The roundtable is held in person. The talks take place on the Stadcampus of University of Antwerp. Attendance is free and no registration is required.
Talk 1 at 10.45AM - "Objective Sensing"
Speaker
Jake Beck (York U)
Abstract
Stepping outside on a sunny day, everything looks bright. The air feels warm. The children playing next door appear numerous. Their screams sound loud and high pitched. A car in the distance looks far away but also to be approaching quickly. In these ways and others, our sensory systems are tuned to magnitudes. We can contrast two views about the nature of these magnitudes. According to Objectivism, we sense objective magnitudes like luminance, temperature, sound wave amplitude, frequency, velocity, and distance. These magnitudes are of interest independently of perceivers and their sensory systems. They often have a home in a non-mental science. According to Anthropocentrism, by contrast, we do not sense objective magnitudes. Instead, we sense anthropocentric magnitudes that conform to our response profiles but are otherwise “unnatural.” They do not appear as kinds in a non-mental science. They are of interest only because we are of interest. This view is most familiar from discussions of color vision, where hues are commonly identified with massively disjunctive physical properties that are determined by the way they strike perceivers. But the view has also been endorsed more widely. In this talk I will defend Objectivism against Anthropocentrism for a large range of magnitudes. But I’ll also argue that Objectivism has its limits. The senses are sometimes anthropocentric. I’ll end by indicating how these considerations can help to resuscitate a distinction between primary and secondary qualities.
Location
The first talk takes place in Room R.231, Rodestraat 14, Antwerp 2000.
Talk 2 at 4.00PM - "Generative DNNs as models of imagination, creativity, and planning"
Speaker
Cameron Buckner (Houston)
Abstract
In current debates over neural-network-based AI, neural network researchers have donned the mantle of philosophical empiricism and associationism, and its critics have taken up the side of philosophical nativism and rationalism. This dynamic is vividly illustrated in a centuries-displaced debate between David Hume and Jerry Fodor over the role that the imagination plays in rational cognition, which centers on the question as to whether statistical learning procedures could be bootstrapped to perform the forms of creativity characteristic of the human mind. Fodor alleged that empiricists are unable to explain how minds synthesize exemplars for use in reasoning, compose novel concepts from simpler concepts, engage in consequence-sensitive planning, or distinguish between causal and intentional relations amongst thoughts. Fodor applauds Hume for agreeing that rational cognition involves all these creative operations, but criticizes Hume’s delegation of these operations to the faculty of the imagination. In this talk I explain how a variety of different "generative" architectures help explain how an empiricist imagination could perform such operations. I conclude with more general morals about the prospects of abstraction and reasoning in empiricist theorizing, about a mutually beneficial interaction between philosophy and science in this context, and about how philosophers and scientists should think about the staggering power of these new systems—such as the “sparks of general intelligence” recently displayed by GPT-4—more generally.
Location
The second talk takes place Room P.002, Prinsstraat 10, in Antwerp, 2000.