Lecturer: Moritz Kriegleder
Fields: Cognitive Science, Information Theory, Philosophy of Science
Content
Today, most discussions of the mind and brain include ambigious terms such as information, memory, and models. While we often do not question their origin and usage, we need to be aware of the philosophical problems of the direct analogy of computation and mental dynamics.
In my talk I will present the historical and mathematical basics of information theory and discuss its influence on cybernetics and cognitive science. While it has proven especially useful in cognitive neuroscience, our use of information to describe cognition stands on shaky philosophical ground. I will discuss these problems of interpretation in detail by analysis of the free energy principle, a current hotly debated mathematical model of the mind that builds on information theory and cybernetics.
Literature
- Dupuy, Jean-Pierre (2000). The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science. Princeton University Press. Bruineberg, J., Dołęga, K., Dewhurst, J., & Baltieri, M. (2022). The Emperor\’s New Markov Blankets. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45, E183. doi:10.1017/S0140525X21002351 Di Paolo, E., Thompson, E., & Beer, R. (2022). Laying down a forking path: Tensions between enaction and the free energy principle. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 3. https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2022.9187
Lecturer
Moritz Kriegleder, MSc is a Phd Student in the ERC Project Possible Life by Professor Tarja Knuuttila. With a background in both Cognitive Science and Physics he is interested in computational modelling of the mind from a mathematical and philosophical perspective.
Affiliation: University of Vienna
Homepage: twitter: @mokriegleder