L'Homme Machine: An AI perspective on Cognitive Science

Informationen

Veranstaltungsnummer:: 8.3068
Veranstaltungsart:: Blockseminar
StudIP:: https://studip.uni-osnabrueck.de/dispatch.php/course/details/?again=1&sem_id=2d2ce1ce58d497818b7809e9aade9f61
Semester:: SoSe 2008
ECTS-Punkte:: 4
Voraussetzungen:

Dozent*innen

Beschreibung

"L'homme machine"--that's the title of La Mettrie's much maligned 1748 tractatus on the nature of man, in which he made three points, that were very controversial at his time:
- Humans are an animal species; the differences between humans and great apes are only gradual.
- Cartesian Dualism suffers from epistemological problems ("how did they count the two substances?") and does not work.
- The mind is part of the physical universe and therefore a machine, just as the rest of the physical universe.

Even today, many people will vigorously object to the notion of mind as machine, even though it is central to much of Cognitive Science. Of course, calling the mind a machine requires a sufficient definition of what we mean by 'mind' and an understanding of the 'machines' involved. In the course, we will discuss if and how the different areas constituting minds can be conceptualized as machines, namely, cybernetical self-organizing systems/dynamical control architectures. Also, we will touch on the question of whether digital computers are sufficient to capture them.

Unifying so different disciplines of the mind as anthropology, neurobiology, psychology, linguistics under a single paradigm is a bold proposition. Nonetheless, such an approach--a Unified Cognitive Architecture--is essential, if our goal is a broad understanding of how the mind works. The course aims at debating this methodological direction, contesting the ideas of the participants and giving food for thought. It is structured as follows:

Day 1: Concepts and Methods.
- From La Mettrie until today: what kind of machine is the mind?
- Computational machines: what is computation?
- The epistemological perspective: physicalism is actually computationalism

Day 2: Cybernetics and Systems Science create a perspective.
- The historical perspective: cyberneticians set out to model organisms, minds and societies
- Functionalism
- Dualism is dead, but its proponents are very much alive: the struggle against essentialism and cryptodualist positions

Day 3: Understanding thought.
- Constraints of mental representation.
- Neurosymbolic theories.
- Symbols and fuzzyness, localist and distributed architectures.

Day 4: Motivation and emotion.
- How can a machine be motivated?
- Autonomous goal-setting
- Physiological, cognitive and social motivation
- Emotion as configurational states of a cognitive system

Day 5: Putting it all together.
- Unified Cognitive Architectures
- Integrated models of motivation, thought and perception
- near-term and long-term goals and applications of research in General Artificial Intelligence

The course will be held in a workshop format, with alternating talks and discussions. Based on the number of participants, you will be assigned papers/texts in one of the areas in order to give a presentation and prepare a debate. Grades will be assigned based on your presentation, your performance during the course and a written assignment (about 5-10 pages).