Event Timeslots (1)

Wednesday
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Mental Representations are the central theoretical posit in cognitive science and psychology. On the one hand, we attribute beliefs and desires as well as perceptual states to ourselves and others every day, partly to make sense of our behavior. These can be considered personal-level representations, some of which we are often even conscious of. Beliefs can be directed at the world or can be about things that do not even exist. On the other hand, scientists regularly posit mental and neural representations in the brain and postulate that brain processes are about or stand in for things in the world. The Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded twice for work in this area, to David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in 1981 for their research on information processing in the brain, and in 2014 to Maybrit and Edvard Moser together with John O'Keefe for their discovery of place cells in the brain, considered a kind of neural GPS system that keeps track of the animal's location. These are just two examples for what may be called subpersonal neuronal representations. More recently, philosophers and scientists have started discussing the existence and nature of representations in artificial systems like Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, these concepts of representations are still poorly understood and raise many questions. How should we think of these entities? What is their place in nature? Are they observable, or at least assessable and manipulable using the research methods available in the cognitive sciences? Can LLMs teach us anything about the nature of mental representations in humans? This research-oriented colloquium will be devoted to such questions and will take place entirely online on zoom as we will be reading and discussing very recent texts on the topic that represent the state-of-the-art of philosophical research on representations, which is not restricted to mental representations, but also involves neural representations and representations in artifical systems. The seminar sessions will involve talks by the philosophers and scientists themselves, and we expect students to join the session prepared with their questions to the authors, and thus having read the text carefully beforehand. This is a unique opportunity to engage with state-of-the-art research and we welcome all interested students. A background and some familiarity with Philosophy of Mind and/or Cognitive Science is resirable. Preparatory Reading: Krzysztof Dolega, Tobias Schlicht (2022) Mental Content. In: B. Young, C. D. Jennings (Eds.), Mind, Cognition, and Neuroscience. A philosophical introduction. London: Routledge. (available in the accompanying Moodle Course)