18 May 2022
Karl Friston
Session 2a ‘Minds, Markets and Self-evidencing’
Speaker: Karl Friston; Professor of Neuroscience, University College London
“…On the one hand, the brain seems to be in the game of optimising beliefs about how its sensations are caused; while, on the other hand, our choices and decisions appear to be governed by value functions and reward. Are these formulations irreconcilable, or is there some underlying information theoretic imperative that renders perceptual inference and decision-making two sides of the same coin?”
Karl Friston is a theoretical neuroscientist and authority on brain imaging. He invented statistical parametric mapping (SPM), voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and dynamic causal modelling (DCM). Entirely celebrated in his field, in 2000 he was President of the international Organization of Human Brain Mapping; in 2003 he was awarded the Minerva Golden Brain Award and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006.
Personal reflections from Patrick Schotanus:
“Karl and I first met in 2017 at the XPect conference organised by Andy Clark, here in Edinburgh. During the Q&A I asked Karl whether it was a coincidence that so many cognitive scientists—including Andy and Karl himself, but also Mike Graziano and Anil Seth who were there—were using economic terms: Andy talks about a “cognitive economy”, Damasio points out that “attention is a scarce resource”, and Karl equates “information and value having the same currency”, etc.) At that time, we kind of agreed that it isn’t a coincidence. I hope to ask a follow-up question during this symposium’s Q&A.”
Scott Kelso
Session 2b ‘Coordination Dynamics and The Metastable Mind’
Speaker: Scott Kelso; Professor of Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Florida Atlantic University
“The Market Mind Hypothesis (MMH) raises a provocative question: what kind of mind are we talking about?…”
Scott Kelso; Professor of Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Florida Atlantic University. Scott Kelso’s research is devoted to understanding how human beings (and human brains)—individually and together—coordinate their behaviour on multiple levels, from cells to cognition to (most recently) social settings.
Personal reflections from Patrick Schotanus:
“Scott was also one of the external advisors to my PhD. His seminal 1995 book Dynamic Patterns had made a big impact on me. It was—at least for me—the first to use ‘economic language’, especially ‘competition’ and ‘cooperation’ to explain mental dynamics, in his case regarding complexity in general and coordination dynamics in particular. We met a few times, most memorably at a conference organised by the economics department of the University of Essex (where I was doing my PhD in complex psychology). Scott’s descriptions and explanations of our emerging self-awareness, aha-moments, and synchronisation of rhythmical movements have been crucial for my research.”
See the full agenda here | Find the pre-symposium material here
