Tuesday, June 21, 2005

The first EGGS event, Torino

Volentieri segnaliamo:
The Graduate Students and Ph.D. Students in Cognitive Science of the Department of Psychology - University of Torino, sponsored by the ISASUT (International School of Advanced Study of the University of Turin), organise the first event of the EGGS series (European Gather of Graduate Students) aimed to promote the cultural and academic exchange among European and extra-European Ph.D. Students:
Organism and Environment in Cognitive Science, July, 19th 2005.
Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, via Principe Amedeo, 34. 10123 TORINO (ITALY)
Morning Session h. 10-13
Maurizio Tirassa, Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Science, University of Torino: Agencies
Marco Colombetti, Politecnico di Milano & University of Lugano: Acting in an institutional environment
Afternoon Session h. 14.30 - 17.30
Ferdinando Rossi, Department of Neuroscience, University of Torino: The nature/nurture interaction: genes, neurons and behaviour
Piero Cervella, Department of Biology, University of Torino: Environment, organisms and genes: perception and interpretation of a natural (imperfect) world.

The aim of this seminar is to discuss how the relationship between human beings and their environment is established.
Human beings are biological organisms. Like every biological organism, we live and act in a space/time whose boundaries and shapes are determined on the basis of how we are made.
The many ways we are enabled to conceive of what happens around us, and act on the basis of this representation in order to achieve our own goals, together form our environment.
Cognition is one of the various sophisticated means that evolved in different forms for different organisms to allow them to act, survive and reproduce themselves in their own environment. This is enough to state that the questions about what cognition is, and what the environment is to an organism endowed with cognition, are strictly related with each other.
Classical cognitive science saw the environment as an internal symbolic encoding and processing of the physical features of the world outside.
The problem with this view is that there are many crucial everyday entities in our own environment that cannot be reduced to physical entities: consciousness, thoughts, social relationships, history, culture, as well as institutions such as taxes, politics and electronical communities.
A reconceptualization is thus needed for the notion of the environment of human being as cognitive agents and biological organisms. Cognitive Sciences should be able to address and answer many question on that.
Among the others:
- how is it possible to give a biological account of the human social environment?
- is cognition quantitatively or qualitatively different for each organism?
- is it possible to build artificial agents that act in their own environment in the same way as human beings do? What does this imply for our concept of cognition?

The seminar will focus on some issues related to these question.
Four internationally renowned Italian researchers from different disciplines of the Cognitive Sciences will give their contributions to thediscussion. Large space will be left to the debate, that will follow each speech.

-- Practical informations --
The sponsoring by ISASUT has made possible to let the seminar be open toeverybody free of charge. Everyone who wish to join please send an email with EGGS2005 in the subject to mailto:nospam@psych.unito.it
As the seminar falls the day before the opening of the CogSci05 - XXVIIAnnual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society in Stresa, a trainticket from Torino to Stresa for the morning of July 20th will be made available to the first 30 people who will register for the seminar.
For more informations about travelling and accommodation, please check further announcements and the informations that will be made available soon in a dedicated page of the CogSci05 conference athttp://www.psych.unito.it/csc/eggs2005.html

Organizing committee:
leonardo cerliani – mailto:cerliani@psych.unito.it
daniele radicioni – mailto:dradic@psych.unito.it
Center for Cognitive Science Department of Psychology, University of Torino
http://www.psych.unito.it/csc

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