Last weekend, I attended the U of T Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Mind (UTISM), which is put on once every two years by the Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence Students’ Association. U of T’s cogsci department, located at UC, is itself a kind of ongoing interdisciplinary symposium on the mind, drawing its instructors from the Departments of Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience, Computer Science, and Linguistics, among others. The focus of UTISM 2010 was emotion, but the talks varied drastically in their approaches.
My expectations going into the conference were very high. Two years ago at UTISM 2008, I attended only one lecture, the keynote speech, and it completely changed my perspective not only on the mind, but communication as well. The speaker was Andy Clark of the University of Edinburgh and he presented an updated version of his 1998 paper, “The Extended Mind” cowritten with David J. Chalmers. It would be hard for me to do the paper justice. I’d encourage you to read it online, but a basic explanation is that Clark and Chalmers present evidence that the act of “thinking” doesn’t take place just within the brain, and that “the mind” as a concept is actually a complex collection of interactions between the brain and the media it uses to conduct thought.
And so I sat down in UC140 last Saturday morning to listen to John Vervaeke, who teaches the cognitive science intro course at U of T, open the conference by talking about cogsci as an interdisciplinary approach. His speech, entitled “Three visions on the nature of cognitive science,” focused on how cognitive science can act as an umbrella under which different disciplines come together. This was the last of his three visions, and as he claimed, the strongest one. He described it as “higher order inference to the best explanation that makes use of plausibility reasoning.” First, cogsci forms solutions to specific problems from individual disciplines through cross-pollination and cross-testing, and second, it comes up with multiple applications for those solutions across a wide array of new problems. His diagram looked conspicuously like a spider, with legs made out of the problems and solutions of varying disciplines and the body made out of cognitive science.
And so the spider went walking across its web. Topics discussed varied from Adam Anderson’s keynote talk on facial expressions to Keith Oatley’s dissection of cinematic narrative from the Great Train Robbery to Avatar. The conference ended on a tone of debate when Ronald DeSousa’s keynote speech, “Epistemic feelings” followed Jordon Peterson’s talk on motivation in cognitive framing. Peterson discussed the “frame problem” posed by the finite nature of human knowledge and demonstrated that a key part of human understanding of the larger world comes from enduring mythological perspectives. He also went into the related issue of the categorization of emotions in the hippocampus, arguing that this more ancient and primal portion of the brain accounts for a surprising amount of human behaviour. In starting his talk, DeSousa made dismissive comments about Peterson’s mythological perspective, focusing his talk on the more linguistic forms of thought associated with the cerebral cortex.
Epistemic feelings tell us something that we should know—for example, the feeling of being right even in the face of a rational argument—and also dictate moral behaviour. Of course, I could not do either of these talks justice in the course of a 600-word article, but they were both very interesting, and did not necessarily present two opposing world views.
Psychology lecturer John Vervaeke also teaches the introductory course in cognitive science.
The panel afterwards came to a head when it almost broke out into a public debate between the two over the existence of God and the primacy of mythology in human thought. It was particularly intriguing to see these two go at it, specifically because they seemed to agree on so many other things. According to DeSousa and Peterson, we may see some sort of public debate between them on the subject in the near future.
