Claremont, Calif. (May 15, 2015)—Pitzer College Professor of Philosophy Brian Keeley will talk about “cyborg senses as a philosophical game changer” at the Building Minds: Microchips & Molecules Symposium at UCLA on May 18. He will be one of four panelists discussing what attempts to create “artificial minds” reveal about the nature of our minds.
Keeley will talk about how people understand the nature of the senses. He argues that humans “stand on the cusp of a new paradigm of sensory understanding as we begin to build new senses” through technological advances, such as cochlear implants. Keeley believes that “such ‘cyborg senses’ will change the way we think about the senses as much as the previous scientific revolution did.”
He will be joined on the panel by Timothy Busbice, founder of Connectomix; James K. Gimzewski, UCLA professor of chemistry; and Randal A. Koene, founder of Carboncopies.org. The panelists will explore intersections among the fields of neurorobotics, psychology, philosophy, chemistry and computational neuroscience. Martin M. Monti, assistant professor of psychology and neurosurgery at UCLA, will moderate the discussion.
Keeley teaches in the philosophy, neuroscience and science, technology & society programs at Pitzer College. After earlier work in the philosophy of artificial life and artificial intelligence, he now focuses on foundational issues and implications of the growing sciences of sensory perception. He is also interested in “the weird epistemology of conspiracy theories.”
Hosted by Psychology in Action, Building Minds: Microchips & Molecules Symposium will be held on Monday, May 18, from 4 to 6 p.m. in UCLA’s CNSI Auditorium. The discussion is free and open to the public.
