Coglunch - December 7 2006
"Conceptic : a physic of imagination"
Idriss Aberkane
Ecole Normale Superieure
Interests of developing a precise concept theory concern at least
philosophy, mathematics, logic, and cognitive science. It is therefore
not surprising that concept theories have been considered, most
notably by Kant, Hilbert, Godel, and Varela. For the cognitive
scientist the main issues may be some approaches to the following
questions:
- what does human imagination have access to?
Can a human being only understand the way she thinks?
- How narrow is our imagination, and why?
- how are ideas connected to each other?
- Is a Genius idea nothing more than a very unlikely idea?
- Are there some metastable and some "too stable" ideas?
- To what extent can culture avoid the biological constraints
of our creativity?
- To what extent have culture and biology shaped our history of
sciences?
My talk will mainly introduce and develop the notion of the conceptic
universe in order to suggest some modest approaches to these questions.
Last modified: Tue Feb 28 11:26:25 PST 2006 by emma@csli.stanford.edu