I. Vocabulary. You should be able to define each of the following terms in a sentence or phrase.

Mind-Body Problem, Cognitive Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, Neuropsychology, Dualism, Forms, Naturalism, Connectionism, Evolutionary Psychology, Reverse Engineering, Materialism, Functionalism, Computationalism, Modularity, Folk (or Common Sense) Psychology, Wonder Tissue, Eliminative Materialism, Behaviorism, Language of Thought, Mentalese, Turing's Thesis, Turing Machine, Homunculus, Inferential Role, Causal Role, Chinese Room, The Alien's Objection, Penrose's Objection, Neuron, Axon, Dendrite, Soma, Synapse, Glial Cell, Myelin, Cerebral Cortex, Cerebellum, Corpus Collusum, White Matter, Grey Matter, Synaptic Vesicles, Radical Connectionism, Implementational Connectionism, Hybrid Connectionism, Classical Theory of the Mind, Distributed Representation, Local Representation, Unit, Weight, Activation Function, Sigmoid Function, Neural Plasticity, Feed-Forward Architecture, Recurrent Architecture, Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Learning, Backpropagation, Hebbian Learning, Perceptrons, Subsymbolic Representation, Vector Representation, NETtalk, Reductive Materialism, Multiple Realizability Objection, Token Identity, Type Identity, Self-Knowledge, Access-Consciousness, Sentience, Easy Problem of Consciousness, Hard Problem of Consciousness, Qualia, Category Mistake Objection, What Mary Didn't Know, Inverted Spectrum, Absent Qualia, Chinese Nation, Zombie
 
 

II. You should be able to answer the following questions. Questions on the Midterm will be very similar to these, in fact some of these will be on it. Other questions will be constructed by simplifying or modifying some of these. You will be allowed some choice between questions on the exam. You will be asked to write a paragraph or so (about 4-5 sentences) on each question you select.

Week 1

1. One might claim that Plato would be more likely to be a dualist, and Aristotle a naturalist when it comes to their theories of the mind. Explain why, citing details of their views.

2. What are the different intellectual areas that make up cognitive science. What are their distinctive contributions to the study of the mind?

Week 2

3. Give reasons for thinking that abilities we take for granted such as walking and seeing are extremely complex cognitive achievements.

4. In class we discussed the difficulties to be faced in defining the word 'bachelor'. What was the point of this example?

5. Garson told the class the story of researchers developing a series of robots, each of which failed to do the right thing about its battery, the bomb, and the wagon. What was the point of this example?

6. What does Pinker mean by saying that understanding the mind means reverse engineering the brain?

7. What is the modularity assumption, and why does Pinker believe in it?

8. What evidence does Pinker cite for the idea that the structure of the brain is genetically determined and a product of the process of evolution?

9. Give an example of both a good and a bad explanation in evolutionary psychology.

10. Suppose that evolutionary psychology shows that sexual infidelity is produced by our genes. According to Pinker does it follow that sexual infidelity is acceptable? Explain his response.

Week 3

11. What is folk psychology? According to Pinker, how does the computational theory help support folk psychology?

12. Distinguish Eliminative Materialism from Behaviorism.

13. According to Pinker, what is information, and what is information processing?

14. According to the computational view, what are sensations, beliefs, and desires?

15. What is the wonder tissue explanation for the mind, and why does Pinker reject it?

16. What is the rules and representations account of the mind?

17. How does Turing's Thesis help support the computational theory of mind?

18. Why does Pinker believe that the brain contains a language of thought?

19. Explain the Interaction Problem, the Homunculus Problem, and the Problem of Intentionality. Then explain how the computational theory proposes to resolve each one.

20. What is the Chinese Room thought experiment? Why is it a challenge to computationalism?

21. What is Penrose's Objection to computationalism? What is Pinker's reaction to the objection?

Week 4

22. Explain how neurons fire. You explanation should include the roles of the following: membrane potential, channels, depolarization, synaptic vesicles, synapses, receptor sites, neurotransmitters.

23. What is neural plasticity? Given some examples of neural plasticity.

24. Draw a diagram of the functional regions of the cortex of the left hemisphere, indicating where various functions occur.

25. Explain how colors and tastes are represented in the brain. Is this local or distributed representation? Explain your answer.

26. What is the fundamental point of difference between implementational and radical connectionists?

27. What are the parts of a neural net model? What is the activation function and how is it computed?

28. What is neural net architecture? Distinguish feed-forward from recurrent architectures and explain the limitations of feed-forward nets.

29. Explain how nets can be trained to learn a task by backpropagation, using a concrete example.

30. Describe some of the atrractive features of autoassociators (neural nets with recurrent connections).

31. Describe two different famous neural net models and describe what they achieved.

32. Discuss the weaknesses of neural net models. Explain at least two of the objections to neural net models that Pinker describes.
 
 

Weeks 5-6

33. What is the main point of difference between Reductive Materialism and Functionalism?

34. Explain the difference between token identity and type identity. Which of these does functionalism accept and why?

35. What is the Multiple Realizability Objection to Reductive Materialism? Why does this objection lead one to Functionalism?

36. What is the difference between the Easy and Hard Problems of Consciousness?

37. Describe the four elements that make up Access-Consciousness.

38. What is consciousness according to Functionalism and according to Reductive Materialism?

39. Discuss in detail four objections to the Reductive Materialist's account of consciousness covered in class. What are Churchland's reactions to these objections?

40. Discuss in detail two objections to the Functionalist's account of consciousness discussed in class. What are Churchland's reactions to these objections?