We are pleased to announce that on Friday, May 31 at 17:30 (CEST), Laurie Ann Paul (Yale
University) will give the talk The computational self: location in space, time, and
possibility as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Spring 2024 organised by the
Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.
This hybrid talk will take place in the Multiuso room, Theology Building, USI West Campus
and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining it online, please write to
events.isfi(a)usi.ch
For more information:
https://www.usi.ch/en/feeds/26653
Here is the abstract of the talk:
To think for yourself, you need to be able to solve new and unexpected problems. This
requires you to identify the space of possible environments you could be in, locate
yourself in the relevant one, and frame the new problem as it exists relative to your
location in this new environment. Combining thought experiments with a series of
self-orientation games, I will discuss collaborative work that explores the structure of
how we perform this computational task. In particular, we propose that the way humans
exploit their ability to center on themselves as physical agents in the real world mimics
the way we solve what we call "the avatar problem" in a First-person game. In
real life, human agents perform the very same computational task, triangulating their
perceptual and proprioceptive inputs with different third person representations of
themselves to represent themselves as an embodied agent in the world. Understanding this
computational feat is relevant for AI researchers trying to build an artificial agent that
can truly think for itself and to philosophers interested in centered worlds
epistemology.