Kant Lecture Series with Dr. Peter Godfrey-Smith, Lecture 1

Mind Around Us, Part 1

The main theme of the two lectures is the most minimal forms of cognition and sentience. Where does the mind begin? A brief tour of the history of life will be followed by a discussion of two features of nervous systems, both with roots in non-neural organisms, that provide different approaches to understanding minimal minds. One approach, and the first lecture, emphasizes network organization, signaling, and computation. The second approach emphasizes large-scale dynamic properties (such as oscillations) and their modulation. The first lecture also looks at different forms of selection and feeback, organized around Larry Wright's concept of a "consequence etiology."