Researchers at CEK were part of organising and presenting at the symposium "Thinking about thinking", and the presentations are now available for streaming from Swedish public service.

Thinking about thinking was an interdisciplinary two-day symposium on thinking in humans and other animals – what it is, how it works, how it evolved, and what sets human thinking apart from animal thinking. Novel biological research sheds light on the latter of these questions through new mathematical models of animal thinking and the identification of, as it seems, a crucial trait enabling humans to learn language and develop culture while animals cannot. Further, there are recent parallel developments within philosophy of mind and cognitive science, more specifically on the brain as a Bayesian prediction machine. Nine invited speakers will present current research across these approaches. The first presentations introduce the new biological research and discuss general philosophical problems surrounding thinking. The final presentations are dedicated to the currently much debated question about ’the predictive mind’.

Intelligent behavior in animals

Stefano Ghirlanda
Brooklyn College, The City University of New York, USA
Centre for Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University, Sweden

Thinking and cultural evolution

Magnus Enquist
Centre for Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University, Sweden

Mental representation

David Papeneau
King's College, London, UK

Informational openness enhances decentralized decision-making: A cognitive agent-based simulation

Joshua Skewes
Aarhus University, Denmark

Troubles with Bayesianism: An introduction to the psychological immune system

Eric Mandelbaum
Baruch College, The City University of New York, USA

Thinking in the predictive mind

Jacob Hohwy
Monash University, Australia