This seminar will be dedicated to discussing “correlation between consciousness and existence”. We will review the sameness of Being and Mind proposed by Parmenides then compare it with Aristotelian Being as Essence and Neo-Platonic’s intelligent emanation of One. Then we will briefly touch Heidegger’s ontological project “Dasein” and connect it with the Anthropic principle of modern Cosmology. Finally, we will discuss the Modern Cosmism’s concept of Super Intelligent Life (SIL) as a seed of self evolving Cosmos.
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.
May 23, Karen Jones (U. Melbourne), “Radical Consciousness and Epistemic Privilege.” 6:30-8:00pm, CUNY Graduate Center 5414.
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
CUNY-Milan Annual Interdisciplinary Workshop in Philosophy, a joint initiative of both institutions’ philosophy departments, is aimed at promoting advanced studies in core analytic topics. This year’s workshop, first in a series of annual events, will focus on belief. Albeit this workshop’s main objective is to advance research in Philosophy of Mind and Logic, the organizers are committed to maintain the interdisciplinary character of the workshop.
This year’s inaugural conference will focus on belief. It is the aim of the organizers to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the topic of belief. Some of the topics to be discussed include:
Mental states/attitudes and beliefs; the connection between imagination and belief; group beliefs; logic of belief; belief and logical omniscience; beliefs about blame and forgiveness; the difference between conscious and unconscious beliefs; confabulations of belief; the experience of belief; what it is like to believe; norms of beliefs; knowledge and belief; metaphysics of belief; religious beliefs; political beliefs; manipulation of belief; content of belief; belief and bias; belief and language; belief as constituting sexual, racial and gender based identity; delusional beliefs; continental perspectives on belief; historical perspectives on belief.
Keynote speakers:
Organisers:
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.
Monday, November 19, 2018 at 6pm. This event is part of the Philosophy Series at The Cornelia Street Café, located at 29 Cornelia Street, New York, NY 10014 (near Sixth Avenue and West 4th St.). Admission is $10, which includes the price of one drink. Reservations are recommended (212. 989.9319)
Jody Azzouni is a philosopher originally from Brooklyn who also writes short stories. His philosophy books include Semantic Perception, and Ontology Without Borders, among many others. Among his short stories are “We’re Wolves,” and “The Meaning of Life.” You can find more of his fiction and poetry at azzouni.com He teaches at Tufts University.
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