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...

Today's post is written by Helen de Cruz . Helen is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University , UK. Her publications are in empirically-informed Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Religion, Social Epistemology, and Metaphilosophy.  Helen's overarching research project is an investigation of how human engage in thinking about abstract domains such as Theology, Mathematics, and Science, what it means for limited, embodied beings like us to think about these topics, and what epistemic conclusions we can draw from this. Here, she introduces her new book " Religious Disagreement ". I find myself frequently in disagreement about religion with academic colleagues and friends and family. Given that I'm a philosopher of religion, this is not surprising. But my experiences are far from unique: religious disagreement is widespread even among quite homogeneous religious communities. There is disagreement both between and within religious communiti...

This post is by Marc Wittmann , Research Fellow at the Institute of Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Here, he writes about his new book on altered states of consciousness. Subjective time emerges through the existence of the self across time as an enduring and embodied entity. This is clearly revealed in everyday states of consciousness such as transiently being in states of boredom or flow. An increased awareness of the self is associated with an increased awareness of time when we are bored. In contrast, we lose track of time and the self when fully immersed in challenging activities accompanied by the feeling of enjoyment – experienced in the state of flow. The relation between self-awareness and time is even more prominently disclosed in anecdotal reports and empirical studies on altered states of consciousness such as in meditative states, in music-induced trance, and after ingestion of psychedelic substances. In peak states the experience of ‘t...