All assignments must be typed (no hand-written work will be accepted) and typically require about 5 pages of double-spaced type. Any paper over five pages will not be graded. Your responses will be graded based on how well reasoned and thoughtful they are, not on producing the right answer. We want to know your opinion. But you need to be able to back up your opinions and justify them.
Cognitive Psychology
Herb Simon argued that we can best understand the mind by attempting to isolate the information processing steps the mind goes through and then modeling them with computer programs. I'd like you to describe whether or not you think Simon was right. In doing so, first try to describe as best you can Simon's argument, then think about various examples of how human information processing was modeled when we talked about mental imagery, categories and memory. Also consider our final session in which we talked about the relationship between cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Make sure that you have a well developed argument and can provide reasons for your conclusions.
Neuroscience
This assignment is due on Monday October 14 in class.
In this section of the course we have examined evidence concerning
the relationship between the brain and the mind. I am interested
in your reasoned opinions on this issue and your reaction to the material
we have covered, both in class and in the readings. Begin by explaining
what you mean by the mind (especially with regard to conscious vs. non-conscious
processes). Do you believe that the brain produces the mind (all
or in part)? Do you believe that consciousness is produced by the
brain? Do you believe that the mind is a unitary phenomenon that
cannot be subdivided, or can portions of the mind be damaged (due to brain
damage) while other portions remain relatively intact (and in some cases
oblivious to the damage)? Explain the evidence and the reasoning
behind your position(s). Has the material we have covered in class
and in the readings affected your opinions or provided you with any new
insights into the working of the mind? If so, explain how your opinions
have changed, and discuss the evidence that caused them to change.
If you do not believe that the brain produces the mind, explain what you
find unconvincing about this possibility and the evidence offered by its
supporters, and explain your own reasoning and the evidence behind it.
Please note that these questions do not address the issue of immortality
or life after death; rather they address the relationship between the brain
and the mind in a living individual.
There are no “right” or “wrong” answers to these questions. Rather, I am interested in your own conclusions and the rationale and evidence that support them. My goal is to get you to think about these issues, to articulate your position on them, and to evaluate critically the rationale and evidence on which your position is based.
Language
Due Friday, November 1 at the start of class
Thought Questions
1. On pp. 17 and 18, Pinker lists a series of commonly accepted “truths”
about language, and then claims that all of them are wrong. Of these
truths, which do you most seriously doubt is wrong, and why?
2.Saffran, Aslin, & Newport (1996) showed that infants can detect statistical regularities in strings of syntesized speech sounds, and they argue that this ability could be the foundation of children's abilities to extract 'candidate words' from the speech stream. Given that children apparently can do the same sort of thing when listening to tone sequences (Saffran et al. 2000), would you argue that infants are general, all-purpose covariation detectors, or that the ability to do this in both language and music requires two distinct capacities? Why?
3. In Galatea 2.2, the author protagonist (Rick, who is sometimes called Marcel after a character in one of his novels) and the abrasive Dr. Lentz (the mad computer scientist) wager that they can teach an artificial neural network all that it needs to know to pass the English Literature Graduate Comprehensive Exam at a major university. In the excerpts given to you, you read excerpts about the bet being made, early versions of the neural net (Implemenatations A and B), and the final version (H, or Helen). Besides this being the stuff that makes for some great fiction, with what you know about language up to this point, which side of the bet would you take, and why? Regardless of which side you take, what does your position tell you about what you believe about language as a unique human system and accomplishment? And, no, I won't tell you how it ends. :-)
Artificial Intelligence
Philosophy