Ron Chrisley

Centre for Cognitive Science (COGS), University of Sussex, UK

"Robots, virtual reality and human consciousness: Using technology to depict the ineffable"

About the talk

The content of our experiences transcend our ability to express them in words. For millennia, this has been a driving force behind creativity and expressive art. Recent technological advances in robotics and virtual reality mean that we can begin, perhaps drawing on techniques developed by artists through history, to attempt a systematic and rigorous characterisation of the contents of experience through extra-linguistic media, an activity which I call “synthetic phenomenology”. I argue that the development of a sophisticated synthetic phenomenology will be necessary for a mature science of consciousness, and that even the relatively superficial investigation of neural correlates of consciousness cannot hope to be successful without it.

About the speaker

Ron Chrisley is Reader in Philosophy in the School of Engineering and Informatics at the University of Sussex. He received a Bachelors of Science in Symbolic Systems, with honours and distinction, from Stanford University in 1987. He was an AI research assistant at Stanford, NASA, and Xerox PARC, and investigated neural networks for speech recognition as a Fulbright Scholar at the Helsinki University of Technology and at ATR Laboratories in Japan. In 1997 he received a DPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, and in 1992 he took up a lectureship in Philosophy in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex. From 2001-2003 he was Leverhulme Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. Since 2003 he has been the director of the Centre for Cognitive Science (COGS) at the University of Sussex, where he is also on the faculty of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science.