testingflink

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. You can find a report on the first part of the workshop here . First talk in the second half of the workshop was by Daniel Dennett  (Tufts) and Keith Frankish  (Sheffield), exploring how we can build up to consciousness and autonomy. They endorsed an "engineering approach" to solving hard philosophical problems, such as the problem of consciousness, and asked: How can we get a drone to do interesting things? For instance, recognise things? We can start by supposing that it has sensors for recognising and responding to stimuli. There will also be a hierarchy of feature detectors and a suite of controllers who will take multiple inputs and vary outputs depending on their combination and strength. When it comes to action selection and conflict resolut...

In this post,  Catherine Bortolon ,  Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology  at University Grenoble Alpes, France, and  Stéphane Raffard , Professor of Clinical Psychology at University Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France, discuss their paper “ The contribution of optimism and hallucinations to grandiose delusions in individuals with schizophrenia ” recently published in Schizophrenia Research. We are interested in the psychological mechanisms that might contribute to psychotic experiences (e.g., delusional ideas) in individuals with and without a mental disorder. Recently, we become more interested in grandiose ideas (or delusions), which are defined as false beliefs about inflated worth, power, knowledge, identity, and which are firmly held despite evidence of the contrary ( APA, 2013 ). It might include the belief of having a special power such as mind reading, a special identity such as being a king or related to Kurt Cobain, and in terms of knowledge, it can in...

This post is about a paper by Andrea Polonioli, Sophie Stammers and myself, recently appeared in  Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger , where we ask whether some common biases have any benefits for individuals or groups. Our behaviour as agents can have a multiplicity of goals. These might be pragmatic in nature (for example, fulfilling practical goals such as being well fed). They might be psychological in nature (for example, increasing wellbeing or reducing anxiety). They might also be epistemic in nature, and have to do with the attainment of true beliefs about ourselves or the world. Epistemologists have identified different notions of epistemic attainment, and different senses in which one can fail epistemically by being doxastically irrational. Doxastic irrationality is the irrationality of beliefs. It does manifest in different ways and comprises: (a) beliefs that do not cohere with each other and violate other basic principles of formal logic or pro- bab...