CogNation

Can we create life artificially? What would that even mean? Rolf and Joe talk about the field of Artificial Life, or "A-Life", which has worked toward the goal from a number of academic disciplines for the past thirty or so years. They think about different approaches, such as software, hardware, and biological artificial life, and consider what it might take to convince us that we have created something that would be considered life.

Dr. Stephanie Preston is our guest for this great conversation about the neural and evolutionary underpinnings of heroic behaviors. She proposes that heroism can be found across the phylogenetic spectrum, and acts of human heroism may have significant roots in conserved behavior patterns -- for example, the instinct for mother rats to retrieve and protect their young even at the risk of great personal danger.

We discuss what qualifies as heroism, how situations can cue (or inhibit) heroic behavior, and what the evolutionary advantage might be to put one's own genes at risk to save the life of another.

We also discuss the field of evolutionary psychology as a whole, and the way in which researchers think about it differently than it is often represented in popular press.

Special Guest: Stephanie Preston.

The psychologist Dan Wegner (1948-2013) had a lot of influential work. One of his most popular (and controversial) claims was that conscious will is an illusion. He wanted to sidestep the issue of whether or not "free will" in a metaphysical sense exists, and get to the more psychological issue of why human beings have such a strong feeling that their conscious intention is what causes their actions.

Can this be right? What exactly does Wegner mean, and does this mean we should abandon moral responsibility? Rolf and Joe get into the weeds sorting out how psychological insights can inform how we think about philosophical issues.

We talk with Adrian Nestor, a professor and researcher at the University of Toronto, Scarsborough, about his recent research, the state of current brain imaging technology, and some speculations about where the field is headed. Can mental images and thoughts be captured, decoded, and understood by a combination of electroencephalography and machine learning techniques? What is the hype and what is the reality?

Dr. Beatrice Golomb describes her paper, "Diplomats’ Mystery Illness and Pulsed Radiofrequency/ Microwave Radiation" which details the evidence for the theory that the Frey Effect is responsible for the Cuban embassy incident in 2016. She also details the (mis)handling of the New York Times story that popularized this claim as a leading theory of the incident.

Rolf and Joe tackle an interesting perceptual phenomenon called the Frey Effect. In the Frey Effect, first discovered in the 1960s, pulsed microwave beams can cause the perception of a high-pitched sound. This has come up in the news recently as an explanation of possible "attacks" on the American embassy in Cuba. How exactly does this work? Should it be something we should worry about? Discussion is based around UC San Diego professor Dr. Beatrice Golomb's paper documenting the case that the Frey Effect is responsible.

In part A of the episode, Joe and Rolf base discussion around "Rapid calibration of an intracortical brain–computer interface for people with tetraplegia" by Brandman et al., thinking beyond the hype to get a realistic picture of how things work in the field. It's not all like The Matrix (yet).

In this second part on brain-computer interfaces, discussion goes toward the more speculative. Joe and Rolf talk about Elon Musk's Neuralink project, which aims to fully connect brains with computers. Would this be possible? Could any system really read our thoughts in the way portrayed in science fiction? Should we even want this to happen? And most importantly, how does this affect the coming Robopocalypse?

Today on the show Rolf and Joe discuss the use of virtual reality for the treatment of mental health disorders like phobias and PTSD. They explore research from Dr. Skip Rizzo on the state of the art, discuss limitations of VR, and then engage in some wild and possibly irresponsible speculation.

In the inaugural episode of CogNation, Joe and Rolf talk about artificial intelligence that mimics the way people think. Along the way, they also talk about pneumatic tubes, uploading consciousness, and how we'll spend our time when robots do all the work. They touch on how this all inevetiably leads to robots taking over the world. The discussion is based around the article "Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People" by Brenden Lake, et al. This article focuses on recent progress in cognitive science that suggests that human-like thinking machines should leverage causal models of the world and be endowed with intuitive physics and psychology.