Transcript Lecture1
What is Cognitive Science? • The study of mind and intelligence – – – – – – Psychology Philosophy Artificial intelligence Neuroscience Linguistics Anthropology Why Bother? • Right now, there are too many questions. We can’t tackle them all with only one approach. • Understanding the human mind requires numerous methods and theories. • Psychological experiments, computational models, brain scans, etc. How did I get here? • Biology – Cognitive Psychology • Clinical Ophthalmology – Development – Stroke • Neuroscience – Vision and movement through the world This Course • It’s impossible to review everything in all 6 fields. – We will focusing on a central topic in each field. – What mental representations does the mind use (or can computers use) to develop thinking? • Major focus will be on human cognition, but we will also discuss machine intelligence. What do you need to know in order to graduate? • • • • • Where do you park/live? How do you decide what classes to take? Rules: avoid 8 a.m. classes. Concepts: “Mickey Mouse“ course. Images: Route from one part of campus to another. • Cases: Particularly good or bad professors. History of Cognitive Science • Fundamental philosophical questions since Plato – Virtue as innate knowledge • Epistemology - What is the nature of knowledge? – Descartes – Rationalism – Locke – Empiricism Can you study the mind? • Franciscus Donders (18181889) – Dutch Physician • Conducted experiments in mental chronometry – Measuring the time course of cognitive processes First Cognitive Psychologists • Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) – Leipzig, Germany – First Psychology Lab – Introspective methods Behaviorism • John B. Watson (1878-1958) – Problems with introspection – 1913 paper threw the “mind” out of psychology – Behaviorism: Measure externals not internals – Successful for about 50 years – Pavlov – B. F. Skinner Cognitive Science Emerges • Noam Chomsky (1959) Linguist – The development of language is not just about copying what is heard. There is evidence of rule formation and originality. • New interest in exploring how the mind works. If you ask the right questions, you can learn quite a lot. History of Cognitive Science • Anthropology: social, cultural aspects of knowledge • Neuroscience: how does the brain make a mind? Can we study mental Representations? • How does the mind hold and manipulate data? – Canaries are yellow. Canaries are birds. – I fixed-ed my bike. • Does our mind store images in three dimensions? • http://psychexps.olemiss.edu/ Questions • How can all these fields, with different histories and methodologies, cooperate to produce an understanding of mind? Computers and the Brain • Computers are getting faster. Will they ever achieve human intelligence? Computers and the Brain How far can the analogy go? • Intelligence requires software as well as hardware. • The software for emulating the brain would be astonishingly complex. • The "software" for human intelligence includes motivation, emotion, and consciousness, which are not part of current computer programs. • Thinking might not be a kind of computation. • Maybe minds are non-material souls? What is Cognitive Science? • Central hypothesis if CS: • Thinking = representational structures + procedures that operate on those structures. • This is broad enough to encompass rules, concepts, images, cases, and distributed representations. • This hypothesis may be wrong, but it is far more powerful and successful than any competing hypothesis to date. The CRUM approach • Computational-Representational Understanding of Mind • Methodological consequence: study the mind by developing computer simulations of thinking. Computer Mind Data Structures Mental Representations Algorithms Computational Procedures DS+A=Running Programs MR+CP= Thinking War and Science The Beginning of modern AI • Is the intelligence of the computer the same as that of the human? • Initially, idea eagerly accepted • 1950 Turing test: can a subject interacting with a computer be persuaded that he/she is communicating instead with a human? • Chinese Room Problem • Deep Blue vs. Kasparov Alan Turing (1912-1954) Computers can calculate, but can they think? • Chat with Alice – Assignment for Wednesday will be available at the end of class. Bringing it all Together Philosophy • Deduction – Descartes, I am a thing that thinks • Thought experiment – imagine brain transfer • General theorizing – develop theory of mind – dualism, materialism, functionalism • Case studies in history and philosophy of science. Bringing it all Together Psychology • Experiments Mental rotation, analogy, concepts • 2. Theorizing Postulate structures and processes Bringing it all Together Computer Science and AI • Write programs aiming to be intelligent. • Evaluation can either be cognitive or engineering – See what it can do, and see whether it can do it like people…even if it means making mistakes. Bringing it all Together Neuroscience • Experiments, but biological, not cognitive. – record cell firing, PET and MRI scans, lesions • Also theoretical • Also computational – build computer models of mind, e.g. neural networks Bringing it all Together Linguistics • Judgments of grammaticality: syntax • Semantics, pragmatics: data, theory • Computational models Bringing it all Together Anthropology • Ethnography, but pay attention to how people think. Like psychology, but less experimental, more cross cultural. • Psychologists are also doing cross-cultural studies. Next Class • Throughout this course: Think about how these disciplines can contribute to our understanding of the mind. • Evaluating approaches to mental representation • See Mind, p. 15, Box. 1.1. Mind Reading + Chapter 2 • "What is an explanation of behavior?" • Programs that simulate cognitive processes explain intelligent behavior by performing the tasks whose performance they explain. • Neurophysiological explanation is compatible with computational explanation, but operates at a different level. • At the neural level, cognitive processes are parallel, but at the symbolic level, the brain behaves like a serial system. • The human mind is an adaptive system, learning to improve its performance in accomplishing its goals. • Herbert Simon is one of the founders of artificial intelligence and cognitive science.