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Philosophy
of Mind, PHIL-UA 80, Fall 2020 Lectures on Zoom, sections hybrid Lecture: TR 4:55 PM-6:10 PM See Classes for the Zoom
address for each class Professor: Ned Block If this does not work, there is a link on the Classes zoom tab Sections: All sections are blended Cristina Ballarini, cyb233@nyu.edu Office hours: Mondays, 10 AM-11 AM and by appointment Classes: W
4:55-6:10 (SILV_208; T 9:30-10:45 (5WP_601,) Zoom link for office hours Rebecca Keller, rk1798@nyu.edu Office hours Mondays,
3-4, or by appointment Classes W 2-3:15
(5WP_601); W 3:30-4:45 (5WP_601) Zoom link for office hours |
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This course examines the conflict between computational and
biological approaches to the mind. Is the mind the software of the brain or to
be found more in the hardware? Topics covered this semester will be: whether a
machine could think or be conscious, the Turing Test, John Searle's arguments
against artificial intelligence, whether thinking could be symbol processing,
mental imagery, arguments that artificial intelligence is not possible, the
inverted spectrum, functional role semantics, whether there is a self, whether
the mind is just in the head or partly in the body and the world and whether
there is more capacity in consciousness than in cognition. The emphasis will be
on whether computational and biological approaches are complementary or whether
they conflict; that is, whether the mind is fundamentally computational or
whether it is fundamentally neural or whether it can be fundamentally both.
ATTENTION: The final examination will be in class on Thursday,
December 10th, the last class. Actually, there will be two final
examinations so as to accommodate students in different time zones. Both finals
will have 10 questions, of which the student should answer any 7. One
examination will be sent to all students via Classes at 4:55 PM EDT on December
10th. Those who are doing this exam must submit it via Classes by
6:10 PM EDT unless an arrangement has been made with the
Moses Center for a longer period. Submitting it late will result in a decrease
in the grade in proportion to the degree of lateness. Make sure that you have
internet access that will allow returning the completed exam in time. Those who
have trouble submitting via Classes can send their exam to their Preceptor (Rebecca
Keller or Cristina Ballarini) by email. Another exam will be emailed at 9:00 AM EDT
the next morning, Friday December 11th to be submitted by 10:15 AM
EDT. Those who did not do the 4:55 PM exam on Thursday must do the 9:00 AM exam
on Friday. All answers must be in your own words and not copied from another
source.
No late
papers. If you miss the deadline for one assignment, just do another.
Assignments
are posted on the class web site. Slides are posted on Classes after each
lecture. Please submit your assignments electronically on Classes by 8 PM EDT
on the due date. If you have problems with Classes, send your paper by email to
Cristina Ballarini or Rebecca Keller. Put your
student number on your paper but not your name so that assignments can be
graded anonymously.
More
information on assignments and grading can be found below in the section Requirements, Rules and Grading
Read Jim Pryor's advice on writing a philosophy paper, Guidelines on
Writing a Philosophy Paper
All assignments are due by 8:00 PM New York time on the date due. DUE
DATES MAY BE MOVED LATER DEPENDING ON OUR PROGRESS
Assignment 1: The
Turing Test (Due Thursday, September 10th) This assignment is now due Tuesday, September 15th
because of a problem with posting the video of Tuesday's class.
Assignment 2: The
Blockhead (Due Thursday, September 17th)
Assignment 3: Searle's
Chinese Room (Due Thursday, September 24th)
Assignment 4: Functional
Role Semantics (Due Thursday, October 1st)
Assignment 5: Searle's
Wall Argument (Due Thursday, October 8th)
Assignment 6: GPT-3
(Due Tuesday, October 20th)
Assignment 7: Iconic
Representation (Due Tuesday, October 27th)
Assignment 8: Inverted
Qualia (Due Thursday, November 5th)
Assignment 9: Overflow
(Due Thursday, November 12th)
Assignment 10: Higher
order thought (Due Thursday, November 19th)
Assignment 11: Dreaming
(Due Tuesday, December 1st)
Assignment 12: The
Zombie Within (Due Tuesday, December 8th)
(Assignment 13: There will be only 12 assignments.)
Readings
Some of the readings require a login/password to be
sent out on Classes and mentioned in class.
Note that the list of readings may be changed as
the term progresses
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. Jim Holt,
"Code-Breaker:
The life and death of Alan Turing", New Yorker February 6, 2006 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) 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 Gary Marcus, "What Comes
After the Turing Test," or here,
New Yorker June 9,2014 Try Mitsuku
and the original
Eliza program 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) Communications of
the ACM. 37.6 (June 1994) p79 Stuart Shieber,
"On
Loebner's Lessons," Communications of the Association for Computing
Machinery, volume 37, number 6, pages 83-84, 1994. 2009 Loebner Prize Transcripts Searle's Chinese Room Argument John Searle, "Minds, Brains and Programs"
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, 1980, p.417-424 Ned
Block, "The Mind as the Software of the Brain", 11.1.2, 11.1.3, 11.1.4, 11.1.5, 11.2 John Haugeland, "Programs,
Causal Powers and Intentionality", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3,
1980, 432-433 Jerry
Fodor, Searle
on what only Brains can Do, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, 1980,
431 Zenon
Pylyshyn, "The
causal powers of machines", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3,
1980, 442-444 John
Searle, "Author's
Response," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, 1980. Read
responses to Haugeland, Fodor and Pylyshyn, 452-454 Joe Lau
& Max Deutsch, Section 2 of SEP article on Externalism
About Mental Content (link) Michael
Rescorla, Section 5.2 of SEP article on The
Computational Theory of Mind (link) Extra Readings: 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 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 Functional Role Semantics Ned
Block, "Semantics, Conceptual Role", Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy PDF
here Ned
Block, "Holism, Mental and Semantic" , Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy PDF
here Jerry Fodor, "Tom
Swift and his Procedural Grandmother"
Cognition Volume 6, Issue 3, 1978, Pages 229-247. (Background
to Fodor: P. Johnson-Laird , "Procedural
Semantics". Cog. 5 3 (1977), pp. 189 214) For the Tom Swift
allusion, click here. Jerry Fodor, "Having
Concepts; A Brief Refutation Of The 20th Century", Mind
& Language 19, 1, 2004, p 29-47. 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 Extra Reading: John Searle, Can
Information Theory Explain Consciousness?, New York Review of Books,
January 10, 2013 Christof Koch,
Giulio Tononi, John Searle, "Can
a Photodiode be Conscious?", New York Review of Books, March 7,2013)
GPT-3 Will Douglas
Heaven, OpenAI's new language generator GPT-3 is shockingly
good—and completely mindless,
Technology Review July 20, 2020 Kevin Lacker, Giving
GPT-3 a Turing Test, blog post Gary Marcus and
Ernest Davis, "GPT-3,
Bloviator: OpenAI's language generator has no idea
what it's talking about" Technology Review, August 22, 2020 Philosophers On
GPT-3 (updated with replies by GPT-3) Try: https://philosopherai.com Julian Michael, To
Dissect an Octopus: Making Sense of the Form/Meaning Debate
Iconic mental representation and analog computation Ned
Block, "Mental
Pictures and Cognitive Science" Philosophical Review Zenon Pylyshyn, Return
of the mental image: Are there pictures in the head? 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, 7, 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. The Inverted Spectrum Alex Byrne, "Inverted
Qualia", in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, paragraphs 89-133,
243-315 Martine Nida-Rumelin, Pseudonormal Vision, Philosophical Studies 82, p.145-157 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 Experiments
on Phenomenal Consciousness and Access Consciousness Victor Lamme's Youtube
talk Ned Block, ""Perceptual
consciousness overflows cognitive access". Trends in Cognitive Sciences December
15, 12, 2011, p 567-575 Cohen, M. and Dennett, D. (2011) Consciousness
cannot be separated from function. Trends
in Cognitive Sciences 15, 358-364 Extra Reading: Victor Lamme, V. (2010) "How
neuroscience will change our view on consciousness", Cognitive
Neuroscience, 1: 3, 204-220 Ned
Block, "Consciousness
and Cognitive Access", Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, 108, Issue 1 pt
3 (October 2008), p. 289-317 Ned
Block, "Rich
conscious perception outside focal attention", Trends
in Cognitive Sciences Vol. 18, Issue 9, p445447, 2014 Michael
Cohen and Daniel Dennett (2011) Consciousness
cannot be separated from function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15,
358-364 Ian Phillips (2015) "No
watershed for overflow: Recent work on the richness of
consciousness," Philosophical Psychology, on-line September 24, 2015 Michael
Cohen, Daniel Dennett, Nancy Kanwisher, "What
is the Bandwidth of Perceptual Experience?" Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, May 2016 Nicholas Shea, Methodological
Encounters with the Phenomenal Kind, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, Vol. LXXXIV No. 2, March 2012 Higher Order Theories of
Consciousness Hakwan Lau and Richard
Brown, The
Emperor's New Phenomenology? The Empirical Case for Conscious Experiences
without First-Order Representation, in Blockheads! Essays
on Ned Block's Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness, edited by Adam Pautz and Daniel Stoljar,
2019. Ned
Block, Empirical
science meets higher order views of consciousness: Reply to Hakwan Lau and Richard Brown, in Blockheads! Essays
on Ned Block's Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness, edited by Adam Pautz and Daniel Stoljar,
2019. Extra Reading: Richard Brown, Block's
Response to Lau and Brown on Inattentional Inflation. For the response by
Block and rejoinder by Brown, scroll down. Hakwan Lau & David
Rosenthal, Empirical
support for higher-order theories of conscious awareness, Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 15, 8, 2011, 365-373 Joseph LeDoux and Richard Brown A higher-order theory of emotional
consciousness. PNAS Early Edition Feb 15, 2017 Dreaming Daniel
Dennett, Are
Dreams Experiences? Philosophical
Review 85 (2):151 (1976) Jennifer Windt, 'Reporting
dream experience: Why (not) to be skeptical about dream reports,
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7, 2013 Susanna
Martinez-Conde, What
Lucid Dreams Look Like, Scientific American, September 7, 2018 The
Zombie Within Christof Koch & Frances Crick, The
zombie within. Nature (2001) 411, 893 Andy Clark,
"Visual Experience and Motor Action: Are the Bonds Too Tight?" Phil
Review Oct 2001. Megan Peters,
Robert Kentridge, Ian Phillips
Ned Block, "Does Unconscious Perception Really
Exist?" Neuroscience of Consciousness (3), 1, 2017 Theories of Consciousness Ned
Block (2009), "Comparing
Theories of Consciousness" Michael Gazzaniga (ed.) The Cognitive
Neurosciences IV, MIT Press. David
Chalmers (2003), "Consciousness
and its Place in Nature". Read the first 5 sections plus section 7. In
Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of
Mind, Blackwell. pp. 102--142 (2003). Algorithms and Bias Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner, ProPublica, "Machine
Bias", or here,
Sam Corbett-Davies, Emma Pierson, Avi Feller, Sharad Goel, "A
computer program used for bail and sentencing was labeled biased against
Blacks. It's actually not that clear."Washington Post, October 17, 2016 Ed Yong, "A
Popular Algorithm is No Better at Predicting Crimes Than Random People,"The
Atlantic, January 17, 2018 Gabbrielle Johnson, Algorithmic
Bias: On the Implicit Biases of Social Technology, Synthese, 2020
REQUIREMENTS, GRADING, AND RULES
Students who successfully complete
this class will be able to combine philosophical and scientific
considerations to reason about issues on the cutting edge of scientific
thinking where what is at issue is not only what the answers are but what the
questions are
Slides
will be posted on Classes after each class.
MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science |
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POLICIES
Religious
Observance As a
nonsectarian, inclusive institution, NYU policy permits members of any
religious group to absent themselves from classes without penalty when
required for compliance with
their
religious obligations. The policy and principles to be followed by students
and faculty may be found here: The
University Calendar Policy on Religious Holidays Disability
Disclosure Statement Academic
accommodations are available to any student with a disability. Students
should register with the Moses Center for Students with Disabilities at NYU's
Henry and Lucy Moses Center for Students with Disabilities 726 Broadway, 2nd
Floor
New York, NY 10003-6675
Telephone:
212-998-4980 Voice/TTY
Fax: 212-995-4114 Web site: http://www.nyu.edu/csd |
