Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience

Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience

Research Seminars

The PPN Research Seminar is a joint endeavour to promote interdisciplinary discussion between Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience.

Time: 3-5pm (but see * in list of seminars below for exceptions)

Venue: Some seminars will take place in person and some via Microsoft Teams. Most will be hybrid. Details provided via our email list.

In addition to the regular meetings, we hold Work in Progress (WiP) meetings where postgraduates present their work. WiP meetings are identified as such below.

All students, staff and visiting researchers are welcome to attend.

Organizers:

These seminars are jointly sponsored by the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, the Department of Philosophy and the CSPE.

Please scroll down to see the programme!

Abstract Brain

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Programme 2026-27

First Semester

25 September [FRIDAY] (3-5pm)

Joe Cruz (Williams College)

Illusionism and Artificial Consciousness 

Abstract: I’m going to defend two claims that you’re likely to find implausible. Firstly, I’ll argue that illusionism —or, at any rate, a view that is recognizably a kind of illusionism—is true about consciousness. Secondly, I’ll claim that even though familiar current LLMs are very likely not conscious, it is not conceptually difficult to see how they easily might someday, even soon, be. My version of illusionism maintains that our conception of phenomenal consciousness is the byproduct of an inability to represent our fine-grained cognitive, embodied, perception-and-action systems. We misunderstand this self-opacity as the presence of real phenomenal properties when in fact there are none. Instead of asking what sort of special property consciousness is, we should aim to explain why we think that there is such a special property. I am proposing an answer to the latter question.This view shows why LLM consciousness is not difficult to conceive. What is required is that the LLMs' self-representational schemes are inadequate to characterizing their own finest-grain processing, and that they represent the mismatch in such a way as to be ineliminably opaque. An LLM might then understand itself as conscious in just the way that we understand ourselves as conscious. Current LLMs are somewhat ambiguous on this front. They are representationally heterogeneous, but the heterogeneity might be the wrong kind. I’ll try to say something more about what the right kind is, but I admit that LLMs might indeed already be conscious.

28 September (3-5pm)

Stephen Butterfill (University of Warwick)

Unknown Minds, Shared Norms: Where Do Standards for Attributing Mental States and Agency Come From?

Abstract: We often agree, confidently, on which things are agents, and on what someone feels, knows or is doing. ‘Of course they knew that! How could they not?’ Yet such judgements vary between individuals, cultures and experts. How do we often reach confident agreement locally while outsiders make equally confident but inconsistent attributions?

Ordinary mindreading is theoretically underdetermined by observation and lacks universal rules for accommodating irrationality. Attributions therefore depend on background standards. To understand both agreement and variation, we need to know where these standards come from.

My proposal starts from a recent conjecture: mindreading is asynchronous coordination. On this conjecture, success in mindreading involves generating and selecting attributions which others would recognise as plausible and appropriate. Acquiring this skill requires coordinating with others; but, once learned, it can be exercised alone. This conjecture, if true, might explain small-scale, short-term agreement and variation.
 
An observation about social norms suggests a way to extend this proposal. Explicit attitudes sometimes decouple from the behaviours that uphold norm-like patterns in our activities. Such norm-like patterns can acquire a life of their own, and may later become linked to new explicit attitudes. If mindreading standards can be upheld in this way, they need not be things we know (and could even be inconsistent with our beliefs). Instead, the standards that make minds intelligible are implicitly maintained, variable—and to us as researchers, largely unknown.

12 October (3-5pm)

Soren Overgaard (University of Copenhagen) 

Exploring Plausibility in Virtual Reality

Abstract: Mel Slater has proposed that presence in VR is best thought of as composed of two ‘orthogonal’ and logically independent illusions, labelled ‘Place Illusion’ (PI) and ‘Plausibility illusion’ (Psi). The first is the illusion of ‘being there’ – being located in a virtual place – while Psi is the illusion that the events experienced in VR are real, ‘are actually occurring’ (Slater et al 2022, 2). Slater has repeatedly insisted that Psi ‘is the most interesting and complex illusion to understand and is worthy of significant[ly] more research’ (Slater et al 2022: 1), both as regards what it means to experience events as actually happening, how such experiences can be measured, and what factors contribute to creating and maintaining such an illusion (Slater et al 2022, 12-13). In this talk, I take up the invitation to advance research on Psi – specifically as regards what it means to experience Psi. While Slater’s distinction between PI and Psi is a significant step in the direction of a much-needed clarification of ‘presence’ in VR, I argue that further clarification is called for. I suggest that we need to distinguish between different levels of experienced ‘reality’ in VR. And I propose an explicit widening of Psi so that it also (explicitly) extends to virtual objects. Although my focus is primarily on Psi, I will outline some implications of my discussion for PI.

26 October (3-5pm) 

Karla Evans (University of York)

9 November (3-5pm) 

Will Sharp (University of Geneva)

16 November (3-5pm)

Sascha Fink (University of Cologne)

23 November (3-5pm)

Luca Barlassina (University of Sheffield)

 

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