The group's next professor talk will be this Wednesday, March 13th, at Weiser 955, starting at 7:30 pm. Associate Professor Eric Lormand will be joining us to discuss "The Easy Hard and Hard Easy Problems of Consciousness."

Professor Lormand’s research concerns those mental phenomena that inspire philosophical challenges to cognitive science, including consciousness and qualia, self-knowledge, meaning, mental representation, emotions, skills, and rationality. Currently he is working on the epistemic justification of logic, of inference to the best explanation, and of evaluations. He is also interested in pursuing related issues in phenomenology and metaphysics.

Overview
"The Easy Hard and Hard Easy Problems of Consciousness: Two Reasons to Be Nice"
The famous so-called “hard problem” about explaining conscious experience--which many like David Chalmers take to be a show-stopper--turns out to be easy. If you’re nice I’ll tip you off on how to solve it. But there’s a different reason why none of the famous theories you can read about in online encyclopedias (theories from philosophers and scientists like Tye, Tononi, Prinz, Penrose, Lycan, Kriegel, Koch, Dennett, Chalmers, Carruthers, Block, Baars) come anywhere close to explaining conscious experience. I’ll describe that second easy-to-understand problem, and if you’re extra nice I’ll tip you off on how to solve it, too.