masters.
Something that might need some work if I want to succeed in this masters is that my interest in the mind has always been directed more towards philosophy than towards science. Still, I find philosophers without the proper scientific knowledge to be a complete waste of everyone’s time. My favorite philosophers are Plato (for his very lucid writings on ethics and governance) and Baudrillard (for his bewildering social philosophy of the postmodern society). Another writer who made an impact on me was Aldous Huxley with his work on social governance, art and the mind.
I do not really have a favorite (neuro)scientist, however if I have to name one I would say Raymond Kurzweil because of his incredible versatility, optimism and his focus on technological and societal progress.
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"I find philosophers without the proper scientific knowledge to be a complete waste of everyone’s time."
ReplyDeleteHope you mean philosophers writing about science ;P. In that case, I would say: Where is the "like" button??
Nono, I actually love philosophers writing about science. Like Baudrillard and to a lesser extent Huxley and then Kurzweil is a scientist writing about philosophy. I believe the two need to go hand in hand :)
ReplyDeleteI don't like philosophers without scientific knowledge because when THEY touch on subjects like 'the mind' or social evolution (things that interest a lot of philosophers of course, and on which a lot of research has allready been conducted) they seem to get lost in their 'musings' and just drift away into extraphysical oblivion :P
ooh but wait, you are reffering to yourself maybe? And now I have possibly insulted you unintentionally. Well, my apologies. However, I don't think you are one of the philosophers I was refering to, otherwise you would not be here of course :)
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