6 December 2018, 'The Algorithmic Mind (Thomas Icard)' reading group

A few of us are getting together to read and discuss the PhD thesis of Thomas Icard, who did the MoL and whose PhD thesis, ‘The Algorithmic Mind’, was supervised by Johan van Benthem at Stanford. We would like to invite anyone who is interested to join the reading group. All are welcome!

Thomas Icard’s PhD thesis examines probabilistic approaches to the nature of human inference, with a special focus on resource-bounded agents. As the abstract explains, “I explore a view of inference based on the idea of probabilistic sampling, which is supported by behavioral psychological data and appears to be neurally plausible, and which also engenders a philosophically novel and appealing view of what grounds subjective probability. I then discuss this view in the context of the Bayesian program in cognitive science, proposing a methodology of boundedly rational analysis”.

We will meet in three sessions of two hours each, at the ILLC every second Thursday 3-5pm, beginning November 8.

Thursday 8 November 3-5pm
F1.15 (ILLC seminar room)
Reading Chapters 1 and 2 (pp. 1-56)

Thursday 22 November 3-5pm
F2.02 (PostDoc meeting room)
Reading Chapter 3 (pp. 57-97)

Thursday 6 December 3-5pm
F2.02 (PostDoc meeting room)
Reading Chapter 4 (pp. 98-136)

The thesis can be downloaded from https://www.illc.uva.nl/Research/Publications/Dissertations/DS-2014-02.text.pdf.