COGS 311 - Seminar in Cognitive Science

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2021/22b: Mind reading. A cognitive science book club. The goal of this course is to explore topics related to mind and agency by intensive reading of books, one per week. The idea is to try to reach beyond what we can normally manage in the core cognitive science curriculum. Classes are book-driven and discussion-intense. No formal (or informal) lectures by the instructor. The book club always covers a wide range of topics. There is no overarching theme. This year, topics likely include: animal behavior; phenomenology; the effects of technology on mind; consciousness; the role of purpose/desire in agency; the uses and abuses of statistics; reading stories with surprises…and others. Gwen Broude.

One 2-hour period.

Topic for 2021/22b: The morality and morals of artificial intelligence. There is an interesting and increasingly complicated conversation happening at the intersection of cognitive science and artificial intelligence, a conversation built upon a very contentious set of questions. What are our moral obligations as scientists when we create intelligent systems capable of autonomous decision making and even independent action? How responsible are we for the consequences of the decisions and actions of these artificial systems if they truly are autonomous? Should we consider such systems to be moral agents in their own right? Will the morality of these agents be determined by those who build them or will the morality of these agents be emergent from the process of their creation in ways that we cannot determine before the fact? In a world of competing moral systems, whose moral system should provide the framework for answering all of our other questions? In order to immerse ourselves in this conversation, we dive into the literature on the current state of research in artificial intelligence while we explore in parallel the cognitive science of morality and moral systems. Kenneth Livingston.

Prerequisite(s): At least one 200-level course in Cognitive Science and permission of the instructor.

One 3-hour period.

Course Format: CLS