Science, Counterfactuals and Free Will - 2016 Dickson Prize Lecture

The recipient of the 2016 Dickson Prize is Judea Pearl, Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science and Statistics, University of California, Los Angeles. He gave a lecture on "Science, Counterfactuals and Free Will" at the prize ceremony on February 29, 2016.

Counterfactuals, or fictitious changes, are the building blocks of scientific thought and the oxygen of moral behavior. The ability to reflect back on one's past actions and envision alternative scenarios is the basis of learning, free will, responsibility and social adaptation.

Recent progress in the algorithmization of counterfactuals has advanced our understanding of this mode of reasoning and has brought us a step closer toward equipping machines with similar capabilities. Dr. Pearl first describes a computational model of counterfactual reasoning, and then pose some of the more difficult problems that counterfactuals present: why evolution has endowed humans with the illusion of free will, and how it manages to keep that illusion so vivid in our brain.

The Dickson Prize in Science is awarded annually to the person who has been judged by Carnegie Mellon University to have made the most progress in the scientific field in the United States for the year in question.

For more, vist: http://http://www.cmu.edu/dickson-prize

Видео Science, Counterfactuals and Free Will - 2016 Dickson Prize Lecture канала Carnegie Mellon University