Podcast
CogNation
Hosted by CogNation Media · EN
CogNation is a podcast by Rolf Nelson and Joe Hardy, two cognitive psychologists interested in the future of brain science and technology. We explore relevant topics in the areas of cognitive science, technology, AI, and philosophy. Although we dabble with dystopian implications of new technologies (such as the impending robopocalypse), we are led by our curiosity and try to keep it light and fun.
https://www.facebook.com/CognationPodcast/
email: cognationpodcast@gmail.com
13episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Daniel Dennett: A Retrospective
May 28, 202400:48:12Tap to summarizeDaniel Dennett, who passed away on April 19th at the age of 82, was one of the great philosophers of our time. Rolf and Joe discuss his ideas and his influence on the field of philosophy, including (especially) bringing consciousness back as a topic of serious study with his book "Consciousness Explained", as well as his work on free will, evolution, religion, and constructing a convincing argument.
Transcribe →AI and Cognition with Daniel Sternberg
Mar 25, 202401:21:50Tap to summarizeWhat can neuroscience teach us about AI, and vice versa, what can AI teach us about our own intelligence?Joe and Rolf talk to returning guest Daniel Sternberg about advances in AI over the past year. Topics include using the methods of cognitive psychology to understand AI; representation in artificial intelligence; what current large language models (LLMs) are good at and not good at; sentience in AI; the future of humanity; and other important stuff.Natural and Artificial Intelligence: A brief introduction to the interplay between AI and neuroscience research (Macpherson, et al., 2021)Can AI language models replace human participants? (Dillion, et al., 2023)Language models show human-like content effects on reasoning (Dasgupta et al., 2022)
Transcribe →Episode 22: The Neuroscience of Free Will: Guest Aaron Schurger
Dec 12, 2019Tap to summarizeGuest Dr. Aaron Schurger talks to us about his research on the meaning of the "readiness potential", which has been referred to as "the brain signature of the will". Although this neural signal was already famous from research in the 1960s, it was Benjamin Libet's infamous experiments in the 1980s that proportedly showed that the readiness potential preceded an act of free will by a few hundred milliseconds. More recently (in press), Dr. Schurger and his colleagues have convincingly demonstrated that the readiness potential is not in fact predictive of an act of free will, but instead comes from a lack of a proper experimental control. Resources: Here is what a classifier is (a topic that comes up that may be unfamiliar to some). For advanced readers, check out AdaBoost, a tool that increases performance in classifiers and other types of machine learning. Papers "The Time Course of Neural Activity Predictive of Impending Movement" (Basbug, Schapire, & Schurger, TO BE PUBLISHED SOON) An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-initiated movement (Schurger, Sitt, & Dehaene, 2012) Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action (Libet's 1985 experiments)Special Guest: Aaron Schurger.
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