Registration Hotel/Directions
Interdisciplinary Conference
Cognition: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended
20-24 October 2007
University of Central Florida
Co-sponsored by the UCF Cognitive Science Program, Philosophy Department
UCF Institute for Simulation and Training, the I2Lab
the International Association for Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
and the European Science Foundation project: Consciousness in a Natural and Cultural Context
Conference website: www.philosophy.ucf.edu/eeee.html
Program Registration Hotel/Directions
Recent works in the cognitive sciences have championed various approaches to embodied and situated cognition, including concepts of enactive perception and extended minds. The assumption that cognition can be studied by looking exclusively at what goes on in the head or in the brain has undergone considerable criticism. A diverse and growing number of researchers now claim that an organism’s cognitive abilities are partly constituted by proprioception, action, environmental manipulation and intricate couplings that spread the causality across organisms and structures in their physical, social, and technological environments. Research in this area is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on fields such as philosophy, cognitive science, developmental studies, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, simulation science and robotics. Much of it is inspired by or complemented by the insights of thinkers in the phenomenological tradition, such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who emphasize the ways in which experience and thought are structured by bodily constraints and environmental interaction. Special focus will be on topics related to extended and augmented cognition.
Keynote presentations
Andy Clark
Andy Clark is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and author of Microcognition:Philosophy, Cognitive Science and Parallel Distributed Processing; Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts and Representational Change; Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again; Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence; and the forthcoming Supersizing the Mind: Reflections on Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension
and
Jeffrey M. Bradshaw
Jeffrey M. Bradshaw is Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). Formerly, he led research groups at The Boeing Company and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the European Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Engineering (EURISCO) in Toulouse, France; an Honorary Visiting Researcher at the Center for Intelligent Systems and their Applications and AIAI at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland; a visiting professor at the Institut Cognitique at the University of Bordeaux. He is a member of the National Research Council (NRC). Among other publications, he edited the books Knowledge Acquisition as a Modeling Activity (with Ken Ford, Wiley, 1993), and Software Agents (AAAI Press/The MIT Press, 1997).
Other plenary talks include:
Fred Adams
Chair, Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences
University of Delaware
Ken Aizawa
Charles T. Beaird Professor of Philosophy
Centenary College of Louisiana
Andrew Brook
Director, Cognitive Science Program
Carlton University, Ottawa
Dan Hutto
Department of Philosophy
University of Hertfordshire
Richard Menary
Department of Philosophy
University of Wollongong Australia
Elizabeth Pacherie
Institut Jean-Nicod
Directeur de Recherche au CNRS
Département d'Etudes Cognitives
Ecole Normale Supérieure
Mark Rowlands
Department of Philosophy
University of Miami.
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Program
More Information: Contact Shaun Gallagher (gallaghr@mail.ucf.edu)
A special Ethics Workshop on Augmented Cognition and Neuroethics (sponsored by the UCF Department of Philosophy) will follow the conference, on October 24th. See the Workshop webpage at www.philosophy.ucf.edu/neuroethics
