Intro. to the Mind Notes

Week 1: Introduction and the Historical Mind

A. Course Mechanics

1. Introductions:  My name, Office Hours, and how to reach me.  (See syllabus.)
2. Books, Readings

a. Pinker is the main text. We will read and discuss almost the whole thing.
b. This week's readings, however, are a selection from historical texts.  It is found on reserve in the library (3rd floor)
c. Two other sources:
1. Philosophy: Churchland, Matter and Consciousness
2. Reading on free will by A. J. Ayer
3. A Post/Pre Test will be given soon.  It will not affect your grade.
4. Your Duties: Read each week's assignment before first class on which it is due. Be prepared to answer oral or written questions about its content.  Come to class.  Attendence will be taken and will count towards your grade.
5. This course is writing intensive, so you will write 3000 words that I will grade for grammar content etc.

a. 2 papers of approximately 1000 words each due on Sept. 12 and Nov. 2 on topics assigned in class.
b. Midterm
c. Final or Project . To qualify for a project in place of the final, a project proposal of at least two pages describing the project must be turned in by Nov. 9. (It could be a paper, web site, computer program, etc. ) I will review the proposal and either reject it, suggest revisions or accept it as is. The project description should give a detailed account of what you hope to accomplish and should contain full bibliographic information on two sources that you will rely on. Any person who does not met the requirements for project approval must take the final.
6. Your grade will be calculated approximately in the following proportions:

Final or Project 30% MidTerm 20% Each Paper 20% Class participation and attendance 10%

I. Course Summary.   This is a summary of cogntiive science
(= science of cognition = science of thinking = the science of the mind).
It involves many academics areas:
 
• AI (Artificial Intelligence),
• Neuroscience (Connectionism, Neuropsychology),
• Psychology (Cognitive, Evolutionary, Social),
• Linguistics (Computational),

Philosophy (Logic and Philosophy of Mind).
A list of the topic headings in this course and their corresponding academic areas (IN BOLD) follows.
 
1. The Historical Mind. PHILOSOPHY

2. Methods for Studying the Mind PHILOSOPHY, AI

3. Computational Theories of the Mind AI

4. Neurological Theories of the Mind NEUROSCIENCE

5-6. Consciousness and Materialism PHILOSOPHY

7. Evolutionary Psychology PSYCHOLOGY

8. Vision and Visualization PSYCHOLOGY, AI

9. Concepts, Learning and Creativity PSYCHOLOGY, AI

10. Logic and Problem Solving AI, LOGIC

11. Emotions and their Social Roles PSYCHOLOGY, NEUROSCIENCE

12. Social Alliance and Conflict PSYCHOLOGY, NEUROSCIENCE

13. The Functions of Culture and Religion PSYCHOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY

14. Morality and Freedom of the Will PHILOSOPHY
 

II. Here is a way to conceive of the interdisciplinary overlap in this course: Each academic area is about the same general topic, but each one differs markedly in its methods:
a. Philosophy: More abstract issues about the nature of thinking.
1. Reasoning:  What are the principles of correct thinking? Are they practical?
2. Representation:  How can a brain (or a machine) represent the world?
3. The Mind Body Problem: What is a Mind and how is it related to the body?
4. Subjective Experience: Are subjective experiences just activities of the brain?
5. Free Will:  Are our actions free or fixed by events in the natural world (or both)?
b. Cognitive Psychology: Controlled experiments with human subjects (and sometimes smaller animals) to try to characterize the nature human thinking and to figure out and test theories of the mechanisms that might produce those abilities.
1. Perception: How is visual information processed into a picture of the world?
2. Memory: What different memory systems are there and how do they work?
3. Reasoning: How do humans reason? What explains their success and failure?
4. Concepts: What concepts do humans use and where do they come from?
5. Emotions: How do emotions affect and/or contribute to thinking?
6. Planning: How do humans formulate plans and monitor their execution?
7. Movement: How can we explain human abilities at graceful motion?
8. Culture, Society: How do societies function and how do they depend on the psychology of their members?
c. Evolutionary Psychology: Explain how human traits and abilities be explained as the results of natural selection.
For example: Vision, Care for young, Curiosity
d. Artificial Intelligence: Create computer models that actually simulate human cognition.
1. Many AI researchers do not care to figure out how humans actually do it. Often their goal may be to create a system to do some task better than humans do by doing it a better way: (medical diagnosis).
2. Creating models can help reveal how hard the problems are that the human being takes for granted. For example robotics has a long way to go to understand and duplicate the seemingly simple feat of walking.
e. Computational Linguistics: Formulate the structures found in language as a set of rules and try to see how such rules might be carried out in machines or the brain.
f. Neuropsychology: Study the brain using PET, MRI, probes, dissection, and the effects of brain damage etc., to try to see how various parts of the brain contribute to human cognitive abilities.
III. Interlude: How do we see? Class discussion.
We broke down into groups for 15 minutes, and each group was asked to respond to question 1.  The other questions may be revisited on later occasions.
 
An image of a gray cat on a red mat is projected (upside down) on our retina by our eye's lens.
Question 1. What turns the image right side up?
Question 2. The brain activity on the color topographic map in cortex is not colored at all. It is dark in there. So what makes it seem red to us, rather than black?
Question 3. What binds images back together so that color and outline match?


The purpose of this classroom discussion was to introduce the Homuncular Fallacy. Namely the idea that perception involves sending the information from the senses to another little person (a homunculus) who then "views" that information. The problem with this way of thinking about things is that a scientific view of perception is supposed to explain how people perceive. Such an explanation is circular if during it we mention a person who is able to perceive.
 
 

I. Cognitive  Science (like science in general) has its roots in philosophy, especially the philosophy of nature. All other sciences related to cog. sci. branched out of philosophy:

Philosophy: 300 BC
Neurology: mid 1800s
Psychology: 1860s
Linguistics: 1920s
Computer Science: 1960
(PhD is doctor of philosophy, In the Library of Congress catalog system B is philosophy, BC is Logic, BF is psychology).

A. Is the Mind appropriate for study by natural science? This question is related to the fundamental struggled between dualists and naturalists.

1.   Dualism: Mind (soul) Body are distinct. (The soul outlives the body and operates by non-physical means.)  Some historical sources for this view follow:

Plato: Death of the body amounts to freeing the soul from the distractions of the real world. So clearly the soul can outlive the body, and is separable from it. Knowledge for Plato is the communion of the soul with the world of forms.

Descartes: (and the Medieval Christian tradition). The Mind (Soul) is radically distinct from (and higher than) the body. It is eternal and therefore non-physical. It interacts with the physical world, but is essentially outside what physical science can explain. The Body/Brain is a complex "machine". Animals act in mechanical ways according to the dispositions of their organs. But men are different. Unlike animals, they can use words to express thoughts, and use reason to solve problems creatively. Since Descartes cannot imagine how a mechanism could do such sophisticated things, he assumes they are done by something spiritual: a rational soul.

Today: The general public believes in remnants of this view. Ghosts, spirits, souls etc. are belived in by many. But there is a Fundamental Problem for Dualism illustrated by this puzzle: If Caspar the friendly ghost can walk through walls, then how can he also move objects? The problem is how can the spiritual world interact with the natural world?
 

2.   Naturalism (also called Materialism or Physicalism): There is nothing beyond the physical world so a Mind must be some feature or aspect of the Body . Some historical sources for this view follow:

Aristotle: Substances are composed of Matter and Form. Forms are the features or principles  of objects, or what makes the object belong to a kind. For example a certain form is what makes something a chair, and a form is what makes an acorn grow into an oak tree. The form is part of what any Substance is. The soul is the form of a living body. It is a power to bring about self nutrition, growth, and (eventually) decay. So when body dies its form is lost as well.

La Mettrie: Man is a machine. Human thinking (like all else) is subject to the laws of nature.

Hobbes: Thought is processing of non-numerical symbols.

Leibniz: Reasoning is like numerical calculation (Ars Combinatoria).

Watson, Skinner: Behaviorist Psychology. There is nothing to explain except human behavior; the Mind/Soul is a myth.

Classical Cognitive Science: The Mind is not a myth. We can theorize about internal (or "subjective") states in scientifically acceptable ways. Thought is akin to the information processing carried out by symbolic computers, and this processing can be the subject of science.

Connectionism: A better theory of how the mind works can be forged by taking our cue from neurology. Forms of parallel computation (parallel distributed processing, neural nets) that are essentially non-symbolic are better suited to explaining how thinking works.

Evolutionary Psychology: Cognition is the functioning of an organ (the brain) which is the product of the process of natural selection. Therefore the nature of our thinking is not designed for some higher goals, (coming to know the Forms) but it is a product of the nitty-gritty of the history of its evolution. To understand the mind look at the needs of naked apes banded into societies of hunter gatherers.
 

B. What is the explanation of Perception? In particular, is perception the receiving of a copy of the thing in the external world?
 
Plato: Reasoning is something distinct and higher than the physical (man is rational animal). Thought is communication with the world of eternal and perfect Forms. Perception of the physical world is a source of illusion, and not to be trusted.

Aristotle: Perception is the sharing of the form of an object found in the outside world with the mind.

For example consider Vision:
1. Light is the presence of something like fire in a transparent medium like air or water.
2. Light does not travel. (For no lag was measurable in light traveling from East to West.)
3. Because of the nature of their substance, transparent things have the potential to take on the fire like form
4. During perception, the fire like form of the air is shared also in something transparent in the eye.
5. What perceives this "fire" in the transparent part of the eye is the soul. [Does this mean that the soul also must be transparent so that it can also have the light?]
Now consider Knowledge:
1. The Soul is identical in nature with what is known.
2. It is capable of receiving and taking on the form of the object known.
3. The Soul has no nature of its own except that it is capable of taking on the forms of things.
4. So if I know redness, then my soul becomes red?


Galileo: He denies the idea that the Soul receives a copy of what is in the external world.

1. Heat, Color, Odors, Tastes, etc. are aspects of our perceptions that are not really in the things being perceived. If our minds were to disappear, so would tastes, etc..
2. To see this consider the feeling I get when I am touched lightly by a feather. Is the tickle in the feather? No. In the same way our other sensations are caused in us by objects in the external world, but the feelings are not in the external objects.
3. So for example, taste is really the result of tiny particles (corpuscles) being received by the tongue's top surface. The feeling of heat is the result of our feeling motions of tiny particles. Hearing is the result of air motions that vibrate parts of the ear, etc..
4. All it takes to produce the whole variety of sensations we feel is the number, motion and shape of particles in the world. So the external world is very unlike the way it appears to us: as full of colors, tastes, smells, etc..
5. Galileo's theory of science is that the Book of the Universe is written in the language of mathematics, that is is terms of number, motion and shape.


Descartes:

1. Light is an effect of the world on our minds. What causes it is particles in motion. So Descartes extends Galileo's theory to vision. Vision is caused by particles that don't really have colors, smells, odors, etc.
2. Also all perception is the result of the activities of nerves.
3. The Soul picks up the qualities we feel from the motions shape and number of the neural system