Day: Wednesdays
Time: 10am SLT

Please note that Philosophical Seminar now takes place away from the Kira Café (but still on Kira land). (This is because the Kira Café has had to move to non-mature rated land.) Venue: Kira Japan land http://slurl.com/secondlife/Bieup/116/246/103

As the name indicates this workshop will focus on the study of the philosophical problematic. All domains and problems of philosophy can be studied, however the first general theme will be on the good old “mind/body problem” otherwise known as the “hard problem.” The specific themes studied will depend on the evolution of the workshop session and debates and generally subjects of interest will arise spontaneously.

The first two seminars focused on the article Turning 'The Hard Problem' Upside Down & Sideways by Piet Hut and Roger Shepard, 1996, J. of Consc. Stud. 3, 313-329; reprinted in Explaining Consciousness , ed. J. Shear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 305-322. It is available in his draft version online at http://www.ids.ias.edu/~piet/publ/turning/tuc2.html. For uniformity this draft version was used and participants were encouraged to read the paper beforehand. One of the authors known by his avatar name Pema Pera (RL: Piet Hut) kindly accepted as the first guest star speaker of this seminar.

Starting Wed. 2009.02.04 the workshop focused on the paper: Chalmers, David J. (2004) How can we construct a science of consciousness? In: The Cognitive Neurosciences III. MIT Press, Cambridge. Available at http://consc.net/papers/scicon.pdf. This paper is heavily linked to our undergoing discussion and so is continuation of it with a supplemental element.

Gilles Kuhn in RL obtained a Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondie (DEA) in philosophy (Master degree) and a DEA in cognitives sciences in France and Belgium. He has also studied political science and human rights and humanitarian international law.