Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by  Robert N. McCauley , William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor at the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture at Emory University and George Graham, Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University. Robert N. McCauley Our book, Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind , promotes a naturalistic approach, which we call Ecumenical Naturalism, to accounting for the long recognized and striking cognitive continuities that underlie familiar features of religiosity, of mental disorders, and of everyday thinking and action. The case for those continuities rests on two considerations. The first is empirical findings that mental phenomena (e.g., hearing voices) associated with mental disorders are more widespread than typically assumed. The second consideration concerns those continuities’ grounding in one sort of intuitive, unconscious, automatic, instantaneous (System 1) cognition, viz., maturationally natural cognition (MATNAT). MATNAT systems address...

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...

This post is by Predrag Teovanović (pictured above), graduate student at the University of Belgrade. In this post he summarises his recent paper ‘ Individual Differences in Cognitive Biases: Evidence Against One-Factor Theory of Rationality ’, co-authored with Goran Knežević and Lazar Stankov, published in Intelligence. If there is a minimal definition of rational behavior, it can be found here . From the normative standpoint, rational behaviour is hard (if not impossible) to maintain all the time. Hence, we satisfice by trying to optimize the boundaries of bounded rationality at the intersection of our own resources (time, information, money, and cognitive capacities) and environmental demands. Cognitive biases (CBs) emerge in that junction.   Since what defines rational behaviour depends on both environment and organism, and since specific CBs arise in different environments - it is reasonable not to expect from CBs to be highly related to individual differences ...