Minds, Brains, and Beyond

I’m off to Bristol tomorrow to attend the Susan Hurley memorial conference entitled Minds, Brains, and Beyond. The conference runs until Sunday and features an impressive array of philosophical luminaries, including John Campbell, José Luis Bermudéz, Daniel Dennett, Andy Clark, Alvin Goldman, Jesse Prinz and Ruth Millikan, to name but a few. Unfortunately, Alva Noë and Kim Sterelny had to drop out at the last minute, although the good news is that ticketing problems with Dennett’s keynote seem to have been sorted out and places have now been offered to anyone who’s attending the conference and wants to go (quite right too!).

I’m very much looking forward to seeing some of the philosophical big beasts in action, especially given that many of the talks are on topics close to my own areas of interest. As seems only fitting, I will be taking my copy (well, Warwick university library’s copy, actually) of Consciousness in Action to read on the train (6:30am at Leamington Spa station!). I started reading it some time ago and only managed until chapter 7, not because it wasn’t interesting, but because I moved onto other things and needed some time to process some of the arguments concerning the inverted spectrum thought experiments after which this blog is named. In any case, it will be good to return to these issues at the interface between philosophy and neuroscience, and upon which Hurley wrote so eloquently.

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology (more specifically, the iPhone, the Internet and WordPress), I will be attempting to post a few comments and (hopefully) pictures from the conference both here on my blog and on Twitter, where I can be found at @keith_wilson. Failing that, I will hopefully have some more things to say by the time I return, and look forward to meeting any fellow grad students who are also attending the conference, which promises to be an interesting and enjoyable weekend.

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