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In episode 102 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Peter Tse.Professor Tse is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and chair of the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on using brain and behavioral data to constrain models of the neural bases of attention and consciousness, unconscious processing that precedes and constructs consciousness, mental causation, and human capacities for imagination and creativity. He is especially interested in the processing that goes into the construction of conscious experience between retinal activation at time 0 and seeing an event about a third of a second later.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (01:45) Prof. Tse's background* (03:25) Early experiences in physics/math and philosophy of physics* (06:10) Choosing to study neuroscience* (07:15) Prof Tse's commitments about determinism* (10:00) Quantum theory and determinism* (13:45) Biases/preferences in choosing theories* (20:41) Falsifiability and scientific questions, transition from physics to neuroscience* (30:50) How neuroscience is unusual among the sciences* (33:20) Neuroscience and subjectivity* (34:30) Reductionism* (37:30) Gestalt psychology* (41:30) Introspection in neuroscience* (45:30) The preconscious buffer and construction of conscious experience, color constancy* (53:00) Perceptual and cognitive inference* (55:00) AI systems and intrinsic meaning* (57:15) Information vs. meaning* (1:01:45) Consciousness and representation of bodily states* (1:05:10) Our second-order free will* (1:07:20) Jaegwon Kim's exclusion argument* (1:11:45) Why Kim thought his own argument was wrong* (1:15:00) Resistance and counterarguments to Kim* (1:19:45) Criterial causation* (1:23:00) How neurons evaluate inputs criterially* (1:24:00) Concept neurons in the hippocampus* (1:31:57) Criterial causation and physicalism, mental causation* (1:40:10) Daniel makes another attempt to push back
What does it even mean to be aware of something, to be conscious? Why do the vast majority of people only have one consciousness? Will computers ever experience consciousness? On this Bingecast, Dr. Robert J. Marks and Dr. Angus Menuge discuss these questions and more. Show Notes 00:01:36 | Introducing Dr. Angus Menuge 00:07:02 | Near-death experiences 00:10:32 | The… Source
The mind-body problem is much like the chicken-and-egg dilemma: Which came first? In today’s episode, Dr. Robert J. Marks sits down with Dr. Angus Menuge to discuss the basics of the mind-body problem, its philosophical history, and whether artificial intelligence ever has a chance at truly replicating the human mind. Show Notes 01:12 | Introducing Dr. Angus Menuge, professor and… Source
The mind-body problem is much like the chicken-and-egg dilemma: Which came first? In today’s episode, Dr. Robert J. Marks sits down with Dr. Angus Menuge to discuss the basics of the mind-body problem, its philosophical history, and whether artificial intelligence ever has a chance at truly replicating the human mind. Show Notes 01:12 | Introducing Dr. Angus Menuge, professor and… Source
In honor of the recent passing of contemporary philosopher Jaegwon Kim, Connor and Dan discuss the Brown University professor's thoughts on physicalism, the mind-body problem, and the difficult problems of philosophy. It's good stuff! But, as usual, they spend the opening ten minutes alienating everyone and everything.
Roland Poellinger (MCMP/LMU) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (14 May, 2014) titled "The Mind-Brain Entanglement". Abstract: Listing "The Nonreductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation" (1993) Jaegwon Kim suggested that the only remaining alternatives are the eliminativist’s standpoint or plain denial of the mind’s causal powers if we want to uphold the closure of the physical and reject causal overdetermination at the same time. Nevertheless, explaining stock market trends by referring to investors’ fear of loss is a very familiar example of attributing reality to both domains and acknowledging the mind’s interaction with the world: "if you pick a physical event and trace its causal ancestry or posterity, you may run into mental events" (Kim 1993). In this talk I will use the formal framework of Bayes net causal models in an interventionist understanding (as devised, e.g., by Judea Pearl in "Causality", 2000) to make the concept of causal influence precise. Investigating structurally similar cases of conflicting causal intuitions will motivate a natural extension of the interventionist Bayes net framework, Causal Knowledge Patterns, in which our intuition that the mind makes a difference finds an expression.
In this episode we interview Zhong Lei, assistant professor of philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, on mental causation and Jaegwon Kim’s so-called causal exclusion argument. Here is an edited text version of the interview. For more on this topic see: Philosophy and Science of Mind Encyclopedia Entry …
Roland Poellinger (MCMP/LMU) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (14 May, 2014) titled "The Mind-Brain Entanglement". Abstract: Listing "The Nonreductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation" (1993) Jaegwon Kim suggested that the only remaining alternatives are the eliminativist’s standpoint or plain denial of the mind’s causal powers if we want to uphold the closure of the physical and reject causal overdetermination at the same time. Nevertheless, explaining stock market trends by referring to investors’ fear of loss is a very familiar example of attributing reality to both domains and acknowledging the mind’s interaction with the world: "if you pick a physical event and trace its causal ancestry or posterity, you may run into mental events" (Kim 1993). In this talk I will use the formal framework of Bayes net causal models in an interventionist understanding (as devised, e.g., by Judea Pearl in "Causality", 2000) to make the concept of causal influence precise. Investigating structurally similar cases of conflicting causal intuitions will motivate a natural extension of the interventionist Bayes net framework, Causal Knowledge Patterns, in which our intuition that the mind makes a difference finds an expression.