Opening Overview Video from January 2011 (first year this course was given):
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Harnad, S. (2003b) Categorical Perception . Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science . Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://www.youtube.co...
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Searle, John. R. (1980) Minds, brains, and programs . Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3): 417-457 This article can be viewed as an atte...
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Fodor, J. (1999) " Why, why, does everyone go on so about thebrain? " London Review of Books 21(19) 68-69. I once gave a (perfec...
Hello,
ReplyDeleteI was able to access the lecture 1 recording on myCourses and it worked fine!
Hello, I was able to access the lecture recording as well!
ReplyDeleteMany thanks, Mathilda and Kayla!
ReplyDeleteDuring the lecture (1:41:49), you said "Thinking is whatever is going on inside the nervous system of the organisms that can think", in this case how would we characterize an organism that can think?
ReplyDeleteGood question!
Delete1. The human Turing Test first. Although the goal is to reverse-engineer thinking (cognition) in all species, we know our own species best, including from the inside (the Cogito, and “mind-reading”). That is why the TT aims at the human TT first.
2. The TT is based on doing-capacities. Cognition is whatever is going on in our brains that produces all of our doing-capacities. So, in general, the goal is to reverse-engineer human doing capacities.
3. The “cognitive/vegetative” distinction. Although the boundary between them is fuzzy, not all doing-capacities are cognitive (like imitation, learning, memory, reasoning communication, language); some are “vegetative” (such as breathing, digesting, balance, heart-rate, temperature-regulation, immunoregulation).
4. Nonhuman species’ cognitive capacities. Nonhuman species have both cognitive and vegetative doing-capacities, many of them similar to our own. On the road to TT it will be necessary to try to first model the cognitive capacities of nonhuman species as well as those of human children.
What is “reverse-engineering”? “mind-reading”? the “Cogito”?
In the last class, we mentioned that "sentient" was the right word to use to describe consciousness. I was wondering if there was any nuance being both terms (sentient vs conscious)?
ReplyDeleteThe following is a lot more than you need to know in this course, but the difference between “conscious” and “sentient” is partly grammatical:
DeleteTo be conscious is to be conscious OF (something). But we don’t say “I am ‘sentient of’ something; we say “I feel something.”
“Sentient” leans more toward sensory feelings (hot, cold, tired, red, loud, wet). It could just as well have been “I sense” as “I feel.”
“Conscious” leans more toward cognitive feelings, what it feels like to think something: “I am conscious that 2 + 2 = 4,” – but I could just as well have said “I feel that 2 + 2 = 4” (and that it means 2 + 2 = 4, and that it is true -- and that ‘2 + 2 = 5’ is not true).” It feels like something to think that 2 + 2 = 4. And it feels like something else to think that 2 + 2 = 5.
All conscious states are felt states, and all felt states are conscious states.
There is no such thing as an UNconscious felt state, nor an Unfelt conscious state. These are both self-contradictions, like an “unfelt felt state” or an “unconscious conscious state.”
(Chime in if you think Freud has shown otherwise! He hasn’t. He’s just misused the weasel-word consciousness (and its weasel-synonym “mind”) as if they were not all exactly synonymous with sentience: the capacity to be in felt states.
All felt states and conscious states (as well as all “mental states”) are states that it feels like something to be in. If a conscious organism is in a state that it does not feel, then that state is not a conscious state; it is simply in an unfelt state. (The organism may be feeling something else, or it may be in deep asleep, or under general anesthesia.)
Boiling water is in a state, but not a felt state. A potato, boiling in water, is in a state, but not a felt state. Neither water, nor a potato, is sentient. They cannot have felt states at all. But a lobster, boiling in water, is in a felt state. It feels that it is boiling (or, rather, that it’s very, very hot, and hurts excruciatingly).
Lobsters are sentient organisms. A live lobster, given general anesthesia, is still a sentient organism (just as it’s still a living animal). But it is in an insentient state, because it is under general anesthesia. It does not feel that it is boiling. It is not feeling anything at all. The boiling is not being felt by anyone. Soon, although the lobster is still alive, the boiling will have damaged its nervous system so much that it is no longer capable of feeling ever again. It is still alive, but no longer a sentient animal. And soon it is no longer a living animal.
Now let’s look at the more “cognitive” end of the feeling spectrum: Descartes’ “Cogito”: “I think, therefore I am,” (the one other certainty, besides the truths of mathematics, which can be proved to be necessarily true, on pain of logical contradiction.)
Although Descartes is a giant, even a Lilliputian can point out that nobody’s sure yet what “I” means or what “existence” means. But we all know what it feels like to think (just as if feels like something to think “2 + 2 = 4).” So while I’m feeling that feeling, I can be certain that I’m feeling that feeling (though a bit later, when I’m just remembering it, I’m no longer certain that I felt it (or anything) just before; I’m sure only that I’m right now feeling that I remember feeling it. (This was the Xmas anecdote about the gas station in New Jersey that I told in class.)
Sarah asked:
ReplyDelete“I had a question regarding the skywritings for this class. Are we examining the assigned readings and writing a reflection on how they relate to the themes discussed in class? Or are we limited to the scope of the content within the reading?”
The readings and lectures are completely interwoven; they’re about the same things. The skywritings are so that I can track how you have understood and reflected upon the readings and lectures.
“Also, are we being asked to write one blog post per reading? Or can we write one skywriting per week that integrates all of that weeks' readings”
You should write one commentary for each reading, but it should not be long (about 100 words each) Remember that I will have to read and evaluate 58 + 58 of them every week, for 11 weeks!
So a total of at least 24 skywritings per student (and more if you don’t participate orally in class).
And please do your skyreadings and skywriting early in the week, not the day before the next lecture!
I have a follow-up: If we respond to a classmate’s skywriting, does that count as our skywriting for that reading, or should we create our own thread as well?
DeleteYes it counts (but make sure you've read the reading and that I will be able to see how well you understood it).
DeleteAnd by "thread" I mean the whole thread for a reading (like Week 1b) rather than the subthread on one of its comments. All the comments are part of that reading's thread,
In today's lecture, we discussed the UG and the poverty of stimulus, and I would like to share an example I saw in a syntax course. I guess that's still a part of the overview, so I post it here. Korean is a verb-final language, and its sentence structure is like Subject-Object-Verb. For generative syntacticians, it is hard to determine where this verb lies structurally. It could be down in the hierarchy or raised to an upper level of the syntax tree (of course, syntax trees are only helpful if you believe in generative syntax). To address the problem, linguists experimented on the scope interaction between negation and quantifiers. It turned out that the Korean population might use two kinds of grammar, and it was even insufficient for grammar transmission from one generation to the next due to the poverty of stimulus. Here's the paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4179396
ReplyDelete[Yes, this thread is the place for questions about the Overview Lecture, which stretches from Week 0 to Week 1, and maybe even a little into Week 2. The details of OG/UG will only emerge in Weeks 8 and 9.]
DeleteNow, as I said in class, I am not a linguist, and I’ve never even taken a course on UG, so I can’t give you a technical answer about this 2007 Korean example. I can only venture some nontechnical guesses.
1. The rules of “Ordinary Grammar” (OG) are learnable, learned, differ from language to language, vary, and change across time.
2. The rules of “Universal Grammar” (UG) are unlearnable (by the language-learning child), the same across all languages, unvarying, and unchanging across time. Therefore it is concluded that UG must be innate.
3. UG nevertheless has “parameters,” which differ across languages. You mention that Korean has the word-order parameter Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) parameter. Other word-order parameters exist (SVO, as in English, VSO as in Arabic, etc.)
4. These learned parameters influence the way UG is expressed in each language. UG is the same and universal, but the parameters are like different “colors” that UG can have. There are only a few such parameters, each with its own (few) options. So we can think of it as one, universal UG, innate across all languages, but coming in a finite number of colors, which are the result of the (learnable) parameters of each individual language.
But for each language, not only can its learned and learnable OG change, but so can the parameters of its UG. Language change can be influenced by contact and mixing with other languages, with different OGs. If OG changes become big enough, they may change a language into another language. That’s how Latin evolved and changed into Italian, Spanish, French and Romanian. UG parameters (but not UG itself) may also change as OG changes.
My guess is that something like that may have been happening with Korean, so that two “dialects” had actually become two similar but different languages, with different UG parameters.
None of this alters the basic facts:, that OG and UG-parameters are learnable and learned, whereas UG itself if is not learnable (by the language-learning child), and learned only by adult linguists (with the help of their inborn “ear” for UG violations, activated by having learned a (1st) language as a child). (There are also some interesting questions about learning two different 1st languages with very different UG parameter settings at the same time as a child. And learning 2nd languages when they are older is yet another ball game.)
[But please take my guess about what’s going on in this Korean example as just “Stevan Says” – just an uneducated guess…]
I found this more recent 2022 article on the same topic. I don’t claim to understand it, but maybe you can!
Zeijlstra, H. (2022). Two-Varieties-of-Korean-Rightward-Head-Movement-orTwo Varieties of Korean: Rightward Head Movement or Polarity Sensitivity? Linguistic Inquiry, 1-32.
ABSTRACT: A strong argument in favour of the existence of rightward, string-adjacent head movement comes from Han, Lidz & Musolino (2007). They argue that Korean language-internal variation with respect to the scopal order between negation and universal quantifier objects shows that in the variety where negation takes wide scope, the negative marker must have moved along with the verb/auxiliary to the head of IP. This would then constitute evidence for rightward string-adjacent head movement. In this paper, I argue that this analysis actually makes different predictions than have been attested in Korean. Moreover, I argue that, following a well-known stand with respect to the nature of polarity-sensitivity (Chierchia 2013), these facts follow naturally once it is assumed that in one variety but not the other, universal quantifiers are Positive Polarity Items (PPIs). This makes the attested language-internal variation in Korean less exceptional since language-internal variation with respect to polarity-sensitivity is something that can be widely attested.
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