Concepts and Proto-Concepts in Cognitive Science (part 1)

11/12/13 • -1 min

In August of 2010 I gave two lectures as part of the annual Summer School of the Swedish Graduate School in Cognitive Science (SweCog; see http://www.swecog.se/summerschool.shtml). I was invited to speak on the topic "Cognition (or Consciousness) and Non-Conceptual Content", so I devoted the first lecture to getting clear on the nature of concepts. This allowed me to contrast conceptual content (which is, briefly: content that is articulable, recombinable, rational and deployable) with non-conceptual content, which was detailed in the second lecture (to follow).

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Previous Episode

Painting an experience? How aesthetics might assist a neuroscience of sensory experience

IULM University, Milan, hosted a European Science Foundation Exploratory Workshop on "Neuroesthetics: When art and the brain collide" on the 24th and 25th of September, 2009. In my invited lecture, I departed significantly from my advertised title, instead using my time to introduce the audience to five strands in my research related to the intersection of neuroscience/cognitive science and art/creativity:

Embodied creativity
Enactive models of experience
Synthetic phenomenology
Interactive empiricism
Art works/installations

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Further links:

Workshop description
Official workshop report
"Beauty and the Brain: The Puzzle": An account of the workshop by author Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books blog

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Concepts and Proto-Concepts in Cognitive Science (part 2)

As explained in the previous post, in August of 2010 I gave two lectures as part of the annual Summer School of the Swedish Graduate School in Cognitive Science (SweCog; see http://www.swecog.se/summerschool.shtml). The previous post contains the first of these lectures; this is part two. Near the end I showed a movie as a kind of dynamical specification of the non-conceptual content of visual experience modeled by the SEER-3 robot. This movie is not included in the PodSlide file; those interested in seeing it should download the supplementary file: "Non-conceptual content specification demo".

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