Measuring Borderline States of Consciousness
Time: 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
There are famous difficulties in measuring subjective states of consciousness. Nevertheless, a number of techniques have recently been developed for measuring states of consciousness in clinical settings. These techniques have been applied to borderlines states of consciousness: in particular, those found in brain-damaged patients diagnosed with vegetative state, and those found in patients under anesthesia. Measures using fMRI imaging, electroencephelography, and various other technologies have been developed.
These measures pose any number of scientific and philosophical questions.
- What is the best measure of consciousness in these cases?
- How can we justify these measures, given the private and subjective nature of consciousness?
- What is the best way to use these measures clinically?
- What ethical issues do they raise?
- What might these measures tell us about the nature of consciousness?
All of these questions and more will be discussed at the workshop. Speakers will include:
Tim Bayne (The University of Manchester), Melanie Boly (University of Wisconsin), Joseph Fins (Weill Cornell Medical College), L. Syd Johnson (Michigan Technological University), Stephen Laureys (Belgian National Fund of Scientific Research), Marcello Massimini (University of Milan), Lionel Naccache (Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière), Adrian Owen (Western University), Nicholas Schiff (Weill Cornell Medical College).
Organizing Committee: Ned Block, David Chalmers, S. Matthew Liao & Nicholas Schiff.
Location:53 Washington Square South, 1st Floor Auditorium New York, NY 10012
Friday, October 24th-Saturday, October 25th from 10:00am – 6:00 pm*
*Conference registration will begin at 9:00 am in the 1st floor lobby.
Registration is free but required. Click here to register.
Friday, December 4 – Saturday, December 5
Kimmel Center and Jurow Hall, New York University
REGISTER HERE
On December 4-5, the NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness
will host a conference on “Is the Brain Bayesian?”.
Bayesian theories have attracted enormous attention in the cognitive
sciences in recent years. According to these theories, the mind
assigns probabilities to hypotheses and updates them according to
standard probabilistic rules of inference. Bayesian theories have
been applied to the study of perception, learning, memory, reasoning,
language, decision making, and many other domains. Bayesian
approaches have also become increasingly popular in neuroscience, and
a number of potential neurobiological mechanisms have been proposed.
At the same time, Bayesian theories have been controversial, and they
raise many foundational questions. Does the brain actually use
Bayesian rules? Or are they merely approximate descriptions of
behavior? How well can Bayesian theories accommodate apparent
irrationality in cognition? Do they require an implausibly uniform
view of the mind? Are Bayesian theories near-trivial due to their
many degrees of freedom? What are their implications for the
relationship between perception, cognition, rationality, and
consciousness?
All of these questions and more will be discussed at the conference. The conference will bring together both scientists and philosophers, and
both proponents and opponents of Bayesian approaches, to discuss and debate a number of central issues.
Speakers and panelists will include:
Jeffrey Bowers (Bristol), David Danks (Carnegie Mellon), Ernest Davis (NYU), Karl Friston (University College London), Weiji Ma (NYU), Larry Maloney (NYU), Eric Mandelbaum (CUNY), Gary Marcus (NYU), John Morrison (Barnard/Columbia), Nicoletta Orlandi (UC Santa Cruz), Michael Rescorla (UC Santa Barbara), Laura Schulz (MIT), Susanna Siegel (Harvard), Eero Simoncelli (NYU), Joshua Tenenbaum (MIT) and others
The conference sessions will run from 9:30am to 6pm on Friday and Saturday December 4-5. Friday sessions will be in Kimmel Center 914
(60 Washington Square South) and Saturday sessions will be in Jurow Hall in the Silver Center (100 Washington Square East). Conference
registration and coffee will begin at 9am both days. A full schedule will be circulated closer to the conference date.
Registration is free but required. REGISTER HERE.
Susan Carey (Harvard) and Jesse Prinz (CUNY)
Jurow Hall, NYU Silver Center
Speakers: Susan Carey[software.rc.fas.harvard.edu] (Harvard, Psychology)
and Jesse Prinz[subcortex.com] (CUNY, Philosophy)
Thursday, February 4, 5:00 – 7:00 pm
Jurow Hall, Silver Center, NYU
100 Washington Square East
Are there innate concepts and if so, what are they like? Susan Carey (author of The Origin of Concepts[global.oup.com]) argues that babies come into the world with many abstract concepts, including concepts of physical objects and physical causality, human purposes and purposive action, and number. Jesse Prinz (author of Beyond Human Nature[subcortex.com]) has argued that on the contrary we have no innate concepts and that even the most fundamental building blocks of knowledge are shaped by experience and socialization.
No registration is required. Seating is first come, first served. A reception will follow the event.
Women in academia, law, medicine, and business earn less than men in most subfields and are promoted more slowly. Women in academia are underrepresented among invited speakers at conferences and among award winners. Two concepts – gender schemas and the accumulation of advantage – together explain women’s slower advancement compared to men’s. A review of current observational and experimental data suggests that although people have meritocratic and egalitarian intentions, those very intentions interfere with meritocratic and egalitarian behavior. Valian presents experimental data that demonstrate how gender schemas – held by men and women alike – produce subtle overvaluations of men and undervaluations of women. She reviews the small imbalances in the treatment of men and women that add up to major disparities in success. She offers a hypothesis about the origin of gender schemas.
There are remedies, both at an institutional level and at an individual level. Institutions can improve their procedures for hiring, retaining, and promoting men and women to achieve genuinely fair organizations that make full use of everyone’s talents. Individuals can act more in keeping with their values and be more effective in their professional lives.
Virginia Valian is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Hunter College and is a member of the doctoral faculties of Psychology, Linguistics, and Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the director of the Language Acquisition Research Center, which has been funded by the NSF and NIH. She is also the director of the Hunter College Gender Equity Project, which has been funded by NSF, NIH, and the Sloan Foundation.
Dr Valian works in the psychology of language and gender equity. In language, Dr Valian works in two areas. One area is first language acquisition, where Dr Valian performs research with the aim of developing a model of acquisition that specifies what is innate, how input is used by the child, and how the child’s syntactic knowledge interacts with knowledge in other linguistic and extra-linguistic domains. Dr Valian’s second language area is the relation between bilingualism and higher cognitive functions in adults.
In gender equity Dr Valian performs research on the reasons behind women’s slow advancement in the professions and proposes remedies for individuals and institutions. She is currently particularly interested in who receives awards and prizes, and invitations to speak at conferences. In a 2014 Chronicle of Higher Education article on ‘What book changed your mind?’, Valian’s book, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women was one of 12 non-fiction books published in the last 30 years that was showcased. Her current book with Abigail Stewart, titled, The Inclusive Academy: Achieving Diversity and Excellence, will be published by MIT Press.
Dr Valian’s most recent talks were at Stony Brook University, the University of Illinois, Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and Birkbeck College in London. Her evidence-based approach has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Nature, Scientific American, The Women’s Review of Books, and many other journals and magazines.
On October 14-15, 2016, the NYU Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness in conjunction with the NYU Center for Bioethics will host a conference on “The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence”.
Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) makes questions about the ethics of AI more pressing than ever. Existing AI systems already raise numerous ethical issues: for example, machine classification systems raise questions about privacy and bias. AI systems in the near-term future raise many more issues: for example, autonomous vehicles and autonomous weapons raise questions about safety and moral responsibility. AI systems in the long-term future raise more issues in turn: for example, human-level artificial general intelligence systems raise questions about the moral status of the systems themselves.
This conference will explore these questions about the ethics of artificial intelligence and a number of other questions, including:
What ethical principles should AI researchers follow? Are there restrictions on the ethical use of AI? What is the best way to design morally beneficial AI? Is it possible or desirable to build moral principles into AI systems? When AI systems cause benefits or harm, who is morally responsible? Are AI systems themselves potential objects of moral concern? What moral framework is best used to assess questions about the ethics of AI?
Speakers and panelists will include:
Nick Bostrom (Future of Humanity Institute),
Meia Chita-Tegmark (Future of Life Institute),
Mara Garza (UC Riverside, Philosophy),
Sam Harris (Project Reason),
Demis Hassabis (DeepMind/Google),
Yann LeCun (Facebook, NYU Data Science),
Peter Railton (University of Michigan, Philosophy),
Francesca Rossi (University of Padova, Computer Science),
Stuart Russell (UC Berkeley, Computer Science),
Susan Schneider (University of Connecticut, Philosophy),
Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside, Philosophy),
Max Tegmark (Future of Life Institute),
Wendell Wallach(Yale, Bioethics),
Eliezer Yudkowsky (Machine Intelligence Research Institute), and others.
Organizers:
Ned Block (NYU, Philosophy),
David Chalmers (NYU, Philosophy),
S. Matthew Liao (NYU, Bioethics)
A full schedule will be circulated closer to the conference date.
Registration is free but required. REGISTER HERE. Please note that admission is limited, and is first-come first-served: it is not guaranteed by registration.
Subscribe to the NYU Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness Mailing List HERE.
Speakers:
Yann LeCun (Data Science, NYU; Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research)
Gary Marcus (Psychology, NYU; Founder, Geometric Intelligence)
Thursday, October 5, 5:00 – 7:00 pm
Tishman Auditorium
NYU School of Law
40 Washington Square South
No registration required. Seating is first-come first-served.
On November 17-18, 2017, the NYU Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness in conjunction with the NYU Center for Bioethics and NYU Animal Studies will host a conference on “Animal Consciousness”.
The recent flourishing of research into animal mentality raises pressing questions for many including zoologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, philosophers of mind and ethicists. How unified are the realizers of consciousness across species? What can animal psychology teach philosophy about the underpinnings of consciousness? How should the light shed by research into animal consciousness inform our conception of the ethical status of animals? By bringing together researchers from a wide range of salient fields, this conference seeks to make progress on these important questions and others.
Registration is free but required. *REGISTER HERE*
PARTICIPANTS:
Speakers and panelists:
Colin Allen (Indiana University, Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine), Andrew Barron (Macquarie, Cognitive Neuroethology), Victoria Braithwaite (Penn State, Biology), Peter Carruthers (Maryland, Philosophy), Marian Dawkins (Oxford, Zoology), Dan Dennett (Tufts, Philosophy), Todd Feinberg (Mt. Sinai, Neurology), Peter Godfey-Smith (Sydney, Philosophy), Lori Gruen (Wesleyan, Philosophy), Brian Hare (Duke, Evolutionary Anthropology), Eva Jablonka (Tel Aviv, Cohn Institute), Björn Merker (Neuroscience), Diana Reiss (Hunter, Psychology), Peter Singer (Princeton, Philosophy), Michael Tye (Texas, Philosophy),
Organizers: Ned Block (NYU, Philosophy), David Chalmers (NYU, Philosophy), Dale Jamieson (NYU, Animal Studies), S. Matthew Liao (NYU, Bioethics)
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE AND LOCATION:
The conference will be held at the NYU Cantor Film Center (36 E 8th St), Room 200 (the main theater on the second floor). The overflow room will be Cantor 101. Sessions will run from about 9:30am to 6pm on both days, with registration beforehand (beginning at 8:30).
Please note again that registration is free, but required. Seating is on a first-come first-served basis. *REGISTER HERE*
Subscribe to the NYU Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness Mailing List here.
Inquiries to: consciousness@nyu.edu
The metaphysics of implicit bias has been an area of heated debates involving philosophers and psychologists. Most theorists of implicit bias posit that associations underwrite implicit bias. Recent dissenters have argued that propositional attitudes undergird this pernicious attitude. However, the propositional attitude view of implicit bias does not satisfyingly explain its various manifestations that are underwritten by its diverse contents. In this paper my criticism targets: (1) legitimacy of ascriptions of unconscious mental content, and (2) the phenomenology of implicit bias. The first criticism focuses on a common assumption in philosophy of mind—the equivalence of content in the conscious and unconscious domain—and raises problems regarding the propositional attitude theorist’s strategy to ascribe propositional attitudes to explain implicit biases which they locate in the unconscious mind of the subject. Second, I argue that the similarities between a more familiar mental phenomenon—the phenomenon of moods—and the conscious manifestations of implicit bias have been ignored. I identify several parallels between moods and implicit bias: their context-dependence, the subject’s lack of awareness of their source, their effects on the salience and valence of their targets, and their simultaneous responsiveness and recalcitrance to reasons. I argue that an explanatorily robust view of implicit bias must be commensurate with this analogy. I end with a proposal that I dub the indeterminate content view, which avoids these problems and promises explanatory power.
We will also be giving an award to 2nd-place essay prize winner Elis Miller (Harvard) for her paper “Whether to Suspend Judgment”.
In split-brain patients, the cerebral hemispheres have been separated by severing the corpus collosum. These patients sometimes behave as if they have one mind and sometimes as if they have two. Do these patients have a single consciousness that is in some respects fragmented? Or does each hemisphere support a distinct experiencing subject with a separate mind?
Joseph LeDoux (Center for Neural Science, NYU)
Yaïr Pinto (Psychology, University of Amsterdam)
Elizabeth Schechter (Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis)
Elizabeth Schechter, author of the recent book Self-consciousness and ‘Split-brains’: The Mind’s I, will argue for the two-minds view. Yair Pinto, author of the recent article “The Split Brain Phenomenon Revisited: A Single Conscious Agent with Split Perception”, will argue for the one-mind view. Joseph Ledoux, author of the 1977 article “A Divided Mind: Observations on the Conscious Properties of the Separated Hemispheres”, will argue for an intermediate position.