Dear Comparative Literature Colleagues
Here is a reminder of events in my Durham Institute of Advanced Study Experience of Emergence series next Monday and Tuesday, which may be of interest. There is a lecture by Kate Hayles (Duke) on 2 March and a workshop with Kate Hayles, Dan Grausam and Mariann Hardey (both Durham) on 3 March. Do kindly pass this on to Departments and post on.
Thanks and kind regards as ever
Nick S.
1. Lecture
Katherine Hayles (Duke)
The Emergence of Nonconscious Cognition
2 March 2015, 18.00 for 18.15, ER140, Elvet Riverside 1
Traditionally, the human brain has been associated with consciousness and (since Freud) the unconscious. However, at a lower level of neuronal processing, cognitive tasks are carried out by what Antonio Damasio calls the "proto-self," inaccessible to consciousness and completely nonconscious. This opens the door to re-think the relation between humans, animals, and technical devices in terms of the cognitive nonconscious. The program in Artificial Intelligence to create conscious computers has not succeeded and is, in my view, unlikely to succeed any time soon. Nevertheless, a wide range of autonomous and embedded computational devices and systems routinely carry out cognitively sophisticated tasks. Understanding these as nonconscious cognition enables us to trace the similarities and differences between the strategies employed by all the cognizers on the planet: humans, animals, and technical devices. Moreover, it provides nuanced and sophisticated ways to consider emergent effects arising from their interactions.
2. Workshop
3 March, IAS Seminar Room, 16.00-18.00 Cosin’s Hall
Katherine Hayles
Emergence and the ecology of automated trading algorithms
With the exponential increase in financial trades made by automated algorithms, 70% of all trades are now executed by algorithms operating at micro-temporal regimes inaccessible to humans. The algorithms are able to sense what competing algorithms intend to do, giving rise to complex social dynamics in which the faster, more aggressive algorithms hunt in packs, looking for "whales" (large orders) that they can out-bid and manipulate to their advantage. With the stock market's transition to a machine-machine ecology rather than the older human-machine ecology, emergent effects arise that undermine the stability and robustness of the entire global financial system. This talk will explore the implications of these developments as a case study in the interactions of technical cognitive nonconscious systems with the human systems in which they are embedded.
Daniel Grausam
Fiction and contemporaneity
(Abstract to follow.)
Mariann Hardey
Emergent experience of dissemination
(Abstract to follow.)
Professor Nicholas Saul
Co-Editor, Novalis-Jahrbuch
Co-Director, Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience
Department of German
School of Modern Languages and Cultures
University of Durham
Elvet Riverside
New Elvet
GB-Durham DH1 3JT
+44 191 334 3457
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http://www.dur.ac.uk/mlac/german/staff/display/?id=2036
https://www.dur.ac.uk/ihrr/
https://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/events/thematic/emergentexperience/
https://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/events/events_listings/
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