What is consciousness for? What difference does it make to what humans can do? That question will be familiar to those who came to the events at the RSA or the RI last year. It’s a question that we keep coming up against in this project. In this new podcast,…
Dennett Debate
Daniel Dennett is a pioneering philosopher and cognitive scientist whose work encompasses all of the project’s themes and much more besides. Professor Dennett has a new book coming out next month that draws together all of his major philosophical views and presents them as a single interconnected package. I’ll be…
Representations of Space
In two of our previous podcasts, Jesse Prinz and Peter Godfrey-Smith offered philosophical perspectives on the idea of mental representation. In this new podcast Professor Kate Jeffery discusses the data showing that some organisms really do use mental representations in dealing adaptively with the world. Some of the strongest evidence…
RI event – What’s the use of consciousness?
Many thanks to the packed audience of over 400 people at the consciousness event at the RI last night. At the risk of channelling the Monty Python team — when we asked ‘what has consciousness ever done for us?’ — we got lots of answers. Surprisingly, none of…
RSA Event Video
The video of our Thursday lunchtime seminar at the RSA is now available here: https://www.thersa.org/discover/videos/event-videos/2016/07/what-is-consciousness-good-for
Uncontrollable laughter?
The third Mind Bites podcast features neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott being interviewed about her research on laughter. Laughter is such a common part of everyday life. But it is surprisingly little-studied and turns out to have a rich complexity that belies its familiarity. Sophie Scott is a leading expert on…
RI event: What’s the use of consciousness?
One of the questions repeatedly thrown up in working on this project is the following: what’s the use of consciousness? We discussed some preliminary project findings about this at the RSA lunchtime seminar in the summer. This autumn, we have brought together a wider interdisciplinary panel of experts to give their own…
Does an inner map call for an inner map-reader?
One of the central concerns of the project is to get a better understanding of the nature of mental representation. But what are mental representations? Should we even accept the idea that there are representations in the head? In the second Mind Bites podcast, Professor Peter Godfrey-Smith examines what it…
New paper: representation in game theoretic models of communication
One way to understand a phenomenon is to build mathematical or computational models that capture some of its key features. Recent years have seen this approach applied productively to the task of understanding communication and signalling. Brian Skyrms and his collaborators exemplify the value of this approach. They construct game…
Consciousness and altruism
This week, I continue to discuss ideas from participants at the Cheltenham science festival as to what consciousness might be for. Another theme that emerged from discussions is the idea that consciousness facilitates altruistic or social behaviour. Here are some of those suggestions. “Consciousness is why we look out for…