July 25 to August 2, 2004 on the Island of Elba

Organizer: Britta Glatzeder

The tenth Parmenides workshop was focused on the task of gaining insight into the development – both in phylo- and ontogenetic terms – of human thinking. In particular we discussed the hypothesis that - being a product of an evolutionary process - thinking has a modular architecture that developed over time. In order to approach this topic we brought together researchers with expertise in evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, anthropology, animal cognition, and information processing.

• Evan Balaban, anthropology, genetics and neurobiology, McGill University, Montreal;
• Katy Börner, information science, Indiana University;
• Britta Glatzeder, philosophy, Parmenides Center;
• Robert Goldstone, cognitive psychology, University of Indiana;
• Pauline Hogeweg, biology, bioinformatics, University of Utrecht;
• Rolf Peter Horstmann, philosophy, Humboldt University, Berlin;
• Chris Langton, artificial life, complexity theory, Parmenides Center;
• Albrecht von Müller, philosophy, Parmenides Center;
• Helge Ritter, neuroinformatics, University of Bielefeld, Germany;
• Eric Schultes, biology, The Whitehead Institute, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• Visualizing Knowledge (Katy Börner)
• Interaction between Perceptual and Conceptual Learning (Robert Goldstone)
• Major Transitions in Evolution, Emergence and the Sequential Nature of Thought (Pauline Hogeweg)
• Structure Formation (Pauline Hogeweg)
• The Concept of Thinking in Hegel’s Philosophy (Rolf Peter Horstmann)
• Cellular Automata (Chris Langton)
• Presentation of the SwarmProject (Chris Langton)
• Strategic Thinking – The 4C Hypothesis (Albrecht von Müller)