Categorization, Communication and Consciousness 2021
Time: FRIDAYS 11:35-2:25
Place: ZOOM
Instructors: Stevan Harnad & Fernanda Perez Gay
Office: Skype sharnad
Skype: sharnad
Google+hangout: amsciforum@gmail.com
Google+hangout: amsciforum@gmail.com
E-mail: harnad@uqam.ca (please don’t use my mcgill email address because I don’t check it regularly) & fernanda.perezgay@mail.mcgill.ca
Optional 2% Psychology Department Participant Pool
You are welcome to participate in the participant pool or to do the non-participatory alternate assignments for an extra 2% on your final grade. Participating is entirely voluntary and is between you and the Participant Pool Teaching Assistant (Sara Quinn) who will indicate to me at the end of the semester who participated and for how much credit. You are permitted to participate in any study for which you are eligible. (However, I do recommend that you sign up for the experiments in my lab -- experiments on category learning and symbol grounding -- because the insight they will give you into this course will be worth far more than just the 2% extra credit!) The pool TA will visit our class to describe the process. All questions about the participant pool should be sent to the pool TA at:
Open to students interested in Cognitive Science from the Departments of Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology, Computer Science, or Neuroscience.
Overview: What is cognition? Cognition is whatever is going on inside our heads when we think, whatever enables us to do all the things we know how to do -- to learn and to act adaptively, so we can survive and reproduce (and get good marks and careers...). Cognitive science tries to explain the internal causal mechanism that generates that know-how.
The brain is the natural place to look for the explanation of the mechanism of cognition, but that’s not enough. Unlike the mechanisms that generate the capacities of other bodily organs such as the heart or the lungs, the brain’s capacities are too vast, complex and opaque to be read off by directly observing or manipulating the brain.
The brain can do everything that we can do. Computational modeling and robotics try, alongside behavioral neuroscience, to design and test mechanisms that can also do everything we can do. Explaining how any mechanism can do what our brains can do might also help explain how our brains do it.
What is computation? Can computation do everything that the brain can do?
The challenge of the celebrated "Turing Test" is to design a model that can do everything we can do, to the point where we can no longer tell apart the model’s performance from our own. The model not only has to produce our sensorimotor capacities – the ability to do everything with the objects and organisms in the world that we are able do with them -- but it must also be able to produce and understand language, just as we do.
What is language, and what was its adaptive value for our species that made us the only species on the planet that has language?
Is there any truth to the Whorf Hypothesis that language shapes the way the world looks to us?
How do we learn to categorize all the things we can name with words? How do words get their meaning?
And what is consciousness? What is consciousness for? What is its function, its adaptive value? Why is explaining it especially hard? Is the Web conscious? And what about other conscious species besides humans?
Objectives: This course will outline the main challenges that cognitive science, still very incomplete, faces today, focusing on computation, the capacity to learn sensorimotor categories, to name and describe them verbally, and to transmit them to others through language, concluding with consciousness in our own and other species.
What is cognition? How and why did introspection fail? How and why did behaviourism fail? What is cognitive science trying to explain, and how?
What is (and is not) computation? What is the power and scope of computation? What does it mean to say (or deny) that “cognition is computation”?
Readings:
1a. What is a Turing Machine? + What is Computation? + What is a Physical Symbol System?
1b. Harnad, S. (2009) Cohabitation: Computation at 70, Cognition at 20, in Dedrick, D., Eds. Cognition, Computation, and Pylyshyn. MIT Press https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/77617063.pdf
2. The Turing test
What’s wrong and right about Turing’s proposal for explaining cognition?
Readings:
2a. Turing, A.M. (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 49 433-460 http://cogprints.org/499/
2b. Harnad, S. (2008) The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950) on Computing,Machinery and Intelligence. In: Epstein, Robert & Peters, Grace (Eds.) Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer. Springer http://cogprints.org/3322/2/turing.pdf
3. Searle's Chinese room argument (against the computational theory of cognition)
What’s wrong and right about Searle’s Chinese room argument that cognition is not computation?
Readings:
3a. Searle, John. R. (1980) Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3): 417-457
3b. Harnad, S. (2001) What's Wrong and Right About Searle's Chinese RoomArgument? In: M. Bishop & J. Preston (eds.) Essays on Searle's Chinese Room Argument. Oxford University Press.
4. What about the brain?
Why is there controversy over whether neuroscience is relevent to explaining cognition?
Readings:
4a. Cook, R., Bird, G., Catmur, C., Press, C., & Heyes, C. (2014). Mirror neurons: from origin to function. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37(02), 177-192.
4b. Fodor, J. (1999) "Why, why, does everyone go on so about the brain?" London Review of Books 21(19) 68-69.
What is the “symbol grounding problem,” and how can it be solved? (The meaning of words must be grounded in sensorimotor categories.)
Readings:
5. Harnad, S. (2003) The Symbol Grounding Problem. Encylopedia of Cognitive Science. Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan.
[Google also for other online sources for “The Symbol Grounding Problem” in Google Scholar]
6. Categorization and cognition
That categorization is cognition makes sense, but “cognition is categorization”? (On the power and generality of categorization.)
Readings:
6a. Harnad, S. (2017) To Cognize is to Categorize: Cognition is Categorization, in Lefebvre, C. and Cohen, H., Eds. Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science (2nd ed). Elsevier.
6b. Harnad, S. (2003) Categorical Perception. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan.
7. Evolution and cognition
Why is it that some evolutionary explanations sound plausible and make sense, whereas others seem far-fetched or even absurd?
Readings:
7a. Lewis, D. M., Al-Shawaf, L., Conroy-Beam, D., Asao, K., & Buss, D. M. (2017). Evolutionary psychology: A how-to guide. American Psychologist, 72(4), 353-373
7b. Cauchoix, M., & Chaine, A. S. (2016). How can we study the evolution of animal minds? Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 358.
8. The evolution of language
What’s wrong and right about Steve Pinker’s views on language evolution? And what was so special about language that the capacity to acquire it became evolutionarily encoded in the brains of our ancestors – and of no other surviving species – about 300,000 years ago? (It gave our species a unique new way to acquire categories, through symbolic instruction rather than just direct sensorimotor induction.)
Readings:
8a. Pinker, S. & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences13(4): 707-784.
8b. Blondin-Massé, Alexandre; Harnad, Stevan; Picard, Olivier; and St-Louis, Bernard (2013) Symbol Grounding and the Origin of Language: From Show to Tell. In, Lefebvre, Claire; Cohen, Henri; and Comrie, Bernard (eds.) New Perspectives on the Origins of Language. Benjamin
9. Noam Chomsky and the poverty of the stimulus
A close look at one of the most controversial issues at the heart of cognitive science: Chomsky’s view that Universal Grammar has to be inborn because it cannot be learned from the data available to the language-learning child.
Readings:
9a. Pinker, S. Language Acquisition. in L. R. Gleitman, M. Liberman, and D. N. Osherson (Eds.), An Invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd Ed. Volume 1: Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
9b. Pullum, G.K. & Scholz BC (2002) Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments. Linguistic Review 19: 9-50
10. The mind/body problem and the explanatory gap
Once we can pass the Turing test -- because we can generate and explain everything that cognizers are able to do -- will we have explained all there is to explain about the mind? Or will something still be left out?
Readings:
10a. Dennett, D. (unpublished) The fantasy of first-person science.
10b. Harnad, S. (unpublished) On Dennett on Consciousness: The Mind/Body Problem is the Feeling/Function Problem.
10c. Harnad, S. (2012) Alan Turing and the “hard” and “easy” problem of cognition: doing and feeling. [in special issue: Turing Year 2012] Turing100: Essays in Honour of Centenary Turing Year 2012, Summer Issue
11. The "other-minds problem" in other species
Consciousness means sentience which means the capacity to feel. We are not the only species that feels: Does it matter?
Readings:
11a. Key, Brian (2016) Why fish do not feel pain. Animal Sentience 3(1) (read the abstracts of some of the commentaries too)
11b. Harnad, S (2016) Animal sentience: The other-minds problem. Animal Sentience 1(1)
11c. Bekoff, M., & Harnad, S. (2015). Doing the Right Thing: An Interview With Stevan Harnad. Psychology Today
11d. Wiebers, D. and Feigin, V. (2020) What the COVID-19 crisis is telling humanity. Animal Sentience 30(1)
.
12. Overview
Drawing it all together.
Evaluation:
1. Blog skywriting (30 marks) -- quote/commentary on all 24 readings
2. Class discussion (20 marks) -- (do more skywritings if you are shy to speak in class)
3. Midterm (10 marks) -- 4 online questions (about 400 words for each answer)
4. Final (40 marks) -- 4 online integrative questions (about 750 words each answer)
Course website: https://catcommcon2018b.blogspot.com
Use your gmail account to register to comment, and either use your real name or send me an email to tell me what pseudonym you are using (so I can give you credit). (It will help me match your skywriting with your oral contributions in class if your gmail account has a recognizable photo of you!)
Every week, everyone does at least one blog comment on each of that (coming) week’s two papers. In your blog comments, quote the passage on which you are commenting (italics, indent). Comments can also be on the comments of others.
Make sure you first edit your comment in another text processor, because if you do it directly in the blogger window you may lose it and have to write it all over again.
Also, please do your comments early in the week or I may not be able to get to them in time to reply. (I won't be replying to all comments, just the ones where I think I have something interesting to add. You should comment on one another's comments too -- that counts -- but make sure you're basing it on having read the original skyreading too.)
For samples, see last year's skywriting blog: https://catcomconm2018.blogspot.com
1. Blog skywriting (30 marks) -- quote/commentary on all 24 readings
2. Class discussion (20 marks) -- (do more skywritings if you are shy to speak in class)
3. Midterm (10 marks) -- 4 online questions (about 400 words for each answer)
4. Final (40 marks) -- 4 online integrative questions (about 750 words each answer)
Optional 2% Psychology Department Participant Pool
You are welcome to participate in the participant pool or to do the non-participatory alternate assignments for an extra 2% on your final grade. Participating is entirely voluntary and is between you and the Participant Pool Teaching Assistant (Sara Quinn) who will indicate to me at the end of the semester who participated and for how much credit. You are permitted to participate in any study for which you are eligible. (However, I do recommend that you sign up for the experiments in my lab -- experiments on category learning and symbol grounding -- because the insight they will give you into this course will be worth far more than just the 2% extra credit!) The pool TA will visit our class to describe the process. All questions about the participant pool should be sent to the pool TA at:
Open to students interested in Cognitive Science from the Departments of Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology, Computer Science, or Neuroscience.
Use your gmail account to register to comment, and either use your real name or send me an email to tell me what pseudonym you are using (so I can give you credit). (It will help me match your skywriting with your oral contributions in class if your gmail account has a recognizable photo of you!)
Every week, everyone does at least one blog comment on each of that (coming) week’s two papers. In your blog comments, quote the passage on which you are commenting (italics, indent). Comments can also be on the comments of others.
Make sure you first edit your comment in another text processor, because if you do it directly in the blogger window you may lose it and have to write it all over again.
Also, please do your comments early in the week or I may not be able to get to them in time to reply. (I won't be replying to all comments, just the ones where I think I have something interesting to add. You should comment on one another's comments too -- that counts -- but make sure you're basing it on having read the original skyreading too.)
For samples, see last year's skywriting blog: https://catcomconm2018.blogspot.com
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