Computation & Cognitive Sciences

Classes taught:

 

Teaching materials:

• Information Flow  in situation semantics (slides as .pdf)
• "Negative Introspection Is Mysterious" (pdf)
• Beyond the Turing Limit? (Powerpoint based slides) a survey of analog and non-standard computation and its relation to Church`s Thesis and its proper understanding; there is also a summary of the main points in text form (pdf).
• Handout: The Concept of an Algorithm (pdf)
• Why Ontological Semantics (in AI) is neither Ontology nor Semantics 
  
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Published Work:

Conceptual Atomism and Justificationist Semantics. Bern/New York/Frankfurt a.M. (Lang), 2008. Table of Content	Information and Information Flow.  An Introduction. Frankfurt a.M. (Ontos), 2004. Table of Content

• "Pro Pain. On the Role of the Phenomenon and Concept of Pain in Studying Animal Minds" (pdf), in: Weingartner, P. (Ed.) Das Problem des Übels. Frankfurt a.M, 2005, pp.120-31.
• "Animal Consciousness as a Test Case of Cognitive Science. Some Theses" (pdf), a German version "Tierisches Bewusstsein als Testfall für die Kognitionswissenschaften" (pdf), in: Bewusstsein: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven, München, 2005.
• "Lessons from Sartre for the Analytic Philosophy of Mind" (pdf), somewhat longer version in: Analecta Husserliana, 88 (2005), some related version "Egological Structures of Consciousness" in: Dreyfus, H./Wrathall, M. (Eds.) Blackwell Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, Oxford, 2006.
• "Tierisches Bewusstsein, Anthropomorphismus and Heterophänomenologie" (pdf), Philosophisches Jahrbuch (2006), (Abstract)
• "How are Semantic Metarepresentations Built and Processed?" (pdf), Kriterion, 26 (2012).
  
  
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Some Reviews:

• "Savas Tsohatzidis (Ed.)  John Searle’s Philosophy of Language. Force, Meaning and Mind", Philosophy in Review, 2009.
• "Lorraine Daston/Greff Mitman (Eds.) Thinking with Animals", Metapsychology Online Reviews, 2006.
• "Robert Lurz (Ed.). The Philosophy of Animal Minds", Metapsychology Online Reviews, 2010.
• "Peter Carruthers. Consciousness", Minds and Machines, 2008. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.
• "David Woodruff Smith/Amie Thomasson (Eds). Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind", Minds and Machines, 2008. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.
• "Brian Christian. The Most Human Human.", Metapsychology Online Reviews, 2011.
  

 

Some Talks:

• "Animal Consciousness as a Test Case of Cognitive Science. Some Theses", European Congress of Analytic Philosophy, Lisbon (Portugal), 2005, and Philosophie und Wissenschaft, Bielefeld, 2003, and Workshop Bewusstsein Interdisziplinär, Magdeburg, 2002.
• "Information and Information Flow", European Summerschool for Logic, Language and Information, Trento (Italy), 2002.
• "Pro Pain. On the Role of the Phenomenon and Concept of Pain in Studying Animal Minds", Das Problem des Übels, Salzburg (Austria), 2003.
• "One Solved and One Unsolved Problem for Conceptual Atomism", Conference of the Dutch Society for Analytic Philosophy, Tilburg (The Netherlands), 2009.
• "Lessons from Sarte for the Analytic Philosophy of Mind", III. World Congress of Phenomenology, Oxford (England), 2004.
• "Is Number a Sortal or Basically a Functional Concept?", Concepts and Frames, Düsseldorf, 2007.
  

 

General Research/Fields of Interest:

Information and Foundations of Computability

Cognitive Science needs a theory of information. A theory that tells us what information is. A theory that tells us how it works that sentences, utterances, signs are said to carry information. Does not the smoke carry the information that there is a fire nearby? A theory of information should tell us what informational content is and how we arrive at information or use information to get at more information. It should tell us how information flows from some piece of information we got to more information. – That is what the introductory book is all about.
Another related philosophical application of logic I am interested in is the relation between metalogical results established for formal systems, the theory of computability and the question of the limits of the human mind. Church`s Thesis could be understood as a bridge between meta-logic and the philosophy of mind (see these slides on this questions, or the paper). There is a chapter on computational complexity and semantics in my book Philosophische Semantik. In general issues of computability and complexity link logic and the cognitive sciences.

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besides:

(Open Court, 2008)

The investigation of animal consciousness can be considered a test case of cognitive science. Investigating animal consciousness seems to be especially difficult since one can ask whether our usual concepts of human cognition should be applied  to animals or whether our phenomenology can be used at all as a heuristic device. On the other hand the treatment of animal consciousness might be a test case of various trade offs and checks between, say, philosophical definitions of mental terms as to be applied to animals, neurophysiology, our reflected intuitions and ethological model building based on a computational theory of animal minds. (Read some theses [pdf] concerning a couple of methodological issues of exploring animal minds here, see also the paper on the role of pain [pdf], and the German paper on anthropomorphism and heterophenomenology [abstract] or the paper on exploring animal beliefs.)

 

 

©  Manuel Bremer