DEPARTMENTAL EVENTS

Elijah Millgram - Colloquium

Date
Fri January 12th 2018, 3:30 - 5:15pm
Location
Building 90, Room 92Q

Outsourcing the Mind:  Extended Cognition and First-Person Authority

The problem of first-person authority is that of explaining how it is
that, normally, you know what you believe, what you feel, what you're
in the middle of doing, what you want and so on -- and know in a way
that's different than other people know what you believe, etc.
Extended cognition is introduced by the observation that if a mind is
a computational system, then there's no principled reason for the
borders of your brain to be the borders of your mind.  Treating these
two philosophical discussions together brings into focus an
engineering problem, that of the design and implementation of reliable
low-overhead monitoring for inferential processes.  First-person
authority constrains the reach or extent of the reasoning mind, and
thus what it makes sense to treat as the limits of extended cognition.
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