Philosophy Lecture

On 16 November, Dr Calder gave a fascinating philosophy lecture entitled ‘To Be Confirmed: The Predictive Mind’.

Here is a write-up by philosophy scholar Aaron (DG/Year 12):

Tuesday night’s Kitcher Society talk, given by the esteemed Dr Calder, entailed him talking about the main subject matter of his thesis which is about predictive processing and mental representation, exploring some of the philosophical implications of an emerging theory in psychology and neuroscience. He went into detail about the fascinating way the human mind works for optimised survival. Predictive processing is all about predictions of our environment made by our minds and then our brains searching for confirmation or error signals and acting upon them. Dr Calder went on to talk about how predictive processing has been adapted into artificial intelligence systems such as Google DeepDream and how they work similarly to predictive processing in the mind to produce pictures based on what is inputted and data collected. There then was a scintillating question and answer session with a plethora of intelligent questions from pupils and staff members answered eloquently by Dr Calder, providing further insight into his personal opinions and knowledge about the ethics of having human-like artificial intelligence and human mind function.