Past Event

We are pleased to announce that the Andrew Brook Distinguished Lecture for this academic year will be delivered by Dr. Mihnea Moldoveanu, behavioural economist and director of the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

The talk will be held on Tuesday April 16th 2013, from 2:30 to 4:00 p.m. Doors open at 2:00 p.m. with cash bar. Reception to follow the talk.

Title: How—and, What—Do Minds and Brains Optimize? A Brainware Compatible Economics of Mental Behaviour

Abstract:

I build a brainware-compatible modeling language for the (pico)economics of mental behavior – including perception, cognition in its many forms and the material pre-conditions for involuntary action. The ensuing set of models heed both the maximization- extremization protocols used by economists and ‘neuro-economists’ to derive behavioral predictions on the basis of agent-level or physiological utility, and the computational representation of mental behavior used in artificial intelligence and cognitive science to represent mental states, operations and search processes. The model relies on a conceptualization of ‘mental work – or, of what humans do when they do what they do – and a new set of objective functions that are plausibly attributable to humans, responsive to concerns and insights regarding the complexity of mental behavior and implementable on architectures which mimic what we currently understand to be their brains.

Notes: click here for lecture notes and click here for lecture slides.