1. Tiffany C Bloomfield, Timothy Q Gentner & Daniel Margoliash “What Birds Have to Say About Language,” Nature Neuroscience 14, 8, August 2011 doi:10.1038/nn.2884
Kentaro Abe & Dai Watanabe, “Songbirds possess the spontaneous ability to discriminate syntactic rules,” Nature Neuroscience 14, 8, August 2011. doi:10.1038/nn.2869
Abe and Watanabe report iterated syntax in the songs of the Bengalese finch and a brain area dedicated to syntax. Rebuts the Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch thesis that recursive syntax is unique to humans
2. Michael A. Cohen and Daniel C. Dennett “Consciousness Cannot Be Separated From Function,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15, 8, August 2011.
An empirical argument against Ned Block’s claim that “phenomenology overflows access,” and hence against the idea that there is p-consciousness. Claims to show that “from an empirical perspective, the ‘hard problem’ is actually an impossible problem that inherently isolates consciousness from all current and future avenues of scientific investigation.
UPDATE Steven Gross (Johns Hopkins) provides a link to an excellent commentary by Mark Liberman on Abe and Watanabe above.
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