Please join us for “Animal Dreamers and the Control Problem” with Dr. Erik Nelson (York University) on Tuesday, March 24 at 5 pm in Eddy 200.

In this lecture, Nelson aims to demonstrate that nonhuman animal minds face a version of what Cameron Buckner has called the control problem. The control problem is what minds face when they must distinguish and manage different types of processes and/or content. For example, a mind that is incapable of distinguishing perceptual experiences from imaginings would be a mind that has failed to find a solution to the control problem. There is a wealth of empirical evidence that strongly suggests that many nonlinguistic animals dream. Nelson argues that if animals dream, then their minds must have a way of sorting dream processes/content from other sorts of mental processes/content. In other words, if animals dream, then animal minds must be capable of a form of metacognitive control.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Erik Nelson is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at York University in Toronto, ON. His interests center around issues in the philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of mind. He currently works on conceptual capabilities and whether nonlinguistic beings (either nonlinguisitic animals, human infants, or nonlinguistic AI systems) can have conceptual capabilities.