Mind, Matter, and Machine

Catalog description

The human mind can engage in sophisticated representation that allows us to plan far into the future, think about circumstances light-years away, imagine scenarios that are possible but not actual (what if I started eating healthy?), speak multiple languages, and understand the goals of other creatures. But... where does the mind come from? This course examines historical and contemporary answers from a range of cultural perspectives, drawing on academic research as well as literature. For thousands of years, minds, a.k.a. souls, were thought to be imbued into human flesh by gods or other supernatural goings-on. Recent science favors a more reductive physicalist conception, according to which all of reality is just matter, appropriately arranged. But... how do you arrange particles into a mind? One answer is that minds are, put bluntly, meat computers. The course examines the breakthroughs in mathematics, philosophy, and the foundations of computer science that (allegedly) solved this long-standing mystery, as well as further questions about artificial intelligence and whether the computational revolution in theory of mind left out a core element of mental life: consciousness.