Introduction

Tuesday 1/20 Class 01 Introductory Remarks

Synopsis

Due to a failure of technology, today I briefly described the mechanics of the class and set out to motivate our fascinating investigations this semester.

As to the mechanics (requirements, policies, etc.) of the course, there's not much I wish to add here, except perhaps to emphasize once again the importance of attendance. I provide lots of notes, handouts, and synopses, but not as a way of making it possible to do well without attending class. The truth is quite the opposite. I provide all these materials precisely because class-time is so valuable we need to off-load as much as we can to make time to discuss the various issues we take up this semester. I encourage you to make it a personal goal to never miss class; you may still unavoidably have to skip a class, life being what it is, but please do your best, especially when we get to truly daunting material and the inevitable sense of futility sets in.

Further, and as I mentioned in class, this course requires you to do a great deal of writing throughout the semester--more, perhaps, than what you are accustomed to seeing in your other classes. You, that is to say, and not an AI like ChatGPT. Now rare is the individual who never procrastinates. Nevertheless, you should employ whatever strategies you can find to help you keep up with the assignments. Falling behind is simply not an option.

Now, what are the topics of our investigations this semester?

Taking a page from Andy Clark's excellent Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science, consider the recent biographies of me and, well, a rock I retrieved from my office this morning.

Rest assured, my recent biography differs greatly from a rock's. Whereas my recent history is best described in terms of my doing things--getting up for the day, making coffee, responding to emails, reading the news, etc.--the rock's recent history is best described in terms of the things that happen, and are done, to it. The rock, that is, is an entirely passive object. It does nothing.

Most of the time, though, it appears that I am an active subject. I make things happen. I have ends in mind. Intentions. Purposes. Goals. I am also, we presume, free to make the things I make happen, happen. Even more importantly, I'm aware of having made things happen. I perceive. I'm self-aware. I'm conscious.

All-in-all, I suspect it is vastly better to be me than the rock, most days.

The upshot of Clark's example is that there appears to be a huge gulf or chasm between me and the rock. Indeed, the divide between me and the rock is so enormous our minds boggle at the proposition that we could be entirely made of rock-stuff or other ordinary materials. According to this view, if you break us down far enough, say to individual atoms, then we are virtually indistinguishable from the rock. Call the position from which this view derives naturalism: Explanations of detectable events and objects may only invoke detectable events and objects. This is the key methodological assumption of every science today. It says that a scientific explanation will not invoke supernatural entities or objects, including things like God and souls. This is not an ontological assumption. It says nothing about whether there in fact are supernatural objects, only that, being supernatural, we can't use them in our explanations. This is tantamount to claiming that what separates us from the rock is nothing more than how those individual atoms are put together. But how can mere complexity--little complexity, in the case of the rock, great complexity, in my case--make such an astounding difference?

If we consider the chasm between me and the rock, we find during the transition from the rock to me that an increase in complexity is followed by an increase in certain rather important properties:

• Activity
• Autonomy
• Perception
• Understanding

Indeed, so astounding are my capacities in comparison to the rock it is often felt that we cannot explain me in naturalistic terms. We have to invoke souls or spirits, since there is no other way to explain how mere complexity can account for these capacities. Yet explaining minds in terms of souls or spirits invites a deeper worry: How do we in turn explain souls or spirits? If the explanation in terms of souls or spirits abruptly and arbitrarily stops at souls or spirits, then we don't have an explanation. (Don't worry if you're not following at this point of the synopsis: I plan to revisit these issues in the coming weeks.)

So we seem to have a puzzle on our hands. Modern Cognitive Science, adopting naturalism, seeks to understand the mind in terms of the organ which seems to have the most to do with underwriting the mind: the brain.

Yet how precisely is it that the brain, however complicated and fantastic an organ it is, can underwrite the mind, given that the capacities of the brain, like neural firings, seem to have little or nothing to do with the capacities of the mind, like imagination or understanding? This question directly leads us to the fundamental question of this course:

How do we bridge the gulf between the rock and me?

One recognizes the overwhelming importance of this question when one recalls Dretske's Dictum,

You don't understand it if you don't know how to build it.

To be sure, we use minds without understanding them, just as we (most of us) drive cars without understanding them. But to understand a car, we have to know how to build it. (Sure, we may not be able to build it for want of the right parts, but knowing how one is built means we could and means, at least, that we understand the car.) Similarly, to understand the mind, we have to understand how to build one.

This, we say, is an engineering obligato. It places a sort of "put up or shut up" constraint on our investigations.

The task of building minds, however, is beset with apparently insuperable difficulties. Yet nature builds minds every day, with ease.

Our study of how to build a mind will take us into many fields, including

• Philosophy
• Computer Science
• Cognitive Science
• Psychology
• Biology
• Anthropology
• Linguistics
• Mathematics

Now, we are most fortunate to have students from Psychology and Philosophy in this class. I expect this to rich and rewarding semester for all of us as we delve into that most spectacular, peculiar, and surprising of phenomena, the Mind.

Our course of investigations proceeds thusly:

1. We set out as best we can the optimistic case that we can understand the mind in light of Dretske's Dictum, marshalling all the reasons we can to think that we are fully up to the task of bridging the gulf between me and the rock.
2. We then turn to setting out as best we can the pessimistic case against bridging the gulf, considering in detail the fantastic cognitive capacities we use every day without understanding.
3. We conclude by considering the Biomimetic Revolution, wherein roboticists and computer scientists follow as closely as they can the path to human intelligence evolution has already trod.

To be sure, the Biomimetic Revolution has had a number of successes, most notably for academia the development of so-called generative AI. Essay writing, code writing, artwork devising, and other endeavors long thought to require human intelligence are readily conducted by AI, which is currently sending shockwaves through the academic world. We'll discuss all of this much more as the semester draws to a close, including especially what the pessimistic case teaches us about the current advancements and their limitations.