Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Valentina Cardella (Università di Messina). Here she talks about a recent paper she wrote, " Rationality in Mental Disorder: Too little or too much? ", published open access in a special issue of the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy on Bounds of Rationality . Valentina Cardella Are people with mental disorders irrational? At first sight, this seems to be a trivial question: madness is the realm of non-sense. When someone tells you that her neighbour installed a tracking device in her abdomen, or that her internal organs are decomposing, you can’t help to wonder: how can she believe such impossible things? Where has her rationality gone? The common conceptualization of madness, which dates back to the Enlightenment, reflects this common-sense intuition: in people with mental disorders emotions are abnormal and unrestrained, and, on the other side, reason is severely affected. People with mental disorders can’t reason properly, healthy people can....

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 co...