[PhilPhys] LSE Philosophy Newsletter | Lent Term 2020

[Philosophy]

LSE Philosophy Newsletter | Lent Term 2020
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Visitors
We welcome our new visitors to LSE Philosophy:

  *   Marius Baumann, Nadia Ruiz and Lei Zhao

We renew our welcome to our continuing visitors:

  *   Michal Hladky, Eva Jablonka, Joe Mazor, Silvia Milano, Raimund Pils and Philippe Verreault-Julien .

And we welcome our new Postdoctoral Research Officers to the GEMS project<https://lse.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=166f0feae024825349b394635&id=fb5957187b&e=72b7eb4f48>:

  *   Laura Bartlett, Noman Javed and Angelo Pirrone

Explore our current visitors' research on our website<https://lse.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=166f0feae024825349b394635&id=14f063c670&e=72b7eb4f48>, and learn more about our cutting-edge research projects on our research pages<https://lse.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=166f0feae024825349b394635&id=383587b628&e=72b7eb4f48>.

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Speakers

  *   Ralph Bader, Véronique Munoz-Dardé and Sergio Tenenbaum will speak at the Choice Group<https://lse.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=166f0feae024825349b394635&id=9a5db5e689&e=72b7eb4f48> lecture series on decision and social choice theory
  *   Ruth Chang, Clayton Littlejohn and Jonathan Parry will give this term's Popper Seminars<https://lse.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=166f0feae024825349b394635&id=df67ca6314&e=72b7eb4f48>
  *   Jeremy Butterfield, Sean Gryb and Sophie Ritson will present their work at the Sigma Club<https://lse.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=166f0feae024825349b394635&id=a26afa619e&e=72b7eb4f48> lecture series on philosophy of physics
  *   Deborah Mayo and Samir Okasha will speak at the Conjectures and Refutations<https://lse.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=166f0feae024825349b394635&id=df16bc3986&e=72b7eb4f48> seminar series on philosophy of science

·         Katherine Furman, Eva Jablonka, David Papineau, Barry Smith and Panayiota Vassilopoulou will appear at the Forum for Philosophy<https://lse.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=166f0feae024825349b394635&id=0927dd1712&e=72b7eb4f48>



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New Research Projects

Foundations of Animal Sentience (ASENT<http://www.lse.ac.uk/cpnss/research/ASENT>)

Project leader: Jonathan Birch

Sentience, in a broad sense, is the capacity to feel. In a narrower sense, it refers to the capacity to have feelings with a positive or negative quality, such as feelings of pain, pleasure, boredom, excitement, frustration, anxiety and joy. These feelings have the elusive property that philosophers like to call "phenomenal consciousness". It feels like something to have them.
In recent years, an interdisciplinary community of animal sentience researchers, drawn from neuroscience, comparative psychology, evolutionary biology, animal welfare science and philosophy, has begun to emerge. However, the field is characterized by foundational controversy over the nature of sentience and the criteria for its attribution, leading to heated debate over the presence or absence of sentience in fish and in invertebrates such as cephalopods (e.g. octopods, squid) and arthropods (e.g. bees, crabs).
The Foundations of Animal Sentience project (ASENT), a five-year ERC-funded project led by Dr Jonathan Birch, aims to find ways to resolve these debates. What is needed is a conceptual framework for thinking about sentience as an evolved phenomenon that varies along several dimensions, a deeper understanding of how these dimensions of sentience relate to measurable aspects of animal behaviour and the nervous system, and a richer picture of the links between sentience, welfare and the ethical status of animals.



Genetically Evolving Models in Science (GEMS)<http://www.lse.ac.uk/cpnss/research/genetically-evolving-models-in-science>

Project leader: Fernand Gobet

The development of scientific models suffers from two related problems: the ever-growing number of experimental results and scientists' cognitive limitations (including cognitive biases). This multidisciplinary project (psychology, philosophy, computer modelling, computer science and cognitive neuroscience) addresses these problems by developing a novel methodology for generating scientific models automatically. The methodology is not specific to any particular discipline and can be applied to any science where experimental data are available. The method treats models as computer programs and evolves a population of models using genetic programming. The extent to which the models fit the empirical data is used as a fitness function. The best models - potentially modified by cross-over and mutation - are selected for the next generation. Pilot simulations have established the validity of the methodology with simple experiments in psychology.

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Interested in visiting us?
Find out more about our visitors programme<http://www.lse.ac.uk/cpnss/visit>






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