Lal Avgen presents her Media Technology MSc graduation thesis work, in 20-25 minutes and followed by 10-15 minutes public discussion. Everyone is invited to attend!

    

Language

English

Access

Public for everyone

Duration

40-45 minutes per graduate

Media Technology MSc graduation presentations follow a classic conference format. Each student presents their work in 20 minutes. With the primary advisor acting as a conference session chair, the presentation is followed by a moderated public discussion.
Although everyone can ask questions in the discussion, the right to ask the first questions is for the two invited critics. These were personally invited by the graduate to read their thesis before the presentation, and to formulate one or two questions for the discussion. Ambitious students have been known to invite high-profile academic critics.

Lal Avgen

Scripts of Realization For the Dualist, A Scientific Reflection

The Explanatory Gap, a term coined by Joseph Levine, describes the scientific explanations’ inability to account for the qualitative characters of phenomenal states, such as feelings (Levine, 1983). The way we understand abstract concepts is metaphorical in nature and these metaphors govern our thoughts, as well as actions (Lakoff & Johnson, 1981). Our phenomenal states are abstract concepts and how we linguistically refer to these states shapes our understanding of them. The way we speak about emotions and ideas provides a mental framework for these concepts and their framework divides the mind and the body by implicitly locating emotions in the body and ideas in the mind through conventional metaphors. Levine states that “our intuition about our phenomenal states are resistant to change and until we solve this, we won’t be able to pass the mind-body dualism” (Levine, 1983). Consequently, the explanatory gap gets reinforced through our use of daily metaphors and figurative speech when we hear to “follow our heart” or when an idea “crosses our mind” because these phrases reflect an implicit mind and body separation. If metaphors do lend a perspective on how we understand abstract concepts, then the metaphors above would give a glimpse of how we conceptually locate substances of the mind and body in distinct mental spaces. Building from this thought, I believe that if we can linguistically reconstruct new metaphors that don't implicitly locate emotions and ideas in fixed distinct places, this can lead to a new structured way of thinking that eliminates the mind-body dualism from our thought frameworks. And maybe if we don’t implicitly think that the matters of the mind and body are separate, then our “intuition about our qualitative experience” won’t be “resistant to philosophical attempts to eliminate it” (Levine, 361) . In this paper I will be reflecting on my scientific research that led me to develop my Scripts of Realizations For the Dualist . To conclude my paper, I will be talking about why I have chosen the form of a script to reflect my research.

Thesis advisor: Bas Haring