E-Intentionality

Paul Loader: Commodities and Cognition

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sun, 25 Jan 2011 22:00:00 GMT

Alfred Sohn-Rethel argues that the "enigmatic cognitive faculties of civilived man" have their roots in the act of commodity exchange. This is put forward as a counter to a Kantian theory of cognition which locates the conceptual prerequisites for sense-making in an a priori transcendental subject....

Blay Whitby: Better People - The Ethical Challenges of Transhumanism

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 15:00:00 GMT

The so-called "transhuman" technologies of human enhancement have serious ethical implications. Technologies now under development, including cognitive enhancement by pharmacological methods, direct brain implants, advanced prosthetics, and genetic selection are seen by many writers as moving us to a "posthuman future".

Simon Bowes: A Discrete Cause Named Desire: Libet, Newcombe and Psychological Explanation

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 16:05:00 GMT

Ron Chrisley: Interpretational Intentional Realism and Non-Transitivity

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 16:05:00 GMT

In this preliminary report of research in progress, I present some possible extensions to Dennett’s Intentional Systems Theory....

Mike Beaton: Integrated Information and Externalism

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 17:35:00 GMT

Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory of consciousness comprises two major claims. The first claim is that integrated information for the subject (in some initial, pre-theoretic sense) is the right kind of thing to correspond to consciousness. This, I will briefly suggest, is correct....

Steve Torrance: The More-Than-Human Mind - Diverging and Converging Visions

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 17:35:00 GMT

I discuss the realizability and the ethical ramifications of machine ethics (ME), from a number of different perspectives. I label these the anthropocetnric, infocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric perspectives....

Ricardo Sanz: Intention and Control

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 17:35:00 GMT

A flash view on intentionality from the perspective of a machine mind or, to be more precise, from the perspective of a control engineer trying to build a control system to improve the physical performance of a machine. Controllers shall know and intend about the world out there. How do they do that?

Joel Parthemore: Extending Conceptual Spaces

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:46:00 GMT

Peter Gärdenfors' conceptual spaces theory of concepts is an example of a similarity space theory, which on the face of things puts it in company with prototype and examplar theories of concepts, in the empirical tradition, and in contrast with e.g. theory theory and informational atomism....

Joel Parthemore: Putting Concepts Into a Context of Agents and Referents

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 14:25:00 GMT

I want to classify concepts according to categories of their referents as well as categories of the agents who possess and employ them. In the process, the lines between concept and referent will become blurred....

Blay Whitby, Anna Dumitriu: Beliefs, Learning and Embodied Experience

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:46:00 GMT

A belief can usually only be considered knowledge if it can be scientifically justified and a false belief can never be considered knowledge. The construction of a belief is a kind of learning process very similar to that of knowledge acquisition...

Ron Chrisley: All Done With Mirrors - Reflections on Denyer

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:35:00 GMT

The answer that (Denyer 1994) gives to the question "why do mirrors reverse left/right and not up/down?" is criticized, and an alternative answer is proposed....

Joel Parthemore: Concepts - Introspection, Articulability, Publicity

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 09 July 2010 21:00:00 GMT

Concepts are often held to be necessarily introspectible, necessarily articulable (e.g., by McDowell (1996)), and, consequently, necessarily public (e.g., by Fodor (1998)). I will present related arguments that all three requirements should be relaxed....

Mike Beaton: Qualia and Introspection

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:35:00 GMT

The claim that behaviourally undetectable inverted spectra are possible has been endorsed by many physicalists. I explain why this starting point rules out the standard form of scientific explanation for qualia....

Stan Rosenthal: Art and Aging - The Work of John Piper

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:15:00 GMT

This talk addresses some of the major issues being researched for a D. Phil, the subject of which is art and ageing, with special regard to scaffolding, the extended mind, and embodiment, as these apply to the visual artist. On this occasion we concern ourselves with the life and work of John Piper....

Ron Chrisley: Knowledge and Physicalism

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:15:00 GMT

In "Epiphenomenal Qualia", Frank Jackson presents the Knowledge Argument against physicalism, construed as the claim that all information is physical information, that is "information [of the kind] that is provided by the physical, chemical and biological sciences"....

Ron Chrisley: Phenomenal Directness and the Extended Mind

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:15:00 GMT

Active Externalism, as put forward by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in their 1998 paper entitled "The Extended Mind", is the view that cognitive processes at least sometimes extend beyond the biological body into the non-biological environment....

Tom Froese: Life and Mind ‘As-It-Could-Be’

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

In this seminar I want to reflect on the role of recent technological developments, in particular the creation of artificial intelligence and sensory augmentation interfaces, in relation to the goal of gaining a better understanding of life and mind. I will argue that both forms of technology are indispensable....

Joel Parthemore: Getting Clear on Our Terms - Symbols and Representations as They Relate to Concepts

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

In writing a paper with Tony Morse at Skövde on a model for the mutual scaffolding of concepts and experience, as a centrepiece for an enactive theory of concepts, I found that I needed to devote considerable space and thought early on in the paper to precisely what I mean by "symbol" and "representation"....

Joel Parthemore: The Inconsistent Foundations of Conceptual Mental Content

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Conceptual understandings, I want to argue, depend on certain fundamental contradictions: what I would like to call necessary fictions. These contradictions give rise to distinctions e.g. self/other, agent/environment, individual/society, internal/external...

Leslie Marsh: Hayek's Philosophy of Mind

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:20:00 GMT

Few know that social philosopher and economist Hayek had a central interest in mind -- indeed, it underpins the work he is most famous for. I want to outline his neglected contribution to cognitive science and particularly make a case for his being taken as a grandee of non-Cartesian cognitive science.

Simon Bowes: Human Action in the Spaces of Reason

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:45:00 GMT

Susan Hurley talks about animals acting in 'islands of practical rationality rather than a continuous space of reasons' (Hurley, 2003, p. 231). I will try to relate this to the analogous analogy I have been using for our natural kind concepts....

Mike Beaton: The Philosophy of the Real

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:15:00 GMT

Perhaps that should be ‘Some Philosophy of the Real’. There’s a lot more one could say. There’s even a lot more, I believe, which I could say, these days. But this is enough for one E-I....

Blay Whitby: What If There Were Nothing? A Denial of Consciousness

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Wed, 28 May 2008 09:35:00 GMT

For at least a hundred years there has been a serious and unresolved philosophical problem in reconciling evidence-based accounts of human behaviour with introspection-based accounts. For the first fifty years this was usually called the mind-body problem....

Paul Loader: Why is a Watt Governor Less Alienated Than an Algorithm?

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Tue, 13 May 2008 08:05:00 GMT

Cognitive Science is involved in a retreat from alienation. Descriptions of other processes at work in Cognitive Science, in terms of movements towards embeddedness, extendedness, enactivity, embodiment etc.., can all be subsumed under this broader description....

Rob Clowes: Artificial Consciousness and Structural Explanation

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:15:00 GMT

Synthetic methods in science can aim at either instantiating a target phenomenon or simulating key mechanisms underlying that phenonemon: 'strong' and 'weak' approaches respectively. While the former assumes a mature theory, the latter find its value in helping specify such theories....

Alexandros Zographakis: The Work of Art as a Cognitive Trail

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:20:00 GMT

I offer a detailed suggestion which construes works of art as 'cognitive trails'. My account recasts Adrian Cussins' 'theory of cognitive trails' and argues for the deeper reasons which motivate us to see works of art as 'constructs' which, in turn, offer a powerful tool that gives an account of how the distinction between mind and world emerges.

Simon Bowes: Philosophy and Landscape Gardening

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:15:00 GMT

I will be looking at Goodman’s New Riddle of Induction, with a view to offering a solution based on embodiment theory. Firstly, I will present a claim (of Rami Isreal) that most people have misunderstood the problem, and then look at a proposed solution....

Kyle Jennings: Kinds of Novelty, and Their Place in the Creative Process

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:15:00 GMT

Upon encountering something that we intuitively know is creative, we no doubt also feel we've experienced something novel; for this reason, "novel" and "creative" are closely aligned concepts. However, directly translating this into the act of creation neglects three important issues....

Tom Beament: No Way, Know How!

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:40:00 GMT

This presentation is a response to some recent papers on the distinction between knowing how and knowing that. In particular, Stanley and Williamson’s 2001 paper, “Knowing How” (S and W) and Snowdon’s 2004 paper, “Knowing How and Knowing That: A Distinction Reconsidered” (Sn)....

Joel Parthemore: Concepts, Consciousness and Self-Reference

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 02:50:00 GMT

In 1995 Dave Chalmers introduced us to the phrase, "the hard problem of consciousness." Dan Dennett has famously argued that the hard problem of consciousness is an illusion. This paper will argue that the best candidate for the "hard problem" is one that seems often curiously overlooked....

Blay Whitby: Sometimes It's Hard to Be a Robot

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 15:33:00 GMT

This is a call for informed debate on the ethical issues raised by the forthcoming widespread use of robots, particularly in domestic settings. Research shows that humans can sometimes become very abusive towards computers and robots particularly when they are seen as humanlike....

Ron Chrisley: Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:45:00 GMT

I am in the final stages of preparing a draft entry (3,000 words) with the above title for the Oxford Companion to Consciousness. I'd like to run my draft past the group for comments and suggestions. Note that my topic is *not* "machine consciousness"....

Mike Beaton: Qualia and Our Access to Them

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:45:00 GMT

I will briefly recap the notion of pain in David Lewis's famous (but controversial) Mad Pain and Martian Pain. I will point out that it is basically the same notion as in the Churchland's Functionalism, Qualia and Intentionality....

Joel Parthemore: What Is a Concept? - Reframing the Question

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Our interaction with the world is largely driven, it might appear, by our conceptual experience of it: I look in front of me and I cannot see the individual pixels that, in some sense, make up the content of my retinal array; once I have learned what such things are, I cannot help but see....

Alexandros Zographakis: Towards a Phenomenological Account of Intelligibility

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:50:00 GMT

After giving a short exposition of Kathleen Stock's key points in "Fiction and Psychological Insight" (M. Kieran and D. McIver Lopes eds., Knowing Art: Essays in Aesthetics and Epistemology, pp. 51-66, 2006), I will examine in detail the notion of "intelligibility" in fiction....

Leslie Marsh: Stigmergic Cognition

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:35:00 GMT

A stigmergic conceptualization of social theory offers a theoretical unification of the cognitive and the epistemological in matters of sociality....

Tom Froese: Hume and the Enactive Approach to Life and Mind

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 16:35:00 GMT

In a previous E-Int talk I related Hume's writings on life and mind to some key elements of enactive cognitive science. Drawing on this work, I will attempt to illuminate both Hume's account of personal identity and the enactive approach to organismic identity....

Simon Bowes: Bodily Functions - Embodied Mental States and Their Subservience Bases

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:45:00 GMT

The debate about reduction of 'special scientific' kinds to physical scientific kinds between Fodor and Kim is couched in terms of natural kinds, supervenience and multiple realization....

Ron Chrisley: Best Intensions

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:20:00 GMT

There is an attractive way to explain representation in terms of adaptivity: roughly, an item R represents a state of affairs S if it has the proper function of co-occurring with S (that is, if the ancestors of R co-occurred with S and this co-occurrence explains why R was selected for, and thus why R exists now (cf Millikan). Although this may be an adequate account of the extension or reference of R, what such explanations often neglect is an account of the intension or sense of R....

Alexandros Zographakis: The Work of Art as a Cognitive Trail

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 14:45:00 GMT

Have you ever felt puzzled because the person looking at you had a 'Mona Lisa smile' on his/her face? Did you ever catch yourself staring at a woman with a 'Rubenesque figure'? Are things very rough lately and maybe you think you're living a 'Kafkaesque nightmare'?...

Tom Beament: Two Conceptions of Consciousness

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Thu, 31 May 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Approaches to understanding the nature of conscious experience can be grouped into two broad categories. Following John Campbell (Reference and Consciousness, 2002) I will refer to these approaches as "The Relational View" and "The Representational View." The Relational View conceives of consciousness as fundamentally a matter of a relation to the world...

Joel Parthemore: In Search of the Concept of Concept

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 25 May 2007 16:30:00 GMT

I attended a workshop this past weekend in Copenhagen, titled CONCEPTS: Content and Constitution. Peter Gardenfors, Jose Luiz Bermudez, Greg Ashby, Ruth Millikan, Jesse Prinz, and Daniel Dennett all presented their overlapping ideas about just what a concept is. I will present all their different concepts of concept within the context of my own exploration of concept content....

Mike Beaton: Who's Representing What to Whom? (aka Inman Was Right)

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 20:45:00 GMT

When I first came here, Inman Harvey spent a long time trying to explain to me that the notion of representation was intrinsically homuncular, and that the notion of inner representation was conceptually flawed. This is my 'Inman was right' talk. (Though I don't yet know whether Inman will agree with anything I say.)....

Ron Chrisley: Varieties of Depiction for Synthetic Phenomenology

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sun, 20 May 2007 14:05:00 GMT

Not all research in machine consciousness aims to instantiate phenomenal states in artifacts. For example, there is work that uses artifacts that do not themselves have phenomenal states, merely to simulate or model organisms that do....

Rob Clowes: Transparency and Agency in Inner Speech

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sun, 20 May 2007 18:55:00 GMT

What is inner speech? How does its phenomenological aspect relate to its functional and representational aspects? Does inner speech play a special role in our inner-lives, and if so, how can we characterise it?...

Steve Torrance: Body-Mind/Fact-Value - How Do the Two Problems Interrelate?

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 16:50:00 GMT

I examine the relationship between controversies over the nature of conscious experience and controversies over the foundation for ethics. I explore parallels between the two areas and some ways in which the two fields are entangled....

Alexandros Zographakis: Art, Perception, and the Possibilities of Body

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 19:05:00 GMT

Margaret Boden in "Crafts, Perception, and the Possibilities of the Body (British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 40, 3, July 2000) contrasts "art" and "craft" through specific psychological theories of perception, namely "indicative" and "enactive" ones. The former put an emphasis on thought, memory, and emotion whereas the latter on "fundamental" and "primitive" bodily movements and "affordances"....

Duncan Kuhns: Edward's Dictum and the Supervenience Argument

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 19:45:00 GMT

...Or: Problems with the metaphysical approach to causality.

Blay Whitby: Transhumanism - Do We Want to Go All the Way to Ongar?

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:20:00 GMT

Contemporary transhumansim encompasses a wide and growing set of both moral and technological claims. In this talk I will provide some vectors along which we might meaningfully describe some of those claims as 'extreme' ; rather than merely strange or unusual. I will also attempt to identify some claims as the core claims of transhumanism.... (Note that the first two minutes of this podcast are missing due to recording problems.)

Simon Bowes: On Planet Pluto - How Scientists Decide the Extension of Natural Kind Terms

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 14:05:00 GMT

Last year something fascinating happened in the world of science (fascinating at least to those interested in natural kind terms). A bunch of experts got together to decide whether Pluto was a planet or not, and therefore to determine the demarcation criteria for the natural kind term 'planet'....

Rob Clowes: The Complex Vehicles of Human Thought

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 23:17:00 GMT

It is often now held as obvious that what we need in the cognitive sciences is an evolutionary account of the human mind. It is also sometimes claimed that mind, consciousness and even language are biological phenomena. I think such claims are based on misunderstandings about the limits of current and probably future biological sciences. I will further argue it is possible and indeed fruitful to hold such a position while cleaving to naturalism....

Marek McGann: Is There a Social Modality of Perception?

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:30:00 GMT

Our intuitive understandings of sensation and perception are dramatically challenged by the group of related approaches to cognitive science that are sometimes collected under the term "enactive". One issue that has arisen in that literature, but which has thus far been given little attention, is the fact that such enactive approaches to perception offer a new conception of sensory and perceptual modalities....

Tony Morse: On the Role(s) of Synthetic Modelling in Cognitive Science

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 20:40:00 GMT

Synthetic modelling is just one method of empirical hypothesis testing available to today's cognitive scientists. Just as physicists may construct a particle accelerator in order to investigate the properties of sub-atomic particles, researchers in the cognitive sciences are increasingly turning to computer simulations and robotics to aid them in their quest for understanding cognition and its underlying mechanisms.

Ron Chrisley: Epistemic Consistency and Knowledge-Based Systems

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 22:10:00 GMT

One traditional methodology within AI has been the construction of knowledge-based systems (KBSs). At the heart of a KBS is a database of sentences in a formal language, with a formal semantics. The idea is that the existence in the database of a sentence S that means P is meant to model believing P....

Simon McGregor: Are Our Everyday Mentalistic Concepts Too Coarse-Grained for AI?

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 12:40:00 GMT

This talk explores the idea of a 'domain of coherence' for concepts, outside of which the concept is no longer safely applicable and finer-grained distinctions are needed. I will suggest that notions like life, agency, cognition, beliefs and so on have an everyday domain of coherence, and that AI may operate outside that domain.

Alexandros Zographakis: An Ecological Approach to Aesthetics

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:00:00 GMT

Can the enactive theory put forth by Alva Noe and Kevin O'Regan provide us with a radical framework for the understanding of the notion of aesthetic experience? Can the study of aesthetic experience, in turn, provide us with insights for perceptual experience in general? My aim will be to provide a non-conceptual, sensorimotor unpacking of the notion of aesthetic experience....

Dustin Stokes and Jon Bird: Evolving Fractal Drawings

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 16:10:00 GMT

We are using an evolutionary robotics approach to generate minimal models of creativity. Our preliminary simulation results demonstrate that this methodology can produce robots that mark their environments and interact with the lines that they have made. These simulated robots possess a "no strings attached" form of agency....

Joel Parthemore: Conceptual Building Blocks

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 22:10:00 GMT

The limitations in the Cyc approach to knowledge representation are well known and much commented upon -- even though Cycorp's stated goal remains to "create the world's first true artificial intelligence, having both common sense and the ability to reason with it." What exactly though are the problems, if any, with Cyc and its approach to knowledge representation?...

Steve Torrance: The Ethical Status of Artificial Agents

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 14:40:00 GMT

Artificial (or Machine) Ethics and Artificial (or Machine) Consciousness are both relatively new fields allied to AI. What is 'Artificial Ethics' (AE)? One should we distinguish between AE and what is sometimes called 'Techno-ethics'....

Blay Whitby: Ethical Issues in Human-Robot Interaction

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 15:35:00 GMT

It not a conclusion of this paper that work in improving human-robot interaction should be prevented or delayed. It is an area that has great potential social benefits. However, despite the tremendous usefulness of this sort of technology, the current failure to address ethical issues has potentially serious consequences. These include the unintentional limitation of human freedom, the reinforcement of existing power structures, and the forcing of designers' views as to what is appropriate on to especially vulnerable humans.

Simon Bowes: Human Kinds

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 09:45:00 GMT

In the presentation I gave at the Symposium on Language, Communication and Cognition in June I argued that kind terms in cognitive science were distinct from those in other sciences because of the kinds of self-referential feedback that occurs when minds try to understand themselves. Recently, I gave found that similar considerations are used by Ian Hacking to argue that 'human kinds' are not natural kinds. I will be looking at Rachael Cooper's refutation of Hacking's argument.

Mike Beaton: The Boundaries of the Conceptual

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:18:00 GMT

Non-conceptualists argue that, to make room for consciousness in animals and pre-linguistic humans, and to do justice to our own introspected conscious experience, it is necessary to admit the existence of contents of experience (i.e., "ways things seem") which cannot be described solely in terms of the concepts (if any) being employed by the animal or human having the experience. I will argue for the alternate view: conceptualism.

Ron Chrisley: Synthetic Phenomenology

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:18:00 GMT

An important, but relatively neglected, aspect of machine models of consciousness is the requirement for a scientific phenomenology, or systematic means of characterizing the experiential states being modeled.

Blay Whitby: Do Robots Need Emotions?

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 01:58:00 GMT

This talk challenges the necessity of cognition involving emotion. It is, in principle at least, possible to construct intelligent machinery with no emotional faculties at all.

Joel Parthemore: Resemblance Redux

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 17:18:00 GMT

Ever since the E-Intentionality talk that I gave last November, I have been struggling with the question of whether, as someone inclined toward concept empiricism, the account of reference I want to give is resemblance-based.

Marzieh Asgari-Targhi: Babies Do Not Play Dice, Either!

jep25@sussex.ac.uk (Joel Parthemore) — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 18:22:00 GMT

Gopnik et al (2004) suggest that there is evidence that infants and children have the prerequisites for making causal inferences consistent with a causal Bayes net learning algorithm.

MA Presentations