Doing Likewise

During November 2005, the eminent British neurologist/ polymath/ and stage and opera director Jonathan Miller will be in residence as a visiting fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. As part of that residency, and at his instigation, the NYIH will be convening a major day-long symposium, bringing together seventeen of the foremost practitioners and theorists across several suddenly convergent disciplines, all dealing with the fascinating set of perplexes and challenges around the ways in which human beings and animals and even mechanical robots can be said to copy, imitate, impersonate, emulate, and generally influence one another.

This field has been the subject of intensive research and discussion over the last few years. Developmental psychologists now investigate the various ways in which children acquire their skills by copying their parents and peers, and the same issue arises in connection with the widely disputed subject of culture amongst primates and other animals. For instance, how, if at all, do chimps acquire their manual skills? But then, for that matter, how do human fashions spread? Is there really such a thing as a meme? What's involved in copying someone? What do we mean by impersonation? What is mimicry exactly? How do children acquire the accent of their region? How do parrots do so? How does culture determine what we decide to copy? How does social influence work and why is it that certain behaviors such as Òthe high fiveÓ spreads through one part of the community while leaving others unaffected? How does ÒfashionÓ work and what determines its influence and spread? What's the difference between imitation and emulation? How do living organisms acquire their protective invisibility by reproducing the visible appearance of their environment? What's the difference between concealment and disguise? And then of course there's the question of computers and robots. Can robots copy human behavior and to what extent are computers copies of ourselves?

To help explore these questions, Dr. Miller has assembled a singularly distinguished group of experts, many of whom are being drawn by the opportunity to trade insights gleaned from long research within their own fields across disciplines that are only now beginning to be seen as relevant to one another.

The first morning panel will focus on how these themes make themselves felt in the animal world, with experts on monkeys (Dorothy Fragaszy of the University of Georgia), parrots (Irene Pepperberg of MIT), insects (Tom Eisner of Cornell), and octopi (Robert Hanlon of the Woods Hole lab).

With the second morning panel, the focus will shift to the human sphere, with Robert Mitchell of Eastern Kentucky University invoking cross-species similarities and then developmental psychologists Elizabeth Spelke and Susan Carey (of Harvard) and Alison Gopnik (of Berkeley) exploring learning patterns among infants and Oliver Sacks considering the implications of compulsive imitation among Touretters.

Following a lunch break, a third panel will widen the focus to more generally cultural themes in the human sphere, with contributions from Ricky Jay (on the history of plagiarism among magicians), Anne Hollander (on imitation in fashion), and Merlin Donald of Case Western Reserve University and Oliver Goodenough of the Vermont Law School on the role of imitation in cultural transfer.

A final panel will begin with contributions on the state of the art in robotics from Brian Scassellati of Yale and Michael John Gorman of Stanford and Dublin, and then widen out, by way of Michael Arbib of USC into a consideration of some of the broader philosophical issues, with Ned Block of NYU and Colin McGinn of Rutgers.

Dr. Miller himself will introduce and then moderate each of the panels.

Dr. Miller will be in New York, at the Institute, and available for interviews, as of November 2nd. The other participants can likewise be reached, in advance of the symposium, by way of the Institute. All such approaches can be made by way of Institute Associate Director Erika Kawalek at 212-998-2101 or eak237@nyu.edu. Further developments regarding the symposium will be posted at the Institute's website.

The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU was established in 1976 for promoting the exchange of ideas between academics, professionals, politicians, diplomats, writers, journalists, musicians, painters, and other artists in New York City-and between all of them and the city. It currently comprises 190 fellows. Throughout the year, the NYIH organizes numerous public events and symposia.

This symposium has been made possible through the generosity of a grant by longtime fellows Dan and Joanna Rose.