Epistemic & Personal Transformation:
Dealing with the Unknowable and Unimaginable
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Monday 13 May – Tuesday 14 May 2019 -
Innes Room, Building 21C,UQ, St Lucia campus
This free cross-disciplinary workshop will bring together participants from philosophy, economics and related fields for invited talks relating to four topics: ethics and uncertainty, transformative experience, climate change, and formal and empirical models of learning and surprise.
This workshop is part of the ARC funded Epistemically Feasible Choice project to consider how to make choices in situations where standard decision theoretic problems may fail, either because of unforeseeable surprises or because choices will lead to transformative experiences that change our valuation of outcomes in ways we cannot anticipate.
Organised by Professor John Quiggin and Dr Ted Shear.
Download schedule and abstracts (PDF, 172.5 KB)
Schedule
Day 1: Monday, 13 May
08:30 - 09:00am Arrival
09:00 - 09:30am Welcome and opening remarks
Session 1: Formal modelling
09:30 - 10:30am Evan Piermont “Partial, Dynamic Awareness” with Joseph Y. Halpern
10:30 - 10:45am Morning coffee
10:45 - 11:45am Ted Shear and John Quiggin “Justification logic with probabilistic confidence”
11:45am - 12:45pm Katie Steele “Belief Revision for Growing Awareness”
01:00 - 02:00pm Lunch
Session 2: Climate change and Natural Sciences
02:00 - 03:00pm Matt Kopec “Climate Change, Manufactured Uncertainty and the Pragmatic Precautionary Principle”
03:00 - 04:00pm Joel Katzav “Issues in the theoretical foundations of climate science” with Wendy S. Parker
04:00 - 04:30pm Afternoon coffee
04:30 - 05:30pm Bruno van Swindern "Understanding consciousness in the smallest animal brains"
7:00 Dinner for speakers at Pane e Vino (124 Albert St, Brisbane City)
Day 2: Tuesday, 14 May
Session 3: Transformative experience
09:00 - 10:00am L.A. Paul & John Quiggin “Education as a transformative experience”
10:00 - 10:30am Morning coffee
10:30 - 11:30am David Braddon-Mitchell "Surviving (to some degree)"
11:30pm - 12:30pm Yuri Cath “Transformative Choices and the Structure of Experience”
12:30 - 01:30pm Lunch
01:30 - 02:30pm Brian Weatherson “Desire as Belief and Moral Newcomb Problems”
02:30 - 03:00pm Panel Discussion
03:00 - 03:30pm Afternoon coffee
Confirmed speakers
- Brian Weatherson, University of Michigan
- Bruno van Swindern, The University of Queensland
- David Braddon-Mitchell, The University of Sydney
- Evan Piermont, University of London
- Joel Katzav, The University of Queensland
- John Quiggin, The University of Queensland
- Katie Steele, Australian National University
- L.A. Paul, Yale University
- Matt Kopec, Australian National University
- Ted Shear, The University of Queensland
- Yuri Cath, La Trobe University
Funding and support
This workshop is made possible through the generous support provided by BEL and HAPI and funding from the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant # DP160100903 led by John Quiggin and L.A. Paul.
Contact
Dr Ted Shear
School of Economics
Colin Clark building (#39)
The University of Queensland
St Lucia 4072 Australia