Tuesday, 27.6.2023: 14.30-16.00 Uhr,
Location (hybrid): GA 04/187 Mercatorraum und online via Zoom:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89147315543?pwd=aTNPMzdJdkhZbFluUXJKeHp5emVNQT09
Prof. Cameron Buckner, University of Houston (USA)
Fellow-Lecture
Theory of Attention and Artificial Intelligence: Ideational Preparation Is All You Need – Deep Learning Meets William James’ Theory of Attention
Abstract: Deep learning is a research area in computer science that has over the last ten years produced a series of transformative breakthroughs in artificial intelligence—creating systems that can recognize complex objects in natural photographs as well or better than humans, defeat human grandmasters in strategy games such as chess, Go, or Starcraft II, create bodies of novel text that sometimes are indistinguishable from those produced by humans, and predict how proteins will fold more accurately than human microbiologists who have devoted their lives to the task. The artificial neural network approach behind deep learning is usually aligned with empiricist theories of the mind, which can be traced back to philosophers such as Locke and Hume.
Contemporary rationalists like Gary Marcus and Jerry Fodor have criticized the innovations behind some of these breakthroughs, because they appeal to innate structure which is supposed to be off-limits to empiricists. I argue that these innovations are consistent with historical empiricism, however, as they implement roles attributed to domain-general psychological faculties like perception, memory, imagination, and attention, which were frequently invoked by paradigm empiricists in their explanations of the mind’s ability to extract abstractions from sensory experience. Computer scientists may benefit by reviewing these philosophers’ accounts of these faculties, for they anticipated many of the coordination and control problems that will confront deep learning theorists as they aim to bootstrap their models to greater levels of cognitive complexity using more ambitious
architectures with multiple interacting faculty modules. In this talk, I focus on William James’ account of attention in the Principles of Psychology by comparing the roles he assigned to attention in the extraction of abstract knowledge from experience to the innovations behind many recent architectures in deep learning. Despite numerous alignments, I argue that deep learning still has much to gain by considering other aspects of James’ theory which have not yet been fully implemented, especially the “ideational preparation” component of his theory, which aligns more naturally with predictive processing accounts of cognition.
10:30: Barbara Tillmann (Laboratory for Research on Learning and Development, Université de Bourgogne
Predictions in music, speech and beyond
11:30: Sam Wilkinson (Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology, University of Exeter
Basic control in cognition and psychopathology
31st May 2023 in GA 2/41 and online
https://ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom.us/j/63955014921?pwd=VWIzN0hBMzkybDBkQmNFRmZHQ01EQT09
Meeting-ID: 639 5501 4921
Passwort: 313364
Monday, June 5th – Tuesday, June 6th, 2023
RUB, Sitzungszimmer HG
(Seminar room in the mensa building / level of the Café bar)
Keynotes online via Zoom
Organizers: Brian McLaughlin (Rutgers, New Brunswick, Dept. of Philosophy), Sen Cheng (RUB, Institute for Neuroinformatics), and Albert Newen (RUB, Institute of Philosophy II)
Monday, June 5th, 2023
DAY 1: Philosophy of Language, Mind and Science
Chair person: Robert Matthews, Rutgers
9:10 – 9:15 Welcome by Albert Newen
9.15 – 10.25 Keynote I – Mark Sprevak “In what sense do large language models understand what they say?”
10.25 – 11.10 AG McGee “Deterministic Doxastic Wrongings’”
11.10 – 11.40 Coffee Break
Chair person: Kristina Liefke, RUB
11.40 – 12.50 Keynote II: Dunja Šešelja “Towards epistemically responsible fact-checking of scientific claims
12.50 – 14.20 Lunch
Chair person: Brian McLaughlin, Rutgers
14.20 – 15.20 Keynote III: Francesco Marchi “The Rationality of Mental Imagery”
15.20 – 16.05 Julia Wolf: “Before Belief – Knowledge and Pretend Play”
16.05 – 16.30 Coffee Break
16.30 – 17.15 Alfredo Vernazzani & Andrew Rubner “In Defense of a Bundle View of Perceptual Content”
17.15 – 18.25 Keynote IV – Frances Egan ““Belief and its Linguistic Representation”
19.00 Dinner
Tuesday, June 6th, 2023
DAY 2: Memory: An interdisciplinary approach
Chair person: Sen Cheng, RUB
9.00 – 10.10 Keynote V – Markus Werning “Predicting the Past From Minimal Traces: Episodic Memory Without Storage”
10.10 – 10.55 Roy Dings “What does it mean to accurately remember? Towards an account of situated authenticity in episodic memory.”
10.55 – 11.20 Coffee Break
11.20 – 12.30 Keynote VI – Pernille Hemmer “The Memorability of Supernatural Concepts”
12.30 – 14.00 Lunch
Chair person: Pernille Hemmer, Rutgers
14.00 – 14.45 Sophie Siestrup “The influence of structure and content modification in episodic cueing on brain activity and memory”
14.45 – 15.30 Sandhiya Vijayabaskaran “How artificial agents learn and represent spatial behaviours”
15.30 – 15.50 Coffee Break
15.50 – 17.00 Keynote VII – Albert Newen “Memory, Self and selfless memories”
Remark: The keynote talks (but only those) will be available online. Please use the following Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86215674920?pwd=cFV1dWhXanNra2RNakkvWERXWmVtUT09
In the 3rd RUB-UFMG Workshop in Philosophy of Mind and of Cognitive Science, philosophers from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais will discuss topics that include mind-body dualism, predictive processing and consciousness, the interface between perception and action, and conceptualism about perceptual content.
Each talk lasts for 30′ followed by a 10′ commentary and an open Q&A of 20′. The workshop is an online event. All talks will be streamed via Zoom.
14:30 – 15:30 Prof. Bruno Souza (UFMG) – Challenging Dualism and Brain-Centered Monism
Commentator: Wanja Wiese (RUB)
15:30 – 16:30 Gabriele Ferretti (RUB) – A Distinction Concerning Vision-for-Action and Affordance Perception
Commentator: Felipe Nogueira de Carvalho (UFMG)
14:30 – 15:30 Prof. Tobias Schlicht (RUB) – Predictive Processing and Consciousness
Commentator: Marco Aurélio Sousa Alves
15:30 – 16:30 Daniel Debarry (UFMG) – Conceptual Capacities and the Unity of Perception
Commentator: Alfredo Vernazzani (RUB)
All times are CET!
The workshop is an online event. All talks will be streamed via Zoom. Further information can be found on our website.
Workshop – Fr. the 2nd of June 2023 – Ruhr-Universität Bochum / Veranstaltungszentrum – Saal 3
Organized by: Suilin Lavelle (University of Edinburgh) & Tobias Schlicht (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
Zoom-Link: Please send an email to Firuze.Mullaoglu@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
