Minds, Mobs and Memories
Venue
The conference was held in the Main Quad Refectory,
which is downstairs in the southwestern corner of the Main
Quadrangle, at the University of Sydney.
Abstracts
Mental Causation and the Determination
Relation
Peter
Menzies (Macquarie)
Click here
for audio and supplementary material.
Stephen Yablo's influential article "Mental Causation" made an
interesting new move in the philosophical debate about the exclusion
problem about mental causation. He observed that (i) determinables are
not excluded from causal influence by their determinates; and (ii) the
relation of mental properties to their underpinning neural properties
is analogous to, if not identical with, the relationship of
determinables to determinates. In this paper I argue that Yablo's
observations do not have the force that he thought they had.
Nonetheless, his observations point in the direction of a more
satisfactory way of answering the exclusion problem in terms of
contrastive causation.
[back to timetable]
Self-organizing collections and
collective agents
Jenann
Ismael (Sydney)
Click here
for audio and supplementary material.
Advances in understanding self-organization over the past few decades
have led to the temptation to extend it to a model of human cognition.
The extension is supported by new insights in situated cognition and
success in reproducing quite complex behaviors in robots without any
centralized control. Dennett has been a vocal proponent of the
extension, repeatedly invoking analogies with self-organizing systems
and denying the existence of a self, conceived as an inner locus of
information and control. I arguei argue that there is a difference
between self-organizing collections and collectives. Only the latter
are agents. And this difference is crucial for our understanding of
selves.
[back to timetable]
Remembering
together: is there a social ontology of memory?
John
Sutton (Macquarie)
Click here for audio
and supplementary material.
In analysing certain integrated collectivities as group subjects or
institutional persons, Philip Pettit stresses that such collectivities
engage in a social form of self-regulation by collectivizing reason in
the service of rational unity over time. This is an additional and
distinct sign of collective intentionality -- of the existence of a
genuinely plural subject -- over and above the mutual awareness among
group members of any shared beliefs, intentions, and goals. Do either
of these signs of collective intentionality extend to the case of
memory? Consideration of this question is aided by some initial
explorations of: memory's role in the self-regulating individual mind;
the distinctive nature of groups which engage in shared activities of
remembering; the role of memory in the kinds of discursive dilemma
which, for Pettit, effective social integrates tend to resolve by
collectivizing reason; whether or not there can ever be stark
discontinuities between a group's memory and the memories of its
members; and the relative contributions of mutual awareness and of the
urge towards rational unification in grounding the normative
commitments of groups and their members.
[back to timetable]
Rationality,
reasoning and regulation: the case of group agents
Philip
Pettit (Princeton)
Click here for audio
and supplementary material.
Rationality involves susceptibility to certain agency-related
constraints and desiderata. This susceptibility is implemented
sub-personally in animal agents but the implementation is intentionally
reinforced by the reasoning and regulation that human animals pursue.
What, then, of artificial agents: not silicon-based robots but socially
constructed organizations? It turns out that rationality is hard to
implement sub-personally with such agents; that reasoning plays a
natural and important part; and that regulation is a necessary
supplement, as with individual subjects.
Followed by commentary from
Katie Steele (Sydney)
[back to timetable]
Enquiries
Enquiries to John
Cusbert.
[top]
Last updated: 20.11.06.
|
