COMP 150 ECP - Evolution of Cognitive Processes
Text:
What Is Thought? by Eric B. Baum,
Bradford/MIT Press, 2004
Table of Contents
(I have added questions that have come up in class.)
- Introduction
- Why is Occam's Razor important?
- How much is in the DNA and how much is learned?
- How much depends on the environment, and how much
is chance? If intelligent life evolved independently
on an earth-like planet, would we recognize it?
- What is evolution optimizing?
- What is the role of language, and how does it relate
to thought, learning, and consciousness?
- How is language, or the ability to learn langauge,
coded in the genome?
- The Mind Is a Computer Program
- What more is there to "mind" beyond the proteins
coded in the exons?
- Is more known now about "junk" DNA that would give
a better estimate of the size of the DNA "program"?
- The Turing Test, the Chinese Room, and What Computers Can't Do
- Occam's Razor and Understanding
- Optimization
- Remarks on Ocaam's Razor
- Reinforcement Learning
- Exploiting Structure
- Modules and Metaphors
- Evolutionary Programming
- Intractability
- The Evolution of Learning
- Language and the Evolution of Thought
- The Evolution of Consciousness
- What Is Thought?
Main thesis:
Semantics is equivalent to capturing and exploiting the compact
structure of the world, and thought is all about semantics.
Links of interest