News

Founding CTN member Philosopher Paul Thagard has a new book out: Dreams, Jokes and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness.

The book provides:

• Clear and empirically supported explanation of consciousness as resulting from four brain  mechanisms.
• Application to a broad range of conscious experiences including smell, hunger, loneliness,  self-awareness, religious experience, sports performance, and romantic chemistry. 
• Use of these mechanisms to generate novel theories of dreaming, humor, and musical experience.
• Proposal of a new theory of time consciousness drawing on recent advances in neuroscience.
• Assessment of consciousness in non-human animals and machines, including the new generative  AI models such as ChatGPT. 
• Development of a new solution to the mind-body problem, called coherent materialism. 

And in a preview of coming attractions, stay tuned for his next book AI Boom or Doom?  Philosophy and Psychology of the New Artificial Intelligence, to be published soon by MIT Press

For more information you can follow this link to Paul´s blog.

Sarah An, Editoral Assistant at the Imprint recently reported on the CTN Brain Day 2025:

https://uwimprint.ca/brain-day-exploring-all-things-brain-through-an-interdisciplinary-lens/

Thought Process a podcast by UWloo alumnus Jack MacKinnon features conversations with CTN members:

CTN Founding Director Chris Eliasmith discusses if AI can ever be truly conscious on the Machine Learning Street Talk podcast.

Sue Ann Campbell is President Elect of the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society. CAIMS represents applied and industrial mathematics in Canada. The society has become a significant presence in industrial, scientific, and technological circles within and outside of Canada.

Founding member of CTN, Professor emeritus of Philosophy, and 2013 Killam prize winner Paul Thagard has a new book out: Bots and Beasts: What makes Machines, Animals and People smart.

No Seminar Feb 1, 2022

To an unanticipated conflict our first colloquium speaker of the term needs to reschedule. Mayank Mehta of UCLA will now present on March 8.

CS 479 “Neural Networks” (cross listed as CS 679) is a new course to be offered for the first time Winter 2022. The course is developed by Jeff Orchard (CTN Core member). It was developed over 4 offerings of CS 489 (“Advanced topics in CS”), and should be of interest to undergraduates and graduates with interests in theoretical neuroscience.  For details and pre-requisites please consult cs479.