koglist May 2001

koglist@maillist.ttk.hu

9 participants
24 discussions

PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE SEMINAR, Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle

by Laszlo E. Szabo

Department of History and Philosophy of Science Eotvos University Budapest, Pazmany P. setany 1/A PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE SEMINAR (http://hps.elte.hu/seminar) ________________________________________________ 21 May 4:00 PM 6th floor 6.54 (Language: English, except all participants speak Hungarian) Panel Discussion Panelists: Balázs Gyenis* Gábor Hofer-Szabó* György Kampis* Miklós Rédei* László E. Szabó* Péter Szegedi* Moderator: Márta Fehér** _____________ * HPS, Eötvös University, Budapest ** Philosophy, Technical University, Budapest Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle No correlation without causation. This is, in its most compact and general formulation, the essence of what became called the Common Cause Principle (CCP). If two events A and B are (positively) correlated, p(A&B)>p(A)p(B), then either there is a causal connection between A and B that brings about the correlation or there is a third event C (common cause) that stands in a causal connection with A and B, and it is this C that causes the correlation, that is, (1) p(A&B|C)=p(A|C)p(B|C) (2) p(A&B|notC)=p(A|notC)p(B|notC) (3) p(A&C)>p(A)p(C) (4) p(B&C)>p(B)p(C) A part of the panelists believe that - although some slight modifications of the original Reichenbachian conception seem necessary - (1)-(4) express the proper mathematical formulation of our causal intuition, and are never violated in reality. Some others argue that Reichenbach's concept of common cause is completely pointless and does not apply for many correlations in our world. Suggested readings: - H. Reichenbach: The Direction of Time, University of California Press, Los Angeles,1956, pp. 157-167. - G. Hofer-Szabó, M. Rédei and L. E. Szabó: Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle: Recent Results and Open Questions, Reports on Philosophy, No. 20. (2001) - E. Sober: The principle of the common cause, in J. H. Fetzer (ed.), Probability and Causality, Reidel Pub. Co., Boston,1988. - E. Sober: Common cause explanation, Philosophy of Science, 51 (1984) 212-241. - N. Cartwright: How to tell a common cause - Generalization of the conjunctive fork criterion, in J. H. Fetzer (ed.), Probability and Causality, Reidel Pub. Co., Boston,1988. - Hofer-Szabó, G., Rédei, M., Szabó, L. E., On Reichenbach's common cause principle and Reichenbach's notion of common cause, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 50 (1999), 377-399. The organizer of the seminar: László E. Szabó -- Laszlo E. Szabo Department of Theoretical Physics Department of History and Philosophy of Science Eotvos University, Budapest H-1518 Budapest, Pf. 32, Hungary Phone/Fax: (36-1)372-2924 Home: (36-1) 200-7318 Mobil/SMS: (36) 20-366-1172 http://hps.elte.hu/~leszabo

24 years, 12 months

BBS Call for Commentators: VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS

by Stevan Harnad

Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article [Please note that this paper was accepted and archived to the web in October 2000 but the recent move of BBS to New York delayed the Call until now.] A SENSORIMOTOR ACCOUNT OF VISION AND VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS by J. Kevin O'Regan Alva Noe http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/ORegan/ This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 8000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to nominate someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. A full electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the online BBSPrints Archive, at the URL that follows the abstract below. _____________________________________________________________ A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness J. Kevin O'Regan Laboratoire de Psychologie Expirimentale Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, Universiti Reni Descartes, 92774 Boulogne Billancourt, France oregan(a)ext.jussieu.fr http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr Alva Noe Department of Philosophy University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA 95064 anoe(a)cats.ucsc.edu http://www2.ucsc.edu/people/anoe/ KEYWORDS: Sensation, Perception, Action, Consciousness, Experience, Qualia, Sensorimotor, Vision, Change blindness ABSTRACT: Many current neurophysiological, psychophysical and psychological approaches to vision rest on the idea that when we see, the brain produces an internal representation of the world. The activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way of acting. It is a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The outside world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the governing laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accounting for visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Several lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotor adaptation, visual "filling in", visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/ORegan/ ___________________________________________________________ Please do not prepare a commentary yet. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article. We will then let you know whether it was possible to include your name on the final formal list of invitees. _______________________________________________________________________ *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENTS *** (1) The authors of scientific articles are not paid money for their refereed research papers; they give them away. What they want is to reach all interested researchers worldwide, so as to maximize the potential research impact of their findings. Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View costs are accordingly access-barriers, and hence impact-barriers for this give-away research literature. There is now a way to free the entire refereed journal literature, for everyone, everywhere, immediately, by mounting interoperable university eprint archives, and self-archiving all refereed research papers in them. Please see: http://www.eprints.org http://www.openarchives.org/ http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- (2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are strongly encouraged to self-archive all their papers in their own institution's Eprint Archives or in CogPrints, the Eprint Archive for the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ It is extremely simple to self-archive and will make all of our papers available to all of us everywhere, at no cost to anyone, forever. Authors of BBS papers wishing to archive their already published BBS Target Articles should submit it to BBSPrints Archive. Information about the archiving of BBS' entire backcatalogue will be sent to you in the near future. Meantime please see: http://www.bbsonline.org/help/ and http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- (3) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!).

24 years, 12 months

approaching deadline for CogSci 2001

by Gergely Csibra

Non-member submission from [CogSci Summer School <school(a)cogs.nbu.acad.bg>] --- Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 16:00:21 +0300 To: neuron(a)cattell.psych.upenn.edu, aisb(a)cogs.susx.ac.uk, PHILOS-L-request(a)LISTSERV.LIV.AC.UK, linguist(a)tamvm1.tamu.edu, list-nl-vision(a)aber.ac.uk, bulletin-prc-ia(a)irisa.fr, contact(a)slovo.logos.msu.su, logos(a)logos.msu.su, connectionists(a)cs.cmu.edu, cogsci-l(a)yorkvm1.bitnet, diagrams(a)cs.swarthmore.edu, simulation(a)ufl.edu, koglist(a)cogpsyphy.hu, psy-pub(a)comlab.vega.msk.su, cogpsy(a)coglab.psy.soton.ac.uk, bulat(a)pavlodar.kz From: CogSci Summer School <school(a)cogs.nbu.acad.bg> Subject: approaching deadline for CogSci 2001 8th International Summer School in Cognitive Science Sofia, New Bulgarian University July 9 - 28, 2001 Organized by New Bulgarian University, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and Bulgarian Society for Cognitive Science Endorsed by the Cognitive Science Society Sponsored by: New Bulgarian University, Central and East European Center for Cognitive Science, Bob Glushko (USA) Kalina Christoff (Stanford University, USA) - Cognitive Neuroscience of Executive and Prefrontal Function Barbara Finlay (Cornell University, USA) - Development and Evolution of the Brain Maurice Greenberg (New Bulgarian University, BG) - Introduction to Connectionism Stella Vosniadou (University of Athens, GR) - Conceptual Change in Physical Knowledge Michael Thomas (NCDU, ICH, UK) - Connectionist Models of Developmental Disorders Csaba Pleh (University of Seget, HU) - Language Understanding in Children, Adults and Patients Robert Goldstone (Indiana University, USA) - Human learning and adaptive systems Jeff Elman (University of California at San Diego, USA) - Connectionist approaches to psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and linguistic theory Susan Epstein (City University of New York, USA) - Cognitive Modeling and the Development of Expertise Financial Support: Bob Glushko from the USA has generously provided support for students who cannot afford paying on their own and whose universities cannot pay either. The scholarships are mainly directed to students coming from Eastern and Central Europe as well as from the former Soviet Union, however, other cases will also be considered. The scholarships cover tuition, travel, and living expenses. Applicants should present a declaration of what kind of sources they can use for their participation in the Summer School. Deadline for application: May 15th Notification of acceptance: May 24th. For more information: http://www.nbu.bg/cogs/events/ss2001.htm Svetlana Petkova Administrative Manager Central and East European Center for Cognitive Science

24 years, 12 months

PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE SEMINAR, P. G n a d i g

by Laszlo E. Szabo

Department of History and Philosophy of Science Eotvos University Budapest, Pazmany P. setany 1/A PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE SEMINAR (http://hps.elte.hu/seminar) ________________________________________________ 14 May 4:15 PM 6th floor 6.54 (Language: Hungarian) P e t e r G n a d i g Atomic Physics, Eotvos University, Budapest Ki lehetett volna ,,talalni'' a specialis relativitaselmeletet 50 evvel Einstein elott? (Could special relativity have been "figured out" 50 years before Einstein?) Kozismert, hogy az elektrodinamika torvenyei teljes osszhangban allnak a specialis relativitaselmelettel, sot, Einstein eppen a ,,mozgo testek elektrodinamikajabol'' jott ra a ter es ido ujszeru viszonyara. Meglepo azonban, hogy ezt a kapcsolatot mar az elektrosztatika (Coulomb-torveny) es az egyenaramok (pl. egy hosszu, egyenes vezeto) Ampere-fele magneses tere magaban rejti, s ez a kapcsolat elemi lepesekkel (az eltolasi aramra, vagy az elektromagneses hullamokra valo hivatkozas nelkul, s felsobb matematikai apparatust mellozve) felszinre hozhato. Megfelelo tolteselrendezest valasztva nehany egyszeru lepes utan eljuthatunk a Lorentz-kontrakciot, az idodilataciot, az egyidejuseg relativitasat, az altalanos Lorentz-transzformaciot es az elektromagneses tererossegek transzformacios kepleteit megado formulakhoz. Erdekes tudomanyfilozofiai kerdes, hogy ha mindez ennyire keszen allt mar az 1800-as evek kozepen, akkor mi volt az a mozzanat, ami egy fel evszazadon keresztul meg hianyzott a relativitaselmelet megfogalmazasahoz. Az eloado velemenye szerint, a toltesek ,darabossaganak'' felismeresere, az atomi reszecskek felfedezesere kellett varni. The organizer of the seminar: László E. Szabó -- Laszlo E. Szabo Department of Theoretical Physics Department of History and Philosophy of Science Eotvos University, Budapest H-1518 Budapest, Pf. 32, Hungary Phone/Fax: (36-1)372-2924 Home: (36-1) 200-7318 Mobil/SMS: (36) 20-366-1172 http://hps.elte.hu/~leszabo

25 years

Bloom: HOW CHILDREN LEARN THE MEANINGS OF WORDS -- BBS Multiple Book Review

by Stevan Harnad - Behavioral & Brain Sciences

Below is the abstract of a forthcoming precis of a book that will shortly be circulated for Multiple Book Review in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS): [Please note that this precis was in fact accepted and archived to the web in August 2000 but the recent move of BBS to New York delayed the Call until now.] PRECIS OF: HOW CHILDREN LEARN THE MEANINGS OF WORDS by Paul Bloom http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Bloom/ This book has been accepted for a muliple book review to be published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Reviewers must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a reviewer for this book, to suggest other appropriate reviewers, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to nominate someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. A full electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) To help us put together a balanced list of reviewers, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a reviewer. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate reviewer for this book, an electronic draft of the precis (only) is retrievable from the online BBSPrints Archive, at the URL that follows the abstract below. Please note that it is the *BOOK*, not the precis, that is to be reviewed. Please also indicate in your reply whether you already have the book or would require a copy to be sent to you. _____________________________________________________________ PRECIS OF: HOW CHILDREN LEARN THE MEANINGS OF WORDS Paul Bloom Department of Psychology Yale University P.O. Box 208205 New Haven, CT 06520 Paul.Bloom(a)yale.edu http://pantheon.yale.edu/~pb85 KEYWORDS: cognitive development, concepts, meaning, social cognition, semantics, syntax, theory of mind, word learning ABSTRACT: Normal children learn tens of thousands of words, and do so quickly and efficiently, often in highly impoverished environments. In How children learn the meanings of words, I argue that word learning is the product of certain cognitive and linguistic abilities that include the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic cues to meaning, and a rich understanding of the mental states of other people. These capacities are powerful, early emerging, and to some extent uniquely human, but they are not special to word learning. This proposal is an alternative to the view that word learning is the result of simple associative learning mechanisms, and it rejects as well the notion that children possess constraints, either innate or learned, that are specifically earmarked for word learning. This theory is extended to account for how children learn names for objects, substances, and abstract entities, pronouns and proper names, verbs, determiners, prepositions, and number words. Several related topics are also discussed, including naïve essentialism, childrens understanding of representational art, the nature of numerical and spatial reasoning, and the role of words in the shaping of mental life. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Bloom/ ____________________________________________________________ Please do not prepare a review yet. Just let us know, after having inspected the precis, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the book. We will then let you know whether it was possible to include your name on the final formal list of invitees. _______________________________________________________________________ *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENTS *** (1) The authors of scientific articles are not paid money for their refereed research papers; they give them away. What they want is to reach all interested researchers worldwide, so as to maximize the potential research impact of their findings. Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View costs are accordingly access-barriers, and hence impact-barriers for this give-away research literature. There is now a way to free the entire refereed journal literature, for everyone, everywhere, immediately, by mounting interoperable university eprint archives, and self-archiving all refereed research papers in them. Please see: http://www.eprints.org http://www.openarchives.org/ http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- (2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are strongly encouraged to self-archive all their papers in their own institution's Eprint Archives or in CogPrints, the Eprint Archive for the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ It is extremely simple to self-archive and will make all of our papers available to all of us everywhere, at no cost to anyone, forever. Authors of BBS papers wishing to archive their already published BBS Target Articles should submit it to BBSPrints Archive. Information about the archiving of BBS' entire backcatalogue will be sent to you in the near future. Meantime please see: http://www.bbsonline.org/help/ and http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- (3) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!).

25 years

THE THEORY OF EVENT CODING -- BBS Call for Commentators

by Stevan Harnad - Behavioral & Brain Sciences

Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article [Please note that this paper was in fact accepted and archived to the web in January 2001 but the recent move of BBS to New York delayed the Call until now.] THE THEORY OF EVENT CODING (TEC): A FRAMEWORK FOR PERCEPTION AND ACTION PLANNING by Bernhard Hommel Jochen Musseler Gisa Aschersleben Wolfgang Prinz http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Hommel/ http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Hommel/Hommel.pdf This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 8000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to nominate someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. A full electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the online BBSPrints Archive, at the URL that follows the abstract below. _____________________________________________________________ The Theory of Event Coding (TEC): A Framework for Perception and Action Planning Bernhard Hommel, Jochen Musseler, Gisa Aschersleben, Wolfgang Prinz Max-Planck-Institut fur Psychologische Forschung Amalienstrasse 33 D-80799 Munchen Federal Republic of Germany Tel: +int(89)38602-256, Fax: +int(89)38602-290 KEYWORDS: action planning, perception, perception-action interface, event coding, common coding, feature integration, binding. ABSTRACT: Traditional approaches to human information processing tend to deal with perception and action planning in isolation, so that an adequate account of the perception-action interface is still missing. On the perceptual side, the dominant cognitive view largely underestimates, and thus fails to account for, the impact of action-related processes on both the processing of perceptual information and on perceptual learning. On the action side, most approaches available conceive of action planning as a mere continuation of stimulus processing, thus failing to account for the goal-directedness of even the simplest reaction in an experimental task. We propose a new framework for a more adequate theoretical treatment of perception and action planning, a theory postulating that perceptual contents and action plans are coded in a common representational medium by feature codes with distal reference. Accordingly, perceived events (perceptions) and to-be-produced events (actions) are equally represented by integrated, task-tuned networks of feature codes--cognitive structures we call event codes. We give an overview of evidence from a wide variety of empirical domains, such as spatial stimulus-response compatibility, sensorimotor synchronization, or ideomotor action, showing that our main assumptions are well supported by the data. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Hommel/ [HTML VERSION] http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Hommel/Hommel.pdf [PDF VERSION] ___________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________ Please do not prepare a commentary yet. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article. We will then let you know whether it was possible to include your name on the final formal list of invitees. _______________________________________________________________________ *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENTS *** (1) The authors of scientific articles are not paid money for their refereed research papers; they give them away. What they want is to reach all interested researchers worldwide, so as to maximize the potential research impact of their findings. Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View costs are accordingly access-barriers, and hence impact-barriers for this give-away research literature. There is now a way to free the entire refereed journal literature, for everyone, everywhere, immediately, by mounting interoperable university eprint archives, and self-archiving all refereed research papers in them. Please see: http://www.eprints.org http://www.openarchives.org/ http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- (2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are strongly encouraged to self-archive all their papers in their own institution's Eprint Archives or in CogPrints, the Eprint Archive for the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ It is extremely simple to self-archive and will make all of our papers available to all of us everywhere, at no cost to anyone, forever. Authors of BBS papers wishing to archive their already published BBS Target Articles should submit it to BBSPrints Archive. Information about the archiving of BBS' entire backcatalogue will be sent to you in the near future. Meantime please see: http://www.bbsonline.org/help/ and http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- (3) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!).

25 years

BBS re BBSPrints Logins

by Gergely Csibra

Non-member submission from [Stevan Harnad (Editor) - Behavioral & Brain Sciences <bbs(a)bbsonline.org>] --- Subject: BBS re BBSPrints Logins To: koglist(a)cogpsyphy.hu From: Stevan Harnad (Editor) - Behavioral & Brain Sciences <bbs(a)bbsonline.org> Date: Mon, 07 May 2001 17:05:34 -0400 Dear KogList List User, This list regularly receives Calls for Commentators from Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) journal. BBS has now changed its procedures. If you also wish to be notified personally of accepted target articles and Calls for Commentators, you can get an individual login and password at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/register.html Please note however that if you have had direct email communication with BBS in the past, a user account may already be in place for you, based on your most recent sending email address and details. In this case, the registration procedure at the URL above will send you the login details for that account. You can then logon to BBSPrints from the User Login link on the http://www.bbsonline.org/ front page and alter your mailshot (Call) status from there. There is of course no charge for any of this: also, there is no need to reply directly to this email. Many thanks, Stevan Harnad Editor Phineas de Thornley Head Editor, Electronic Review Systems Behavioral and Brain Sciences Journals Department _/_/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/_/ Cambridge University Press _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ 40 West 20th Street _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ New York _/_/_/_/_ _/_/_/_/_ _/_/_/_/ NY 10011-4211 _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ UNITED STATES _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ /_/_/_/_/ /_/_/_/_/ _/_/_/_/ bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://bbsonline.org __ __ | | |\ | | | |\ | |_ 'Phone: +001 212 924 3900 ext.369 |__| | \| |__ | | \| |__ Fax: +001 212 645 5960

25 years

BBS Call for Commentators A SENSORIMOTOR ACCOUNT OF VISION AND VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS

by Gergely Csibra

Non-member submission from [Stevan Harnad (Editor) - Behavioral & Brain Sciences <bbs(a)bbsonline.org>] --- Subject: BBS Call for Commentators A SENSORIMOTOR ACCOUNT OF VISION AND VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS To: koglist(a)cogpsyphy.hu From: Stevan Harnad (Editor) - Behavioral & Brain Sciences <bbs(a)bbsonline.org> Date: Mon, 07 May 2001 17:22:58 -0400 Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article [Please note that this paper was in fact accepted and archived to the web in October 2000 but the recent move of BBS to New York delayed the Call until now.] A SENSORIMOTOR ACCOUNT OF VISION AND VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS by J. Kevin O'Regan Alva Noe http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/ORegan/ This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 8000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to nominate someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. A full electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the online BBSPrints Archive, at the URL that follows the abstract below. _____________________________________________________________ A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness J. Kevin O'Regan Laboratoire de Psychologie Expirimentale Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, Universiti Reni Descartes, 92774 Boulogne Billancourt, France oregan(a)ext.jussieu.fr http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr Alva Noe Department of Philosophy University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA 95064 anoe(a)cats.ucsc.edu http://www2.ucsc.edu/people/anoe/ KEYWORDS: Sensation, Perception, Action, Consciousness, Experience, Qualia, Sensorimotor, Vision, Change blindness ABSTRACT: Many current neurophysiological, psychophysical and psychological approaches to vision rest on the idea that when we see, the brain produces an internal representation of the world. The activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way of acting. It is a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The outside world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the governing laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accounting for visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Several lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotor adaptation, visual "filling in", visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/ORegan/ ___________________________________________________________ Please do not prepare a commentary yet. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article. We will then let you know whether it was possible to include your name on the final formal list of invitees. _______________________________________________________________________ *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENTS *** (1) The authors of scientific articles are not paid money for their refereed research papers; they give them away. What they want is to reach all interested researchers worldwide, so as to maximize the potential research impact of their findings. Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View costs are accordingly access-barriers, and hence impact-barriers for this give-away research literature. There is now a way to free the entire refereed journal literature, for everyone, everywhere, immediately, by mounting interoperable university eprint archives, and self-archiving all refereed research papers in them. Please see: http://www.eprints.org http://www.openarchives.org/ http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- (2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are strongly encouraged to self-archive all their papers in their own institution's Eprint Archives or in CogPrints, the Eprint Archive for the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ It is extremely simple to self-archive and will make all of our papers available to all of us everywhere, at no cost to anyone, forever. Authors of BBS papers wishing to archive their already published BBS Target Articles should submit it to BBSPrints Archive. Information about the archiving of BBS' entire backcatalogue will be sent to you in the near future. Meantime please see: http://www.bbsonline.org/help/ and http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- (3) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!). -- Gergely Csibra Centre of Brain and Cognitive Development Research Scientist School of Psychology Senior Lecturer Birkbeck College g.csibra(a)bbk.ac.uk Malet Street Tel: +44 20 7631 6323 London WC1E 7HX Fax: +44 20 7631 6587 United Kingdom

25 years

Computational Models of Creative Design

by Gergely Csibra

Non-member submission from ["MLeyton" <MLeyton(a)email.msn.com>] --- From: "MLeyton" <MLeyton(a)email.msn.com> To: <KOGLIST(a)cogpsyphy.hu> Subject: Computational Models of Creative Design Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 09:50:29 -0400 Your readers may be interested in the following: Fifth International Roundtable Conference: Computational and Cognitive Models of Creative Design. 9-13 December 2001, Heron Island, Great Barrier Reef, Australia. Conference web-site http://www.arch.su.EDU.AU/kcdc/conferences/HI'01/ Message distributed by Michael Leyton International Society for Mathematical and Computational Aesthetics

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Y. Elkana's lecture

by Laszlo E. Szabo

A public lecture presented by the Deaprtment of Philosophy and History of Science Technical University, Budapest __________________________________________ Y e h u d a E l k a n a rector of CEU, CEU Philosophy program To rethink, not un-think Enlightenment Venue: 30 May, 16:00 Technical University, Budapest, "Oktatói Klub", Building K, 1.66. _________________________________________ Márta Fehér

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koglist May 2001