Seminar by Rajesh Kasturirangan
A Rational Embodiment
Rajesh Kasturirangan
NIAS, Bangalore
Date: Tuesday, March 19th, 2013
Time: 6PM
Venue: CS102.Abstract:
The computational approach has been immensely successful in Cognitive Science as well as in AI. The computational approach allows for a precise formulation of questions in the mind sciences and has led to major advances linguistics and perceptual science. However, there has been an increasingly louder chorus of disappointment with the computational approach, much of which is now clubbed under the umbrella of embodied cognition (EC). Broadly speaking, the EC point of view denies that the mind is the software that runs on the hardware of the brain. It says that the body is integral to the mind. Unfortunately, the embodied cognition approach has a tendency to throw out the baby with the bathwater - it shies away from rational principles altogether. In this talk, I will show how one can bring a rational - almost computational - perspective together with a deep concern for embodiment, and how that can illuminate how language, gesture and cognition come together.
About the speaker:
Rajesh Kasturirangan graduated with M.Sc (integrated - Math) from IIT Kanpur in 1993. He did a Ph.D. in Mathematics from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998 and another Ph.D. in Cognitive Science (2004) from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently a faculty member and Anchor of the Cognition Programme at NIAS, Bangalore.