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Jonathan BowenPhD Student and Rotman Institute Member
I'm a philosophy student interested in what we are and how we work. On of my projects is to develop an ecological approach to perceiving psychological states of other persons and animals. Inspired by E. B. Holt, E. Tolman, and J. J. Gibson among others, I claim that psychological states are motor attitudes with respect to outer objects and aspects of the world, that purposive behaviour has descriptive characteristics of persistence, flexibility, and economy, and that we can maintain perceptual contact with these aspects of the world. I also work on experimental methods capitalizing on some of the unique prospects for experimental design offered by virtual reality platforms. My second project concerns the possibility of creating artificial persons. I'm interested in its formulation: What is to succeed at creating artificial persons? Which aspects of us are the ones that matter? And also in its ethical implications: Are there good reasons for creating artificial persons? Should we create them? Bowen, J. (2019). A Gibsonian Approach to Purposive Behaviour. Expression, Communication, and the Origins of Meaning (ECOM)’s Inaugural Graduate Conference. Storrs CT, United States. Bowen, J. (2019). Embodiment and the Split-Brain: an Enactive Unity. Annual Meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, London, Canada. With Michael Anderson. Bowen, J. (2019). Thou, Robot. Annual Meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association, Vancouver, Canada. Bowen, J. (2019). Non-Instrumental Reasons for Creating Artificial Persons. Canada-United Kingdom Symposium On Ethics In Artificial Intelligence (EIAI2019), Ottawa, Canada (Poster presentation.) Bowen, J. (2016). Training Facial Expression Production and Perception. Perceptual Expertise Network XXXI Workshop, New Orleans LA, United States. |