WIPS - Prof. Jacob Beck: "Analog or Digital? Revisiting the Format of Magnitude Representations"

Ordinary representations like thermometers and clocks can be analog or digital. What about representations in the brain? Are they analog or digital? In the first part of Prof. Beck's talk, he’ll rehearse a powerful argument that the brain uses an analog code to represent magnitudes such as luminance, distance, number, and duration. He’ll then consider an objection to this view advanced by CR. Gallistel. Finally, he’ll evaluate Gallistel’s positive proposal for a view Gallistel calls autoscaling, which appeals to scientific notation as a model for how the brain codes magnitudes. His conclusion will be that we still have reason to think the brain uses an analog code to represent magnitudes. 

Prof. Beck is also a member of York’s Cognitive Science Program, which he directed from 2018 to 2022, and Centre for Vision Research. Beck’s research makes progress on longstanding philosophical puzzles about the mind by reconceptualizing them in light of contemporary cognitive science. He has a special interest in pre-linguistic forms of mental representation, such as perception and the number sense.

Beck’s work has appeared in philosophy journals such as Mind, Noûs, and The Journal of Philosophy, cognitive science journals such as Cognition and Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and popular outlets such as Scientific American and The Atlantic. He co-edited (with Kristin Andrews) the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds. Beck has been a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), and the recipient of two Insight Grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. He is an area editor at the open access journal Ergo.