Jamie Freestone's talk on Philosophy, feedback, and representations

Title: Philosophy, feedback, and representations

Time, Date, Location: 11:00, Friday, June 2, 2023, Brian Anderson Seminar Room

Abstract: Many branches of philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science have tackled the problem of mental representations: how can one part of the physical world - a brain - be about or represent some other part of the world? The problem extends to external representations too, like images, words, data, symbols, etc. A “textbook” response says that mental representations are a system of three parts: (1) a vehicle that instantiates the representation, such as a particular network of neurons; (2) the content carried by that vehicle, i.e. what it is about; and (3) and the target of the representation, which is the object or feature of the world being represented. Many philosophers find this problematic. I suggest how progress might be made with lessons drawn from how representations are dealt with in technical disciplines.