Speakers
Georg Northoff
The Royal’s Institute of Mental Health Research (IMHR)
Our human self and its brain - Will Artificial Intelligence have a self?
Georg Northoff is a philosopher, neuroscientist and psychiatrist, holding degrees in all three disciplines. He works in Ottawa/Canada holding a Canada Research Chair for Mind, Brain Imaging, and Neuroethics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His research focuses on the relationship between brain and mind. The question driving him is: “why and how can our brain construct mental features like self, consciousness, etc.” To address the brain-mind relationship he developed his novel and unique Spatiotemporal Neuroscience and Psychopathology where time-space are shared by brain and mind. He is also one of the leading figures in linking philosophy, psychiatry, and neuroscience having developed non-reductive neurophilosophy and the world-brain relation as answer to the mind-body problem. He authored over 400 journal articles and 20 books which are translated into several languages including “Neuro-philosophy and the Healthy Mind” (2016) Norton Publisher, and “Neurowaves” (McGill”) (2023).
Our human self and its brain - Will Artificial Intelligence have a self?
Our self is the core of our mental life. It relates us to ourselves, our body and also to the environment. Various neuronal and psyhcological mechanisms have been discussed and will be presented in my talk. Moreover, changes in these mechanisms go along with changes in the self as in mental disorders like depression and schizophrenia. Does current artificial intelligence have a self? We do not know. Based on the relational nature of the human self spanning across hte divides of environment, body, brain and mind, I postulate that current AI does not have a self or a sense of self. However, I do not exclude it principally that future AI versions will develop a sense of self.
Sami Gülgöz
Koç University
What is memory for? Revisiting Baddeley’s 1988 question
Sami Gülgöz is a Professor of Psychology at Koç University. He received his undergraduate degree in Psychology from Boğaziçi University in İstanbul, Turkey, and his MA and Ph.D. degrees in Experimental Psychology from the University of Georgia in the USA. Between 1989 and 1993, he worked as an Assistant Professor at Auburn University, Alabama, USA, after which he started working at Koç University. He served as the Dean of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities between 2008-2014. His current research focuses on memory and its relationship with social and personality factors, particularly concentrating on the functions of remembering, memory for public events, and predicting the future. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Psychonomic Society.
What is memory for? Revisiting Baddeley’s 1988 question
In the seminal volume 1 of Practical Aspects of Memory, Alan Baddeley lamented the lack of awareness that humans are products of evolution and argued that we should ask ourselves what function memory serves. Almost 40 years later, we have made some progress in studying these functions, though whether they are sufficiently emphasized remains a question. In this talk, I present recent developments in the functional approach alongside some research results from our laboratory. I argue that conceptualizing memory as primarily about the past is only a minor part of the overall picture; functionally, memory is mainly about the future.