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Minds and Machines 2011 Silver Center 705 Tuesday and Thursday 3:30-4:45 Professor: Ned Block 212-998-8322 (Note: you will have better luck reaching me
by email than by phone)
TAs: Grace Helton, grace.helton
at-sign gmail.com Office hours: Wednesday 10:15-12:15 in 5 Washington
Place, Room 414 Sections: Wednesday,
12:30-1:45 Location TBA Wednesday,
3:30-4:45, Location TBA |
This course examines the conflict between
computational and biological approaches to the mind. Topics covered this
semester will be: whether a machine could think, the Turing Test, whether
thinking could be symbol crunching, mental imagery, Searle’s arguments against
strong artificial intelligence, volition and the function of consciousness, the
inverted spectrum, the self and the body
ATTENTION: The final examination will be in class on Thursday,
December 15th, the last class.
Remember, no late papers. If you miss the deadline for one assignment, just do another.
Read Jim Pryor’s advice on writing a philosophy paper, Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper
Assignment 1: The Turing Test (Due Thursday, September 15th)
Assignment 2: The Blockhead (Due Thursday, September 22nd)
Assignment 3: Searle’s “Chinese Room” Argument. (Due Thursday, September 29th)
Assignment 4: Haugeland (Due Tuesday, October 11th)
Assignment 5: Searle’s Wall Argument (due Thursday October 20th )
Assignment 6: Functional Role Semantics (due Tuesday, November 1st)
Assignment 7: Inverted Spectrum: due Tuesday November 8th
Assignment 8: Pictorialism vs the Overlap Thesis: due Tuesday November 15th
Assignment 9: Kosslyn vs Pylyshyn: Due Tuesday November 22nd
Assignment 10: Overflow 1: Due Thursday, December 1st
Assignment 11: Overflow 2: Due Tuesday, December 13th
Assignment 12: There will not be a 12th assignment
Final Exam: December 15th: questions will be based on the assignments
TENTATIVE (!) SCHEDULE
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All readings will be available on the
web. Some will require a password
which will be revealed in class and which is also on Blackboard. The reading for this course is not lengthy but it is difficult
material. You should expect to read everything twice. The readings listed below are tentative and
subject to revision throughout the course. September 6, 8: Turing September 13: Block 11.1.1 and Cleverbot September 15: Braddon-Mitchell & Jackson, 107-128 September 20: Shieber & Loebner papers September 22: McDermott, Hafner, Fish, Schlaefer,
Ferrucci Focus on the articles about Watson, skim
the others September 27: Searle: both articles September 29: Byrne, Block remaining sections, except
398-400 October 4: Haugeland October 6: Churchland & Churchland October 11: Holiday October 13: Searle APA Presidential Address Block 398-400 of “The Mind as the
Software…” October 18 Block, 2 articles from Routledge
Encyclopedia October 20: Fodor Tom Swift (Johnson-Laird is
background reading) October 25: Fodor Brief Refutation October 27: Fodor again November 1: Byrne, Block November 3: Dennett November 8: Tarr, Kosslyn, Ganis & Thompson November 10: Block November 15: Pylyshyn November 17: Topic Change: Kouider November 22: Cohen & Dennett November 29: Block Aristotelian Society December 1: Block Trends in Cognitive
Sciences December 6: Reading: Stazicker; Guest lecture
by James Stazicker December 8: Phillips December 13 Review December 15: Final Exam |
Readings: Please send me email about broken links
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The Turing Test ·
A.M.
Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". Mind 59: 433-460, 1950. For
PDF of published paper, click here. This PDF requires a password which will be
given out in class and which is on the Blackboard site for this course. ·
Ned Block, "The Mind as the Software of the Brain", section 11.1.1, "Machine Intelligence" in An Invitation to Cognitive Science, edited by D. Osherson, L. Gleitman, S. Kosslyn, E.
Smith and S. Sternberg, MIT Press, 1995) ·
MSNBC
on Cleverbot plus cleverbot itself ·
David
Braddon-Mitchell and Frank
Jackson “Four
Challenges to Functionalism”, pages 107-128 of Philosophy
of Mind and Cognition, 2nd Edition, Blackwell, 2007 · Dinosaur Comics September 29, 2006, plus full commentary · Stuart Shieber, "Lessons from a Restricted Modern Turing Test" Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, volume 37, number 6, pages 70-78, 1994. Published version · Hugh Loebner, "In Response" (reply to Shieber) or here or here · Stuart Shieber, “On Loebner’s Lessons,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, volume 37, number 6, pages 83-84, 1994. Or here. · 2009 Loebner Prize Transcripts · Drew McDermott, "How intelligent is Deep Blue?" long version of an op.ed. article in New York Times, May 14, 1997 · Suggested: Play with some on-line bots, such as this one or this one or this one. · Katie Hafner “In an Ancient Game, Computing’s Future”, or here New York Times, August 2002. · Nico Schlaefer, “Schooling the Jeopardy! Champ: Far From Elementary,” Science 331, 2011, p. 999 · David Ferrucci, et. al. “Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project”, AI Magazine, Fall 2010, p. 59-79 · Stanley Fish, “What Did Watson the Computer Do?” ·
Searle's Chinese Room Argument · John Searle, "Minds, Brains and Programs” (That link is temperamental, so you can try the issue of the journal here (scroll down), a typescript here or the journal web site here (only useable from NYU)) Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, 1980, p.417-424 · John Searle, Watson Doesn’t Know it Won on Jeopardy!, Wall Street Journal, February 23, 2011 · Ned Block, "The Mind as the Software of the Brain", remaining sections · Alex Byrne, “Intentionality”, In Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, ed. J. Pfeifer and S. Sarkar (Routledge, forthcoming) · Patricia Churchland and Paul Churchland, Churchland, (1990). “Could a Machine Think” Scientific American, 262, 1, (JAN) pp. 32 —3 · John Haugeland, “Syntax, Semantics, Physics”, in Views Into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence, edited by John Preston and Mark Bishop, OUP 2002 Searle’s Wall Argument · John Searle, "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?" APA Presidential Address ·
Ned Block, "The Mind as the Software of the Brain", section 11.2.2, p 398-400 ·
David
Chalmers, “Does a Rock
Implement Every Finite-State Automaton?” Functional Role Semantics · Ned Block, "Semantics, Conceptual Role", Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy · Ned Block, "Holism, Mental and Semantic" , Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Inverted Spectrum ·
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, paragraphs 89-133,
243-315 · Alex Byrne, “Inverted Qualia”, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ·
Ned Block, “Wittgenstein and Qualia”, Philosophical
Perspectives (21, 1)
edited by John Hawthorne. 2007: 73-115 ·
Daniel Dennett, "Quining Qualia", in A. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds, Consciousness in Modern Science,
Oxford University Press 1988 Mental Imagery ·
Michael Tarr, “Mental
Rotation”, MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (or here) · Stephen Kosslyn, Giorgio Ganis and William Thompson, Neural Foundations of Imagery, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2, 9/2001 · Ned Block, "Mental Pictures and Cognitive Science" (or here) Philosophical Review · Zenon Pylyshyn, Return of the mental image: Are there pictures in the head? Or here Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17, 3, 2003, 113-118 · Stephen M. Kosslyn, Giorgio Ganis, William L. Thompson, Mental Imagery: Against the Nihilistic Hypothesis, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17, 3, March, 2003 , 109-111, or here · Zenon Pylyshyn, Explaining Mental imagery: now you see it, now you don’t: Reply to Kosslyn, et. al., Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17, 3, March, 2003, 111-112. Or here Does Consciousness Overflow Cognition? · Sid Kouider, Vincent de
Gardelle, Jerome Sackur & Emmanuel Dupoux (2010), How
rich is consciousness? The partial
awareness hypothesis. Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 14, 301-307.
Background for this article: de Gardelle, V., Sackur, J., &
Kouider, S. (2009). Perceptual illusions in brief visual presentations.
Consciousness and Cognition, 18(3),
569-577 ·
Michael Cohen, & Daniel
Dennett (2011) Consciousness
cannot be separated from function. Trends
in Cognitive Sciences 15, 358-364 · Ned Block, “Consciousness and Cognitive Access”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 108, Issue 1 pt 3 (October 2008), p. 289-317 ·
James
Stazicker, (2011) Attention,
Visual Consciousness and Indeterminacy. Mind & Language 26, 156-184 ·
Ned Block, (2011). "Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15(12) 567-575. · Ian Phillips (2011), Perception and Iconic Memory: What Sperling Doesn’t Show, Mind & Language 26, 4, 381-411 Slides will be posted on Blackboard after each class. MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science |
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REQUIREMENTS, GRADING, AND RULES
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There will be a 3-5 page writing assignment posted
each week and due the following week.
You must choose three of these assignments, including one of
Assignments 1-3, and one assignment after Assignment 6. · There will be a final examination, the questions of which will be very similar to questions on the weekly writing assignments. So you should be satisfied that you understand the questions even for assignments that you do not do in writing. · The writing assignments will normally require statements of positions taken by one of the authors that you've read. These statements should be couched in your own words, explaining how you see what the author has said. No quotations; no paraphrases. · Grading: Each of the three papers will count for one fifth of the grade, the final will count for one fifth of the grade and participation in class (including section) will be another one fifth. · Joint work is encouraged. Arguing about your views with others is the best way to find out where your position leads. If your paper is a product of joint work, all of the participants should turn in their own versions, with the communal ideas stated in each paper in the writer's own words. When you do work together on an assignment, this must be stated on each paper. All participants in joint work get full credit. ·
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