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This cross-disciplinary symposium on the nature and implications of human and artificial autonomy was organised by Anastasia Christakou and held at the Henley Business School at the University of Reading on 8th May 2019. Josh Bongard (University of Vermont) opened the workshop presenting his research in robotics, where he and his team challenge the Cartesian assumption that body and brain are separate by simulating first, and creating then robots that have body plans adapting to changes in morphology. Bongard also addressed important questions about AI safety and AI ethics. Based on a recent publication on Machine Behaviour in Nature , he argued that we should treat machine behaviour in the same way as we treat animal behaviour, as something that evolves. Next Emma Borg (University of Reading) presented a paper on understanding agency in other people and in ourselves. She started comparing two accounts of how we explain and predict the agency of others, behaviour-reading and mind-re...

Today’s post was written by  Shannon Spaulding , Assistant Professor of  Philosophy at   Oklahoma State University . Her general philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and the philosophy of science.  The principal goal of her research is to construct a philosophically and empirically plausible account of social cognition. She also has research interests in imagination, pretense, and action theory. Here she introduces her new book,  “How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition” . A question that has long interested me is how we understand others – that is, what are the cognitive processes that underlie successful social understanding and interaction – and what happens when we misunderstand others. In philosophy and the cognitive sciences, the orthodox view is that understanding and interacting with others is partly underwritten by mindreading, the capacity to make sense of intentional behavior in terms of me...

Mind Reading is the yearly conference of the collaboration between UCD Child & Adolescent Psychiatry , researchers at the University ofBirmingham , and the Diseases of Modern Life and Constructing Scientific Communities Projects at St Anne's College, Oxford. Organised by Elizabeth Barrett (Consultant in Liaison Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Children’s University Hospital) and Melissa Dickson (Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham) the conference, and project more generally, focuses on two simple questions: Do doctors and patients speak the same language, and how can we use literature to bridge the evident gaps? In what follows, I summarise just some of the talks and workshop sessions. How do cultural norms and expectations shape diagnosis and the experience of illness?  Melissa Dickson  showed us that, in 19th Century Britain, there were multiple literary and medical accounts of a psychosis-like state brought about by…green tea. It was ...