Public Dialogues

YHouse continues its program of lectures, events, and conversations on exciting and provocative topics at a number of venues around New York City.

Consciousness Club NYC

YHouse invites you to the Consciousness Club, a study group to promote broadly transdisciplinary discussions on the neural and computational bases of consciousness, and how these concepts can be applied to other fields of interest. Our weekly meetings are for you if you are into awareness, science, technology, philosophy, art, and design.

For more information and meeting schedule, check out our Facebook page, or tune in to our Twitter updates.

Although the meetings are open to all, we encourage technical and scientific discussions for this series of meetings.

Cognition Lunch Salon

YHouse continues to organize informal Lunch Salon events hosted by the Program in Interdisciplinary Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, 1 Einstein Drive, Princeton, N.J., West Building Seminar Room, 2nd floor. The format is an informal chat, followed by longer open-ended discussions among the participants, on the topic of consciousness and cognition. This event is by invitation only. To request an invitation, please email us at info@yhousenyc.org

With Dr. Ryota Kanai (Araya, Inc., Tokyo)

The notion that consciousness is a natural phenomenon suggests that consciousness is subject to a set of yet to be uncovered laws of nature. However, conditions in which consciousness occurs remain elusive. Here, I discuss existing literature in psychology and neuroscience and propose that a key function of consciousness is the ability to internally generate sensory representations of counterfactual environments. Counterfactual representations endow an agent with a variety of cognitive functions such as intention, imagination, planning, short-term memory, attention, curiosity, and creativity, all of which contribute to behavioral flexibility and efficient learning. I illustrate how counterfactual representations are linked with generative models in AI research and top-down predictions in biological brains. The information generation theory provides new perspectives on the relationship between information and consciousness.
 

WeWork Park South, New York, NY

Wednesday, June 28, 6 p.m.
Registration required