Feb 4 – Ryan Ogilvie (Maryland), “A Prolegomena for a Theory of Perceptual Content”
Feb 18 – Jeremy Goodman (NYU), TBD
Mar 3 – Claudia Passos (Columbia), “Color Experience in Newborn Babies: A Problem for Representationalism?”
Mar 24 – Nada Gatalo (CUNY), “Photography, Technology, and the Plasticity of Visual Perception”
April 7 – Andrew Lee (NYU), “Carving Experience at its Joints”
April 21 – Jake Quilty-Dunn (CUNY), “Compositionality and Computation without Constituent Structure, or: Syntax and Semantics of Perceptual Icons”
May 5 – Nemira Gasiunas (Columbia), TBD
Feel free to invite anyone you like to attend any of these presentations.
Anya Farennikova (University of Bristol)
“Bayesianism and the Perception-Cognition Divide”
Co-sponsor: Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies
CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5307
ABSTRACT: Perceptual experience and belief are frequently treated as distinct kinds of mental states. A belief might prompt a new perceptual experience, and new experience can confirm or trigger a belief. Despite causal influences of this sort, it was commonly held that perceptual experience is insulated from the information contained in beliefs. However, recent scientific evidence shows that this picture is mistaken: perception is routinely influenced by beliefs and expectations. This evidence of cognitive penetration thus erodes a strict perception-cognition divide. Two recent approaches to the mind, Bayesianism and Predictive Coding, do further damage to the divide. According to these approaches, influences from cognition on perception are not just pervasive, but integral to its functioning. In this talk I’ll argue that if these two approaches are correct, there is no use in saving divide. Perception and cognition do not exist. Understood as paradigm changes, Bayesianism and Predictive Coding imply eliminativism with respect to belief and experience. They constitute a real revolution in the philosophy of mind, and it is time for philosophers to embrace the change.
The Institute for Visual Intelligence
is thrilled to announce its inaugural symposium in New York City in November 2016. We are seeking a philosophical understanding of visual intelligence.
Keynote Speakers:
Dr. Ahmed Elgammal
Director of the Art & AI at Rutgers University
Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University. He is the founder and director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence at Rutgers, which focuses on data science in the domain of digital humanities. He is also an Executive Council Faculty at Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science. Prof Elgammal has published over 140 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and books in the fields of computer vision, machine learning, and digital humanities. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2006. Dr Elgammal’s recent research on knowledge discovery in digital humanities received wide international media attention, including reports on the Washington Post, New York Times, NBC News, the Daily Telegraph, Science News, and many others.
Dr. Gary Hatfield
Director of the Visual Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania
Adam Seybert Professor in Moral and Intellectual Philosophy and Director of the Visual Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He works in the history of modern philosophy, the philosophy of psychology, theories of vision, and the philosophy of science. In 1990, he published The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz; at HOPOS 2016, the 25th anniversary of the book was celebrated. In 2009, Perception and Cognition: Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology appeared from the Clarendon Press; a revised version of his book on Descartes’ Meditations appeared in 2014. He is a member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, the Penn Perception group, and the History and Sociology of Science Graduate Group. He has directed dissertations in history of philosophy, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy and history of science. He has long been fascinated by visual perception and the mind–body problem.
Dr. Sun-Joo Shin
Professor of Philosophy at Yale University
At Yale Sun-Joo Shin teaches logic, philosophy of logic, history of logic, philosophy of linguistics and, philosophy of language.
In her book “The Iconic Logic of Peirce’s Graphs” Shin explores the philosophical roots of the birth of Peirce’s Existential Graphs in his theory of representation and logical notation. She demonstrates that Peirce is the first philosopher to lay a solid philosophical foundation for multimodal representation systems.
We would consider papers with parameters of the following:
Philosophy of language
Logic
Artificial intelligence
Aesthetics
Analytic philosophy
Philosophy of psychology
Visual studies
Philosophy of science
Data science
Philosophy of mind
Art history & criticism
http://philevents.org/event/show/26754
We are pleased to announce the second symposium at Columbia University, Saturday, March 4, 2017,
Keynote Speakers:
Dr. John Morrison, Department of Philosophy at Columbia University/Barnard College
Professor Morrison is currently working on three projects. The first is about how we manage to perceive secondary qualities, such as redness. He argues that we perceive them in virtue of perceiving the differences and similarities between objects, thereby reversing the traditional order of explanation. He then develops similar explanations of how we perceive objects, kinds, and many primary qualities. The second is about uncertainty and perception. He argues that our perceptual experiences sometimes assign degrees of confidence. Both of these projects draw heavily on empirical psychology, particularly psychophysics and cognitive psychology. The third project is about the foundations of Spinoza’s metaphysics. He hopes to unravel Spinoza’s claims about minds, bodies, God, and their essences.
Dr. Alexander Todorov, Department of Psychology at Princeton University
The primary focus of research in Professor Alexander’s lab is on the cognitive and neural mechanisms of social perception and social cognition with a particular emphasis on the social dimensions of face perception. Our approach is multidisciplinary. He uses a variety of methods from behavioral and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) experiments to computational modeling. The span of our research ranges from the social consequences of rapid, initial person impressions to the basic neural mechanisms underlying such impressions. Current major areas of research include computational modeling of social perception of faces, identifying brain networks involved in representing other people, and mechanisms of updating person representations.
Topic: What is a cognitive understanding of visual intelligence?
Keywords: analytic philosophy, fine art, intelligence, logic, artificial intelligence, data science & mining, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language, grammar, philosophy of games, visual studies, aesthetics, art history & criticism, psychology, philosophy of science.
Call for Papers:
We would consider papers with parameters of the following:
Philosophy of language, logic, artificial intelligence, aesthetics, analytic philosophy, philosophy of psychology, psychology, visual studies, philosophy of science, data science, philosophy of mind, art history & criticism
Submission deadline: Fri, February 10, 2017. Accepted submissions will be announced before Feb 17.
Length: 500 – 1000 words
How to submit: Please email PDF files to insvi [at] insvi.org
or upload your files at http://insvi.org/submission
The umwelt is a notion invented by the Baltic-German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. It represents how a creature, an animal, a child or even an adult “sees” the world and is a precursor to the Wumpus world in contemporary AI literature. A fly is caught in a spider’s web because its vision is too coarse to see the fine threads of the web. Thus though the web is part of the world, it is not a part of the fly’s umwelt. Similarly a tick will suck not only on blood but also on any warm liquid covered by a membrane. In the tick’s umwelt, the blood and the warm liquid are “the same”.
We represent an umwelt as a homomorphic image of the real world in which the creature, whatever it might be, has some perceptions, some powers, and some preferences (utilities for convenience). Thus we can calculate the average utility of an umwelt and also the utilities of two creatures combining their umwelts into a symbiosis.
A creature may also have a “theory” which is a map from sets of atomic sentences to sets of atomic sentences. Atomic sentences which are observed may allow the creature to infer other atomic sentences not observed. This weak but useful notion of theory bypasses some of Davidson’s objections to animals having beliefs.
Russell, Stuart J., and Peter Norvig. “Artificial intelligence: a modern approach (International Edition).” (2002).
Von Uexküll, J., von Uexküll, M., & O’Neil, J. D. (2010). A foray into the worlds of animals and humans: With a theory of meaning. U of Minnesota Press.
Our final session of 2017 will be on Friday 15th of December, 10.30-12.30, in 7113 (The Philosophy Thesis Room) at the CUNY Graduate Center.
We will be discussing the attached paper by Louise Daoust (Penn/Eckerd) on Perspectival Geometry and Spatial Perception.
Hope to see you there.
Fourth Saul Kripke Lecture
April 11 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
The circa 9th century CE poet-saint Saraha enjoys a close association with spontaneity in both his reported actions and recorded works. This association leads him to be popularly read and remembered as a freewheeling antinomian sacred figure opposed to institutions, rituals, and even social norms. His appears to be a call to joyful chaos. But many of his verses invite readers towards a different kind of chaos, towards mental/perceptual chaos as the path towards correct conventional perception.
What does it mean to correctly perceive an object? Many Buddhist sources describe how perception functions, and theorize the differences between correct and incorrect perception. A related important distinction is made between conventional and ultimate truth in the discussion of the reality of phenomena even when correctly perceived. But this arguably epistemic distinction may also be understood as the difference between an ordinary person’s correct perception and a Buddha’s perception. I am not here exploring ultimate truth. I am interested in conventional truth, in what makes it true. Broadly, correct conventional perception is associated with the product of a rational mind processing sense perceptions fed to it by functioning sense organs, and conventional truth then is the experience of that reality. Correct conventional perception can be contrasted with incorrect conventional perception, which would be perception based on an irrational or deluded mind, or an experience based on damaged or non-functioning sense organs.
Saraha, however, sings a different tune. His work tells us that the very process of identifying and recognizing objects – what most of us would associate with the basic skills necessary to get around in the world – is itself deluded, its objects adventitious. He calls this kind of perception drenpa (dran pa; usually translated as mindfulness, memory, or recollection). In other words, he claims that our very perception of objects – no matter how carefully or clearly experienced – is evidence of our being deluded. In contrast, correct conventional perception is the undoing of that object-making, what he refers to as drenmé (dran med). Drenmé is an uncommon term the contexts of the two truths and meditation. Usually denoting a swoon or a coma, here it refers to a reversal or undoing of drenpa. What does it mean – if it means anything – to describe our perception of objects itself as evidence of our delusion? Can perception as object-making ever produce truth?
The Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy (CSCP) is a University Seminar dedicated to the advancement of projects that draw on both western and non-western philosophy. The CSCP meets monthly on the campus of Columbia University and occasionally hosts conferences.
Please save the following dates for our upcoming talks:
March 30: Kin Cheung (Moravian College)
April 13: Lara Braitstein (McGill University)
May 11: David Cummiskey (Bates College)
Perceptual Capacities and Pyschophysics
Saturday, October 26-27, 2018, 09:30am – 06:00pm
Location Rutgers Philosophy Department, 106 Somerset St, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA
Despite remarkable strides across virtually all scientific disciplines, the nature of the relationship between our brain and our conscious experience—the “mind-body problem”—remains perhaps the greatest mystery confronting science today. Most neuroscientists currently believe that neural activity in the brain constitutes the foundation of our reality, and that consciousness emerges from the dynamics of complicated neural networks. Yet no scientific theory to date has been able to explain how the properties of such neurons or neural networks actually translates into our specific conscious experiences.
The prevalent view in cognitive science today is that we construct our perception of reality in real time. But could we be misinterpreting the content of our perceptual experiences? According to some cognitive scientists, what we perceive with our brain and our senses does not reflect the true nature of reality. Thus, while evolution has shaped our perceptions to guide adaptive behavior, they argue, it has not enabled us to perceive reality as it actually is. What are the implications of such a radical finding for our understanding of the mystery of consciousness? And how do we distinguish between “normal” and “abnormal” perceptual experiences?
Cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman and neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan join Steve Paulson to discuss the elusive quest to understand the fundamental nature of consciousness, and why our perception of reality is not necessarily what it seems.
*Reception to follow
This event is part of the Conversations on the Nature of Reality series.
Moderated by journalist Steve Paulson, Executive Producer of Wisconsin Public Radio’s To the Best of Our Knowledge, this three-part series at the New York Academy of Sciences brings together leading scientists and thinkers to explore the fundamental nature of reality through the lens of personal experience and scientific inquiry.
To learn more about each lecture and to purchase tickets, click on the links below.
- The Mystery of Our Mathematical Universe, Wednesday, October 10, 2018
- Human Cognition and the AI Revolution, Thursday, December 6, 2018
- Reality is Not As it Seems, Thursday, February 7, 2019