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…
Do you think in images? Sometimes … always?
The most obvious types of mental representation are our own conscious perceptual states: seeing an apple on the table or imagining a flock of sheep on a mountainside. Many philosophers have thought that we also have a more abstract kind of mental representation: concepts, which compose together to make up…
RSA Lunchtime Seminar
What is Consciousness Good For? I’ll be talking about that question in conversation with Barry Smith in the RSA’s popular Thursday lunchtime seminar series: Thursday 14th July 2016 at 13:00 – 14:00 Durham Street Auditorium, RSA House I’ll present some of the questions the project has been grappling with over the…
What Does Consciousness Do For Us? – Ideas
Many thanks to so many for stopping by to talk to the team at the Cheltenham Science Festival on Saturday. We demonstrated a typical experimental paradigm to many keen volunteers (gathering some useful data in the process) and talked to many more about consciousness and the mind. The question of…
Cheltenham Science Festival
We’ll be at the Cheltenham Science Festival on Saturday 11th June. As well as having members of the team on hand to talk about the project, we’ll be asking looking for volunteers to take part in an ongoing experiment. This will give us an valuable new dataset for the project. More…
New paper: ‘type 0’ cognition
As well as trying to characterise meaning or representational content in relatively simple information processing systems in the brain, we’re also interested in identifying ways that information processing is different in more complex cases. Clearly consciousness may make a difference, as we’ve discussed already. Another popular way of distinguishing between…
What is this “personal level” and why does it make a difference to meaning?
A preliminary issue for the project is to characterise the difference between the personal level and subpersonal levels. We don’t need to take this to be a clear or hard-and-fast distinction. ‘Personal level’ is just shorthand for having one or more of a number of more sophisticated features that we…
Meaning: Easier and Harder Cases
The project is about two things. The first is the nature of representational content in some simple systems that make use of representations. Here the focus is largely on representations invoked in information processing explanations in cognitive science. For example, in cognitive science we explain a person’s rapid choices between…
