YHouse continues its program of lectures, events, and conversations on exciting and provocative topics at a number of venues around New York City.
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.
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
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Cognition Lunch Salon
Our format this season 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
Our format this season 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
Our format this season 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
Our format this season 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
Our format this season 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
Our format this season 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
Cognition Lunch Salon: Enthusiasm about Russellian monism
Presenter: Torin Alter (University of Alabama)
Abstract: According to Russellian monism, consciousness is constituted by intrinsic properties that underlie structural properties described by physics. Enthusiasm about this theory is on the rise. Is this enthusiasm justified? I will consider two reasons to think not. One is that the theory offers nothing truly new. The other is that it fails to deliver on its promise to well integrate consciousness into the natural, causal order. I will suggest that neither reason is compelling. I will also suggest that seeing why provides insight into what we should ask of a theory of consciousness and its place in nature.
Presenter: Brian P. McLaughlin (Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science; Director, Rutgers Cognitive Science Center)
Abstract: A number of AI researchers are predicting that there will be sentient robots with human-level intelligence or greater within the next thirty or so years. If this prediction is correct, we face enormously difficult moral and social issues. Status as a moral agent or moral patient depends only on mental abilities. Sentient robots would have moral rights, and so should have legal rights to protect them. Moreover, the sale of robots with intelligence even approaching human-level intelligence would be slavery. There is a tsunami of humanoid robots soon to enter our lives. I argue, however, that the prediction that sentient robots with human-level intelligence will soon be here is based, in part, on a false behaviorist assumption about mentality. Although the tsunami will bring a flood of difficult moral and social issues in its wake, robots rights is not among them. The robots will be devoid of mentality. They could be damaged or destroyed, but neither harmed nor wronged.
Institute of Advanced Study (map)
Presenter: Selmer Bringsjord (Director of the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning Laboratory).
Abstract: Panpsychism, let’s grant, is roughly the view that all the physical stuff in our world is conscious. This view seems to imply that a lot of things are conscious. After all, a lot of physical things exist!—people, pebbles, electrons, meteorites, politicians, umbrellas, llamas…ad indefinitum. On some versions of panpsychism, even some non-physical but existing things are conscious (e.g., you, if you’re a non-physical thing). Yet our view on and theory of consciousness casts an even wider net, for it counts Detective C. Auguste Dupin as not only conscious, but very conscious—and the great sleuth doesn’t even exist: he’s the creation of Edgar Allen Poe, and purely fictional. We explain why Dupin is indeed conscious, and why—on the \Lambda (as opposed to Tononi’s \Phi) measuring system of the degree of consciousness enjoyed by a being—he’s highly so. We also explain (with demos) that some of the artificial agents and robots in our lab are conscious as well, as are some of the fictional machines we’ve conceived, but not yet built.
Presenters: Kenji Doya (Okinawa Institute of Science & Technology, Japan)
Abstract: The standard paradigm in functional brain imaging is to ask subjects to perform tasks requiring a certain computation or not, to see which brain areas are more activated, and to conclude that those areas subserve the computation. However, we do not really know why and how those specific brain areas can be activated and connected when they are needed. As deep learning provides solutions to specific computations like image recognition and language processing, how to select and combine those networks as needed in different tasks and situations is a critical challenge in general and autonomous artificial intelligence. In this talk, we will explore possible anatomical and computational mechanisms that realize modularity and compositionality of the brain.
Open Discussion Led By: Michael Solomon (RWJBarnabas & MSNJ Bioethics Committee) and Olaf Witkowski (Earth-Life Science Institute)
Abstract: We are sharing this article in hopes of stimulating discussion at our Thursday March 8th meeting: "Personal robots are coming into your home. Will they share your family values?" Is it possible to program ethical values in the machines we use and have come to rely on? Can we even agree on fundamentals like “Do unto others...” or “Thou shalt not kill”? Is Diversity an obstacle to finding shared values? Can urban surveillance cameras with facial recognition be used to prevent crime and terrorism, without being used by authoritarian governments to weed out dissent? Can we have Transparency in decision making when no one can determine how neural networks reach conclusions? Ethics choices may not be between good and evil, but more often involve conflicting goods. Can we make better policies and choices with A.I. than we can without it?
Cognition Lunch Salon: Beyond or Not Beyond
Speakers: Catherine Prueitt (George Mason University) and Piet Hut (Institute for Advanced Study)
Abstract: Cat and Piet will continue an ongoing dialogue they started a few weeks ago at Columbia about the notion of exploring the notion of beyond in theory and experiment, in science and contemplation, as well as in daily life. Cat, a philosopher, and Piet, an astrophysicist, share a deep and burning interest in the question of how humans construct and experience the world they live in and themselves who live in it.
Speaker: Hayden Kee
Abstract: To what extent do we require a phenomenological level of description to adequately grasp the behavior of non-human organisms? At one extreme, some versions of autopoietic enactivism endorse a strong phenomenological life-mind continuity thesis, maintaining that wherever we find life, we find also a mind exhibiting the same basic phenomenal interiority as human experience. In this talk, I will argue that this broad application of phenomenological concepts to all living beings, including ones believed to lack sentience, introduces a fateful equivocation into the phenomenological idiom, which is designed to describe sentient experience. But this terminological clarification serves to bring into focus an underlying ontological and methodological issue: autopoietic enactivism (along with other approaches to naturalized phenomenology) is radically incomplete in the absence of a foundational (meta)physics of consciousness.
institute of Advanced Study (map)
Speaker: Christoph Salge (New York University / University of Hertfordshire)
Abstract: Empowerment is a formalization of how much an agent is in control of its own perceivable future. This is captured by the channel capacity from an agent’s actuators to an agent’s sensor at a later point in time. In this short presentation I will briefly introduce the formalism and idea behind empowerment. I will outline how empowerment relates to the concept of intrinsic motivation and show some recent applications that demonstrate the range of behaviours that can be created in different scenarios. In particular, I will talk about recent work looking at coupled empowerment maximisation in a human-AI system – and how this can be used to define some core companion duties.
Speaker: Zhaoping Li (University College London)
Vision is a window to the brain, and I will give a short introduction and demonstrate that it can be seen as mainly a problem of "looking and seeing", which are two separable processes in the brain. Understanding vision requires both experimental and theoretical approaches, and to study the brain using our own brains have its peculiar difficulties.
Speakers: Piet Hut (IAS, Princeton) and Yuko Ishihara (ELSI, Tokyo)
We will start with a quick review of a paper, started by Piet and two (then) postdocs at IAS at the end of the previous century, and finally published in 2006, about the nature of reality: "On Math, Matter and Mind", by Piet Hut, Mark Alford and Max Tegmark. In that paper Piet's position centered on a big question mark in the middle of their central diagram. Now, almost two decades later, Yuko and Piet will investigate that question mark, theoretically and experientially. Theoretically, by comparing various philosophical traditions. Experientially, by starting with Husserl's epoche and considering extensions beyond the subject/object polarization.
Institute of Advanced Studies (map)
Speaker: Michael Solomon, MD
For the past 40 years we have thought of cancer as the result of somatic mutations in nuclear DNA that either block tumor suppressor genes or unblock oncogenes resulting in malignant transformation. But our success in understanding or in treating cancer has been sadly limited.
Speaker: Randall D. Beer (Indiana University)
I will briefly describe two intertwined research programs.
The first concerns issues of embodiment, situatedness and dynamics in understanding how an animal's behavior arises from the interaction between its nervous system, its body and its environment. Specifically, we use genetic algorithms to evolve model brain-body-environment systems and then analyze their operation using the tools of dynamical systems theory and information theory. This approach has been applied to a wide variety of behaviors, including locomotion, action-switching, learning, categorization, selective attention, and referential communication.
Institute of Advanced Study (West Building Seminar Room) (map)
Speaker: Jonathan C. Gold (Princeton University)
Drawing upon (but not dwelling in) my work in Buddhist philosophy, I propose that the Buddhist doctrines of the two truths and the three natures can be understood as expressing and formalizing Occam’s Razor. This provides us with articulate tools to challenge reification of abstract entities and to privilege, always, pragmatic assessments as the defining criteria of reality. When we turn to the nature of consciousness, then, questions around illusionism and the requirements of satisfactory explanations can be made sharper by adopting the strict epistemic modesty that a Buddhist critique entails.
Institute of Advanced Study (West Building Seminar Room) (map)
Smitha Vishveshwara (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
The Universe at the quantum and cosmic scales instills wonder and exercises physical laws quite foreign to the human scale. Here, I share my three interconnected collaborative ventures that explore these two awe-inspiring realms through the arts. One concerns the writing of a popular book on quantum physics and Einstein's relativity in the format of letters between father and daughter. Another relates to science-art creations stemming from an interdisciplinary course, Where the Arts meets Physics. The third involves devising a performance piece entitled Quantum-Cosmic Journeys.
Speaker: Liat Lavi (Bar Ilan University)
In my talk I will present the account of understanding I am developing under the title of 'expectationalism'. The account draws heavily on Jamesian Pragmatism and the thought of Heidegger and Merelau-Ponty. Its central premises are: 1. That the meaning of something is its consequences, and to understand something is to grasp its consequences. and 2. That expectations are not some internal content, but are rather actualized by our bodies.
I will link this account with contemporary approaches in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, and suggest that if the account is correct this implies that strong AI is possible and that limited instances of it already exist.
With Erik Persson (CTI & The Pufendorf Institute of Advanced Studies, Lund)
Abstract: Finding a good definition of ‘Life’ is a task that has turned out to be very difficult. Some say, it is even impossible, or at least meaningless. We believe both that it is possible, and that it is in fact crucial to achieve at least a tentative definition of ‘Life’, especially when searching for the origin of life on our earth or for extraterrestrial life. We are not sure, however, that the classical way of approaching the task of defining ‘Life’, that is, by trying to make a list of necessary properties that together makes up a sufficient set of criteria for being alive (a de redefinition), is the best way of approaching the task, however. The main problem with this type of definition is that it is inherently essentialistic. It is doubtful, however, that life as it is understood today, that is, in Darwinian terms, can be meaningfully said to have an essence. An alternative approach would be Wittgenstein’s family resemblance definition, according to which a concept is defined by a cluster of properties that are associated with the concept. If we use this concept to define Life’ it tells us that something is alive if it has a number of properties that are associated with being alive though it does not have to have all these properties and it does not have to have exactly the same set of properties as any other living entity. In our paper we present an extension of the family resemblance model by combining it with state of the art methods for statistical modelling in the form of cluster analysis. That way we hope to be able to construct the kind of overlapping clusters needed to achieve an informative and practically useful definition of ‘Life’.
Discussion led by Michael Solomon (RWJ Barnabas University Hospital )
Abstract: We will discuss a paper by Will Knight that can be found at the following link: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/. Everyone is invited to read the paper before the lunch, but Michael Solomon will present a synopsis of its contents for the benefit of those who might not have time to do so.
With Andreas Losch (University of Bern)
Abstract: Can the human mind actually control the body? This seems to be an experience we all have every second. Yet doesn’t it imply the existence of a free will to perform its decisions with bodily means? How could this scientifically be imagined, the causal nexus of the physical world provided? Amongst others, Karl Popper and John Eccles – drawing on the ideas of Michael Polanyi and Donald T. Campbell – propagate the idea of a “top-down causation“ as a potential answer. I will discuss the origins, extent and shortcomings of this idea.
With David Fergusson (University of Edinburgh)
The notion of ‘providence’ as divine foresight and provision is present in Stoic and Platonist philosophy. Analogues can be found in other cultures. Adapted by the Christian religion as a central element in belief and piety, this concept of providence was later secularized in a variety of ways. I seek to explore the historical varieties of providentialism and to consider whether a chastened account can be appropriated by contemporary Christianity.
