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SUMMARY:From Neural Criterial Causation to a Premotor Theory of Human Imag
 ination - Professor Peter Ulric Tse\,  Department of Psychological and Bra
 in Sciences\, Dartmouth College\, Hanover. USA
DTSTART:20241129T163000Z
DTEND:20241129T180000Z
UID:TALK224167@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Sara Seddon
DESCRIPTION:In this talk\, I will discuss a form of causation operating am
 ong neurons that emphasizes dendritic sensitivity to the arrival of coinci
 dent presynaptic spikes\, and the rewiring of synaptic weights on a millis
 econd timescale. Such "criterial causation" is "late Wittgensteinian" in t
 he sense that possible outcomes are neither random nor determined but rath
 er adequate and unpredictable\, subject to "family resemblances". Such a n
 eural code allows\, say\, a jaguar to do otherwise\, but not to become oth
 erwise than it is. In contrast\, humans can not only do otherwise\, they c
 an also become otherwise. I then ask what makes human imagination so diffe
 rent from that of a jaguar? I will argue that the radical creativity of hu
 man imagination arose through a process of demodularization whereby previo
 usly (i.e. in a chimp-like ancestor) encapsulated operators came to operat
 e on the operands of other modules. I will argue that this "disencapsulati
 on of promiscuous operators" arose in part via the application of internal
  dexterous hand movements that permitted complex operations to take place 
 within an internal virtual mental workspace before executing any operation
 s in the world. fMRI experiments that test some of these ideas will be dis
 cussed.
LOCATION:Ground Floor Lecture Theatre\, Department of  Psychology
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