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Jonothon earman arrest records1/9/2024 ![]() The science of animal welfare provides an important context in which to consider the role ethical values should, or should not, play in setting appropriate burdens of proof. After proposing a basic decision-theoretic account of 'reasonable doubt', I will challenge it on several grounds, which will lead me to clarify the picture of belief states and dynamics we need in order to account for this notion. One important, and hard question, is how to draw a clear boundary between reasonable, and unreasonable doubts. In this talk, I will take the juror's situation as a model for everyday reasoner and decision-maker, and try to extend the notion of reasonable doubt as a norm of reasoning and decision-making under uncertainty more generally. This standard of proof raises intriguing epistemological and psychological issues, in addition to judicial ones. Jurors in criminal trials are instructed to bring a verdict of 'guilty' if and only if they estimate that guilt has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt (BARD). ![]() Marion Vorms (Birkbeck, University of London) In this talk, I will explore the role of sight and image in Maier's alchemical epistemology and situate his book in the visual culture of early modern European alchemy. The parts of each emblem and the 214-page quarto book as a whole are meant to work together, with the music, image and text as an interlocking guide to alchemical theory and to the production of the philosophers' stone. Written by the German physician, courtier and alchemist Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens (1617/18) offers its readers an alchemical interpretation of the Classical myth of Atalanta as a series of fifty emblems, each containing an image, motto and epigram (in German and Latin), an accompanying fugue (or canon) for three voices, and a Latin discourse explicating the emblem's alchemical meaning. What, if anything, does this deeply probabilistic framework have to say about the nature of daily human experience and (indeed) the nature and possibility of conscious experience more generally? Can a story that posits prediction error minimization as cognitive bedrock accommodate the undoubted attractions of novelty and exploration? Is it falsifiable? What is the true scope of this story – can it really be a theory of 'everything cognitive'?Įmblematic alchemy: Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1617/18) But this leaves many questions unanswered. The 'predictive processing' framework shows great promise as a means of both understanding and integrating many of the core information processing strategies underlying perception, thought and action. Only predict? Conscious experience, and the scope and limits of predictive processing Ultimately, I argue, 'computing' in the popular imagination was only to a limited degree a product of its time. Still others seem to have persisted by default without much underpinning intent: the remorseless tendency to explain binary arithmetic, to all audiences and for all purposes, endured for half a century. Others were consciously introduced to shape expectations: industry sources promoted awareness of the GIGO principle ('garbage in, garbage out') to affirm the technology as a neutral tool, doing only and precisely what it was told. Some of these representations originated in wider, older discourses: fears that computers would destroy white-collar jobs were an obvious reincarnation of pre-digital tensions over mechanized deskilling. Although some authors harnessed the blank-slate rhetoric to revolutionary social, economic or educational manifestos, the conceptual content of the literature overall was interestingly conservative, returning repeatedly to a default stock of narratives, justifications and analogies. The vision of computers as profoundly new and world-changing endured over a paradoxically long period, from the mid-1940s to the 1980s, in newspapers, magazines and an ever-growing range of introductory books. Here I apply similar considerations to an inescapably 20th-century phenomenon: the electronic digital computer. Studies so far have tended to focus on 19th-century cases, seeking the origins of the familiar boundaries of 'science in public'. Garbage in, garbage out? A history of representations of computers in popular mediaĪ variety of recent scholarship has traced the development of popular science through print media sources, exploring how characterizations of scientific phenomena evolve through interactions between authors' agendas, audience responses, and changes in publishing culture. Organised by Mary Brazelton and Marta Halina. There is tea beforehand from 3pm in Seminar Room 1. Seminars are held on Thursdays from 3.30 to 5pm in Seminar Room 2. Philosophy and History of Physics Reading Group.
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