Matteo Cavalli-Sforza - Free will, the brain and deep learning

Wednesday 1 Feb 2017, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Madrid

Seminar (IFAE)

Jelena Aleksic (IFAE), Joern Lange (IFAE Barcelona), John E Ward (IFAE)

We like to think that our mental processes are free, and that in the absence of external constraints we are masters of our decisions. However this view is incompatible with the principle of causality, and cannot coexist with scientific determinism. Starting from this philosophical issue, I will argue that the idea of human free will arises from being conscious of only a tiny part of the workings of our brain, a machine whose immense computing power, much greater that any current computer system’s, is only recently beginning to be understood. In parallel to neuroscience, recent progress in Artificial Intelligence, based on extensive and increasingly complex neural networks, has created Deep Learning, a new scientific revolution that will profoundly affect our lives – and our way to do research.