Hi all, The first meeting of the Moral Sciences Club for the new academic year is on Tuesday the 13th at 2.30 (in the Barbara White Room in Newnham College). The speaker at this meeting will be Josh Greene, from Harvard University, who will give a talk titled *How does the brain construct complex thoughts?* (Josh's abstract is at the end of this email).
Just a reminder that there's a fee to attend MSC meetings. The easiest way to pay this is via a yearly membership fee (£7.50 for students, £15 for others) which can be paid online at http://onlinesales.admin.cam.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=75&prodvarid=87 Alternatively, you can pay cash in person in the day (but if you choose to do so, please arrive a little early as there may be a queue and we don't want to delay the start of the first meeting: there will be someone in the room taking payments from 2 o'clock). You can also pay (either online or at the meeting) a one-off fee to attend a single meeting (£2 for students, £3 for others), instead of purchasing a yearly membership. Those interested in who else will be speaking this year might like to check out the details currently available on the MSC website: http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/research/seminars-phil/seminars-msc *Abstract* Human brains flexibly combine the meanings of words to compose structured thoughts. For example, by combining the meanings of ‘bite’, ‘dog’, and ‘man’, we can think about a dog biting a man, or a man biting a dog. This capacity for conceptual combination (“compositionality”) is essential for the mental processes that we think of as “thinking”—from everyday planning to mathematical reasoning to moral judgment. In this talk I’ll present some new research aimed at understanding, in a preliminary way, how our brains accomplish this remarkable feat. We find that patterns of activity in distinct sub-regions of left-mid superior temporal cortex dynamically represent the values of two abstract semantic variables: the agent (Who did something?) and the patient (To whom was something done?). This functional architecture, which in key respects resembles that of a classical computer, may play a critical role in enabling humans to flexibly construct complex thoughts. -- Daisy Dixon and Adam Bales Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
