Psych 85 Lecture 1, Fall 2024 PDF

Welcome to PSYCH 85: Introduction to Cognitive Science! Psych 85, Lecture 1 Fall 2024 Julia Schorn, Instructor Agenda Introduction Course information & syllabus review What is Cognitive Science? Philosophical Approach Consciousness...

Welcome to PSYCH 85: Introduction to Cognitive Science! Psych 85, Lecture 1 Fall 2024 Julia Schorn, Instructor Agenda Introduction Course information & syllabus review What is Cognitive Science? Philosophical Approach Consciousness  Introduction Julia Schorn (she/her) TA: Tovah Irwin (they/them) [email protected] [email protected] Office Hours: Wednesday 3pm-4pm Office Hours: Tuesday 4-5 pm Friday 10am-11am and by appointment Office: Pritzker Hall 2523 / Zoom link Zoom link is on BruinLearn on BruinLearn My Research How do people implicitly Behavioral health and learn from their environment? performance of astronauts How does that factor into decision-making and metacognition? How does isolation & confinement affect sleep, cognition, team performance, What strategies do we use to etc? learn important information, and how does that change as we age? About Me In my free time, I like to Play harp Read Watch movies with my cats Course Information Course will be entirely in person and will not be recorded Lectures will be posted as a PDF after class  Readings Combining information from book chapters, videos, scientific articles Optional readings will not be covered on exams, but might help expand on concepts from lecture Posted weekly on BruinLearn In order to get an A, you will need to know both the lecture materials and the reading materials Focus on major topics that are covered in both lecture + reading Written Assignments 3 written responses (about 1 page each) to course material and readings Due: 10/16, 11/13, 11/27 (Wednesday @ noon) Honest effort to engage with the material, mostly graded on completion; 1 question graded on correctness Weekly Quizzes You’ll have 4 weekly quizzes assigned through Bruin Learn Open on Thurs at 9am, due Mon at 12:00 pm Lowest will be dropped 25 min to complete Purpose: These are your best example of exam questions! Reinforce the concepts from lecture to help you learn (retrieval practice) These are open-note, but highly recommend you try them without using your notes! Active Learning Polls and discussions are designed to engage active learning This is evidence-based design to improve learning! Errors are good for learning Active engagement is better than passive listening Polling is anonymous and NOT factored into your grade (low stakes!) Grade Breakdown Exams: 60% Midterm: 30% Final: 30% Quizzes: 20% 4 total, but one will be dropped Written Responses: 20% Extra Credit: 2% + 1% Subject pool participation Final Evaluation Academic Integrity Academic dishonesty includes: Cheating (e.g., using notes/materials during exams without permission) Forgery/taking exams for others Plagiarism (including self-plagiarism!) Use of ChatGPT for material work (i.e., thoughts and ideas) You may not submit an answer to a question that is entirely generated by means of an AI tool. Also, you must acknowledge using such. If you use AI tools to generate, draft, create, or compose any portions of any assignments, you must provide a paragraph at the end which (1) explains what you used the tool for, (2) what prompts you used to get the results, and (3) why you decided to include the AI tool’s output. How do I do well in this course? Show up and put in the effort Participate and give yourself the time to engage with the material Use good study strategies Spacing, testing, summarizing, connecting to your life or other course concepts, studying with others This course will go FAST and we will cover A LOT of info in each session. Leave time to review and space our your study! Intro to Cognitive Science Learning Objectives *A note on learning objectives: these should help you guide your studying and understanding of the lecture material By the end of this lecture, you will be able to… Describe the model-dependent realism approach to science philosophy Recognize the types of questions cognitive science seeks to answer Describe the mind-body problem and both viewpoints Describe functionalism Describe the “easy” and “hard” problems of consciousness Describe Searle’s Chinese room problem How do we think about science? Hawking & Mlodinow (2010) Classical science: The world exists in a certain way, independent of the observer Our goal is to find out this “truth” or reality But what is “reality”? And doesn’t it depend on the observer? Philosophy of Science Objects and the light that allows us to see them are made by things we cannot perceive directly (photons and electrons) We process crude “data” from the retinas/optic nerve, which gets further processed by the brain, creating the impression of 3-D space and object recognition This allows us to build a “mental model” or representation of the world Building models of reality Science attempts to develop models of the world (in cognitive science, of intelligent systems – mostly the human mind) We seek “truth” or “reality” But the same physical situation can be modeled in different ways → model-dependent realism What does this mean for cognitive science? What we can observe and describe through scientific discovery is ultimately limited by our (human) perception of reality We will cover many theories and hypotheses of how the mind works, and it’s possible that each theory is correct under certain conditions Model-dependent realism Some theories may be better or worse than others (e.g., explain more or less data), so there is usually no one correct theory What is cognitive science? Poll: what comes to mind when you think of “cognitive science”? Go to www.menti.com and enter code 7222 2664 Cognitive Science It’s a young discipline (1950s). The mind is difficult to study: it is not easy to observe, measure, or manipulate It is the most complex entity in the known universe There are ~85 billion neurons in the human brain This vast web gives rise to fascinating but difficult to understand mental phenomena What is the mind? How does the mind work? How do we see, think, and remember? Can we create machines that are conscious and capable of self- awareness? Cognitive Science ❑The scientific study of the mind and intelligence ❑Conceptualizes the mind as an information-processing system ❑Encompasses multiple diverse disciplines ❑Communication between these disciplines is essential! What is cognitive science? The interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind  9K papers from the main cognitive science conference (2010-20) Use machine learning to automatically detect which of the 6 disciplines are represented in each text >90% of papers represent two or more disciplines: empirical evidence for inter-disciplinarily Alasehir & Acarturk (2022), Cog. Sci. What is cognitive science? What is cognitive science? Cognitive science attempts to Specific applications… answer questions like… How do we build an intelligent How do we store and retrieve system? (computer science) memories? How are beliefs and desires What makes a system constructed? (marketing) “intelligent”? How can thoughts be reshaped How do we solve complex to be healthier? (mental health) problems, and why do we How can we make learning more sometimes fail? effective? (education) How do we perceive the world How can we help patients with around us? brain damage? (medical) How does the brain process What are the pitfalls of information? eyewitness testimony? (law) Fundamentals of Cognitive Science Focus on mental representation Something in the “mental” world can stand for something in the physical world Views the mind as a machine for manipulating symbols, images, rules, and other representations of information Focus on computation Metaphor: the mind as an information-processing machine Tool: The computer as a simulator of Cognitive processes Multiple levels of analysis Cognitive phenomena can be analyzed at different levels Full understanding comes from relating explanations across the levels Grounding in classical philosophical problems What is the nature of the mind? Philosophical Approach What is “mind”? Is it separate from the body? How do we come to know things? How much knowledge is hard-wired, and how much is learned? (nature vs. nurture) Philosophical Approach How do we come to know things? How much knowledge is hard-wired, and how much is learned? (nature vs. nurture) Nativism: Most knowledge is innate Empiricism: Knowledge is acquired through experience Rationalism: Not born with specific knowledge, but born with faculties that help us learn through reason The Mind-Body Problem What is “mind”? Is it separate from the body? Dualism: there are two kinds of substances in the universe Monism: the mind and the body are both made up of the same substance (either physical or mental) Dualism there are two kinds of substances in the universe Your subjective experience (“mind) goes beyond the physicality of your body The mind is metaphysical, immaterial, eternal whereas the body exists in the physical world, is material and perishable Monism The mind and body are both made up of the same substance The astonishing hypothesis “a person's mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them” Poll To which school of thought do you most closely subscribe? Dualism Monism Go to www.menti.com and enter code 8224 7839 Philosophical Approach Is a mind physical or functional? Physical kinds are identified by their material composition Functional kinds are identified by their actions or tendencies Functionalism: a mind is defined by its functional properties (e.g., information processing, computation) ? Consciousness – philosophical approach The subjective quality of experience (qualia) The “easy” problems of consciousness Defining different mental states Interpreting and responding to information in the environment Mapping functioning to brain areas The “hard” problem of consciousness Describe the subjective experience – “what it’s like” (qualia) Problems in consciousness Unitary or divided? It seems like we have a unitary mental experience– there is one self or “I.” But most neural processing happens in parallel. There is no CPU in the human mind, or a place where “it all comes together” The Problem of Other Minds How can you tell when another creature (or machine) has conscious experience? Criteria for consciousness Phenomenological criteria I know that I am conscious precisely because I have such experiences First-person knowledge is subjective, available only to the self Behavioral criteria Objective, observable Assumes that if someone or something behaves enough like I do, it must be conscious like I am Physiological criteria Biological substrates of consciousness What is it like to be a bat (or human)? Thomas Nagel (1974) We might be able to study and understand what it might be like to be a bat. But we can’t possibly ever know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. The functionalism approach doesn’t account for this type of subjective experience (qualia) Could a computer have a mind? Searle’s Chinese Room Man in room by himself, man outside asks question in Chinese Question is asked to man inside room Man inside has rulebook which maps questions to answers Man uses rulebook to give “answers” and write symbols Written answers sent to outside man Does the person in the room understand Chinese? John Searle’s famous thought experiment (1980) Searle (1980), Brain & Behavioral Sciences Searle (1980), Brain & Behavioral Sciences “The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese, but they do not understand a word of Chinese” Searle (1980), Brain & Behavioral Sciences The Chinese Room Overall question: can a system that simply follows formal rules (symbol manipulation) to translate Chinese ever really understand the language? Take-home point: building such a program does not mean the program “understands” in the way that humans do. Searle says the man inside the room does not understand Chinese. Man is following an algorithm that maps inputs to outputs (like a computer), but to him, this process lacks meaning Truly understanding is knowing the mapping (intenIonality) between English and Chinese Objections to Searle The Systems Reply: Searle is part of a larger system. Searle doesn’t understand Chinese, but the whole system (Searle + room + rules) does understand Chinese. Searle’s rebuttal: It’s absurd to say that the room and the rules can provide understanding What if I memorized all the rules and internalized the whole system. Then there would just be me and I still wouldn’t understand Chinese. Objections to Searle The Robot Reply: There is more to understanding than symbol manipulation If the program were implemented inside a robot that could interact with people and the environment, then it would begin to actually understand Chinese Searle’s rebuttal: All the robot’s sensors do is provide additional input to the computer Additional inputs will do nothing to allow the man to associate meanings with the Chinese characters Could AI meet the criteria for consciousness? Strong AI: artificial minds can be conscious relate to functionalism Weak AI: consciousness is not physical and so cannot be reproduced BUT, machines are getting more and more complex all the time...is there really something special about biological matter? Machines don’t truly understand or have subjective experiences We will return to AI at the end of the quarter!