Ole Koksvik (Bergen): Three Models of Phenomenal Unity
Other
There is something it is like to have a headache – the experience of having a headache has a certain phenomenal character. There is also something it is like to be you overall as you’re having it, your overall conscious experience (at a time) also has a phenomenal character. The ‘local’ phenomenal…
Drew Khlentzos (UNE): IF and the Myth of Semantic Transparency
Other
Everything we know about the human mind tells us that cognition is selective and subject to various biases. Why then think that our semantic intuitions have been spared? In this talk I argue that they haven’t — not only is it possible that we might process certain concepts incorrectly, there are…
Peter Godfrey-Smith (CUNY): Complex Life Cycles and Natural Selection
Other
Familiar summaries of evolution by natural selection hold that one requirement for evolutionary change of this kind is heredity. Parents must resemble their offspring; like must beget like. In many organisms, however, that is not how things seem to work. Many life cycles feature long and complex…
Kim Sterelny (ANU): Cumulative Culture and the Evolution of Language
Other
Debates about the evolution of language are notorious for their fractious nature, and the utter lack of consensus generated; so much so, that there is a reasonably suspicion that the whole problem is empirically intractable. In this paper, I present a substantive proposal about the timing and…