We’ll be meeting to discuss Jennifer Nagel’s paper “Intuitions and Experiments” in the CCR Reading Group/Philosophy Grad class.
Here’s a link to the pdf of the paper:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lybh4n147c8lda1/Nagel.Intuitions%20and%20Experiments.pdf
We meet in HumSS 181 from 2.15 to 3.30.
Prof. Kim Kirsner (Western Australia) will speak about his work on speech fluency and aphasia. This will also involve informal discussion of potential collaborations involving brain imaging and a new database of fluent speech in aphasia.
As a cognitive psychologist, Kim Kirsner has also published extensively on implicit memory, and dual-route models of speech production.
Tuesday 21st of May, 12 noon in room 157, Harry Pitt Building.
CogDev 2013 is a joint conference of the British Psychological Society’s Developmental and Cognitive Sections, to be held in Reading 4-6th Sept and organised by Dr Graham Schafer of the CCR and the Department of Psychology. There has been a lot of interest from within the University, across the country, and internationally. We received almost 500 submissions, which is more than twice the usual total for an individual Section, and over 50% up on the combined total for the two Sections last year. Abstracts have been sent from countries as diverse as Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Republic of Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Slovenia , Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the USA .
A great line-up of speakers includes Sue Gathercole, Mark Seidenberg, Mike Tomasello, and Faraneh Vargha-Khadem, as well as a good number of Reading’s own stars. Students are welcome to volunteer in return for access to sessions. The local committee is currently reviewing the submissions- more details to come- but symposia have already been accepted on topics as diverse as: The development of creativity, innovation & exploration, The development of the Mirror Neuron System in human and macaque infants, Literacy, Memory, Mental toughness, Neurocognitive approaches to developmental disorders, Picture-mediated learning, Theory of Mind, and Young people’s reasoning about biology & physics (to name but a few)
The conference website is at http://www.reading.ac.uk/pcls/cogdev2013.aspx or follow us on Twitter @CogDev2013.
The following conference (organised by recent CCR speaker Vincent Müller) and call for papers may be of interest to members:
Philosophy & Theory of AI Conference, Oxford, 21 & 22 September 2013
An affectionate obitury for Henry Molaison, an amnesiac who was the subject of research into memory for 55 years:
You can see some photos of Andrew Glennerster’s talk on the Philosophy at the University of Reading facebook site:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Philosophy-at-the-University-of-Reading/125492997485879
Vincent C. Müller
Anatolia College/ACT & University of Oxford www.sophia.de
“If the human brain is a computer, does it follow that we can reproduce human cognition on different hardware?”
Neuroscientists say they have maps of the nervous systems of the nematode worm C. elegans and the drosophila fly, maps of the brain of the honeybee and the embryo zebrafish … and governments in the US and EU are now spending over 100mil€ each, per year, to generate a complete map of the human brain in all the necessary detail to explain its functioning at the neural and synaptic level, including the connections between neurons (the “connectome”). The obstacles before this project are surely formidable, but the main problems seem to be feasible, rather than requiring deep new insights.
At the same time, much of current neuroscience is based on the assumption that the human nervous system is a computational system at its basic level of function. And finally, there are good reasons to assume that computing is ‘multiply realizable’: Strictly the same computing procedure can be realized on different hardware. So, if the whole brain could scanned and its computation run on different hardware, what would happen, and what would that show for the theory of cognition?
Vincent Muller’s talk next week (2-3.30, Thursday 9th May) will now talk place in the Nike Theatre in Agriculture (not G79 in Psych as advertised previously). Apologies for the change to the programme.
