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…
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…
