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DTSTART;TZID=America/Toronto:20250326T153000
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SUMMARY:Rotman Visiting Speaker: Chris Letheby
DESCRIPTION:“Merely Believing and Really Believing: Mental Imagery in Personal Transformation”Talk Description: As a teacher of mine once remarked\, when we say that teenagers think they are immortal\, we don’t mean that they would fail a biology test. Teenagers believe\, truly and justifiably\, that they will die\, but there is also a sense in which they – and perhaps most of us – don’t really believe it. The topic of this talk is exactly this difference between merely believing and really believing a proposition – between knowing it only in our head\, as we might say\, and knowing it in our heart\, or feeling it in our bones. The shift from ‘head’ knowledge to ‘heart’ knowledge has been much discussed but is still not fully understood. A fuller understanding of it could shed light on interesting theoretical questions and be of significant practical benefit\, given the apparent therapeutic and transformative relevance of such shifts. In the talk I explore a simple proposal about the cognitive nature of such shifts: that they consist primarily in the activation of mental imagery. My ultimate conclusion is that this proposal gets at part of the truth\, but may not be the whole story. Exploring its limits promises to shed further light on the nature of the shifts themselves\, and perhaps even on broader questions about cognitive architecture. \nBio: Dr Chris Letheby is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at The University of Western Australia (UWA). His areas of specialization are philosophy of mind\, philosophy of cognitive science\, and philosophy of neuroscience. His research interests include the causal mechanisms and epistemic status of transformative spiritual practices\, the possibility of a “naturalistic spirituality”\, and the nature of self-awareness. At UWA he teaches topics including intro to philosophy\, formal logic\, epistemology\, philosophy of mind\, philosophy of science\, philosophy of artificial intelligence\, and philosophy of psychology and psychiatry. \nLetheby’s research to date has focused mainly on the use of classic psychedelic drugs in neuroscience and psychiatry. In several articles and a book\, he has argued that a traditional conception of psychedelics as agents of insight and spirituality can be reconciled with naturalism\, the philosophical position that the natural world is all there is. He takes a neurophilosophical approach\, grounding his philosophical analyses in scientific findings\, and he has engaged in several interdisciplinary collaborations with neuroscientists and psychologists. \nAttendance is free\, no RSVP is required. Light refreshments will be served.
URL:https://www.rotman.uwo.ca/event/rotman-visiting-speaker-chris-letheby/
LOCATION:Room 3000 – Western Interdisciplinary Research Building\, Western University\, London\, Ontario\, N6A 3K7\, Canada
CATEGORIES:Past Events,Public Events,Public Lectures
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UID:29017-1743078600-1743082200@www.rotman.uwo.ca
SUMMARY:Generative Artificial Intelligence & Historiography
DESCRIPTION:EVENT DESCRIPTION\n\nBIO:\n \nWilliam J. Turkel is Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario and internationally recognized for his innovative work in digital history. He uses machine learning\, text mining\, and computational techniques in his study of the histories of science\, technology and environment\, drawing on many decades of programming experience. He is the author of Spark from the Deep (Johns Hopkins\, 2013)\, The Archive of Place (UBC\, 2007) and the open access textbook Digital Research Methods with Mathematica (2nd ed 2019). His current research focuses on the use of generative AI in historiography\, history and theory\, and historical methods. Dr. Turkel is a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy and the College of New Scholars\, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada (2018-25). \nABSTRACT: \nCollaboration with Generative Artificial Intelligence will rapidly reshape the nature of historical thinking in the 21st century. Because GenAI is capable of performing complex\, nonroutine\, and cognitive tasks through natural language prompting\, it drastically reduces barriers for developing hybrid human-AI systems that can read and understand vast numbers of sources (albeit in a distinctly non-human way). At the same time\, GenAI systems operate so that they always have some possibility of so-called hallucination. Hallucinations can be mitigated by the use of more structured techniques for representing\, analyzing\, and reasoning about sources. Here\, I make three arguments. First\, contemporary information environments\, including our collective record of the past\, require sophisticated computational systems to make sense of. Second\, we will need to understand this as an adversarial process. Historians have long practiced source criticism to evaluate reliability and authenticity\, and assessed the biases\, gaps\, and silences in their archives. But GenAI supports new forms of ambiguity\, influence\, denial\, deception\, and disinformation and all of these techniques have a historical dimension. Third\, the traditional slow scholarship of individuals writing monographs at the time scale of decades has to be supplemented by larger teams of humans and AIs\, collaborating to create an evidence-based usable past in real time. \nAttendance will be free\, but advance registration is requested. Please RSVP at historyrsvp@uwo.ca or scan the QR code on the poster.
URL:https://www.rotman.uwo.ca/event/rotman-seminar-generative-ai-historiography/
LOCATION:Room 3000 – Western Interdisciplinary Research Building\, Western University\, London\, Ontario\, N6A 3K7\, Canada
CATEGORIES:Artificial Intelligence,Past Events,Rotman Dialogues,Rotman Lectures
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