[Sci-tech-public] Mind/Brain/Behavior grad student conference Fri Feb 16

[Philip Davis Loring]

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2007 Harvard Mind/Brain/Behavior Graduate Student Conference

Friday, February 16, 2007, 8:30 am to 6pm
Biolabs Lecture Hall, 16 Divinity Avenue, Harvard University
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Finding Perfection:
Perspectives on Optimality from Mind, Brain, and Behavior

Free and open to the public, but please register beforehand.
To register, go to http://mbb.harvard.edu/grad/gradstudentconf.php


Is it possible to find perfection in the natural world? For example, are 
the mental faculties that underlie our capacities to acquire and use 
language, solve problems and navigate our way through the world optimal 
solutions to complex design problems? Or is natural selection a 
‘tinkerer’, producing ad hoc and imperfect responses to adaptive 
pressures? In response to a growing body of literature in support of the 
first view, the conference will consider what it means to claim that the 
mind, or some component of it, is ‘perfect’. Is the notion of optimality 
compatible with what we know about evolution? Can we find examples of it 
in other organisms? What conditions must a system satisfy in order to be 
described as ‘optimal’? What place has the idea of optimality occupied 
in the history and philosophy of science? And what is its role in 
shaping how scientific research is practiced?


Schedule:

8:30 am  Coffee and welcome

9:00    Professor Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
  	Professor of Cognitive Science, University of Arizona,
  	& Visiting Professor, Dept. of Linguistics, Harvard
  	The Return of the Laws of Form

10:30   Noah Goodman
  	Computational Cognitive Science Group, MIT
  	Ideal Observers in Theory of Mind

11:10   Margaret Moulson
  	DMC Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Children's Hospital
  	Becoming a “Face Expert: The Role of Early Experience in Shaping 
Underlying Neural Systems

11:50   Dennis Ott
  	Dept. of Linguistics, Harvard
     	Reverse-engineering the Language Faculty: Origins and Implications 
of the Minimalist Program

12:30 pm Lunchtime panel: "Language: A Case Study in Optimality?"
	 Moderated by Professor Piattelli-Palmarini

1:45     Break

2:00     David Britton
  	 Cognitive Neuroscience, Dept. of Psychology, CUNY
	 The Presence of Mind: Optimality, Uncertainty and Consciousness in 
Neurons

2:40     Gary Sing
  	 Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard
  	 Optimization of Structural Complexity in Motor Adaptation Expressed 
by a Simple Multi-Rate Learning Model

3:20     Lukas Rieppel
  	 Dept. of the History of Science, Harvard
  	 Is the Optimal Foraging Model an Optimal Model?

4:00     Break

4:15     Professor Gary Marcus
  	 Dept. of Psychology, NYU
  	 How Perfect the Mind? Two Perspectives on Evolutionary Psychology

. . . . . . . . . .
Philip Davis Loring
Lecturer in Anthropology
M.I.T.

Ph.D. candidate, History of Science
Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
Harvard University
. . . . . . . . . .

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