On 30th-31st July, University of Tokyo hosted a symposium on Philosophy of Mind and Mental Illness at its Komaba Campus. This post describes the talks presented at the symposium.

On May 26th I gave a talk entitled "The Perceptual Constancy Problem as an aspect of the Binding Problem." In this talk I proposed a new approach to the perceptual constancies. I proposed that the problematic converse aspect of constancy - percptual relativity - is caused by the peculiar way in which properties tend to be co-represented within a sensory modality. I further proposed that perceptual relativity in the above sense is not simultaneous relativity, but rather a gestalt-like re-evaluation of the scene, much like so-called "mulitstable perception", such as when viewing a Necker cube. The underlying mechanisms should be very similar - a consequence which ought to be empirically testable.

In this month’s colloquium, John O'Dea gave a paper on the phenomenon known as “confabulation”, based largely on William Hirstein’s recent monograph, Brain Fiction.

The Program of the 8th TCCP was a presentation by John O’Dea, a research fellow of UTCP. The title of his presentation was "Is there an Ethical Problem with Neuromarketing?" As indicated in the title, it was a review of the background and current state of Neuromarketing; i.e., the commercial use of neuroscientific knowledge or technology for the purpose of manipulating public opinion. Neuromarketing is one of hot topics within neuroethics, though there are not yet many neuroethical papers on neuromarketing. Assessing several studies on neural features of consumers and examples of actual commercial uses, O’Dea concludes that there’s no ethical problem with neuromarketing.

On Saturday Aug 2nd members of UTCP took part in a round-table on recent neuroscience and consciousness at the World Congress of Philosophy. Apart from myself, the other panel members were Jung-Sun Han Heuer, Yukihiro Nobuhara, and Saku Hara. Junichi Murata chaired the round-table.

　　The program of the 7th TCCP was text reading, and we read the preface and chapter 1 of J. J. Prinz’s book Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (2004).