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 by Neil Van Leeuwen who talks about his recent research with Larisa Heiphetz on the differences in meanings between "think" and "believe". For related research by Heiphetz and Van Leeuwen, see  here ,  here , and  here .  Neil Van Leeuwen Do “think” and “believe” mean the same thing? Consider two sentences: Jill believes that God exists. Jill thinks that a lake bigger than Lake Michigan exists. Both sentences attribute mental states to Jill. And each breaks down into an  attitude  (thinks/ believes) and a  content  (that God… / that a lake…). So we can sharpen our question: if we set the contents aside, do the words “thinks” and “believes” convey the same attitude type (or manner of processing)? Many philosophers and cognitive scientists talk and write as if the answer were  yes —as if the words “think” and “believe” were interchangeable, at least in propositional attitude reports (i.e., as if “thinks that  p ” and “belie...