| Science B-62: The Human Mind |
This blog was inspired by Science B-62: The Human Mind by Steven Pinker
February 5th, 2008
A fundamental theme of this class is going to be the scientific approach to the study of the mind. Science is essentially an extension of Western philosophy, specifically of the philosophy of epistemology. This is the study of the nature of knowledge, or “how you know what you know.”
There are...
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February 7th, 2008
This lecture is about the modern study of the human mind, or cognitive science. The general approach integrates findings and approaches from many fields including biology and computer science, especially the field of artificial intelligence. In this approach the brain can be seen as an information-processor,...
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February 12th, 2008
I am going to introduce the second law of thermodynamics here just to illustrate the importance of evolution in explaining life. I would recommend reading Cosmides and Tooby's Primer of Evolutionary Psychology to really understand the connection of evolution and psychology:
Primer of Evolutionary...
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February 14th, 2008
I have added in the first three topics as additional analysis on some difficult issues this class addresses, in an attempt to explain away some misunderstandings before they have a chance to set in.
The false dichotomy
The long-standing debate over nature vs. nurture has not only been found to be...
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February 22nd, 2008
The Astonishing Hypothesis
"The Astonishing Hypothesis" is that all our beliefs, desires, feelings, and thinking are a product of the brain. The brain is the engine of reason and the seat of what has traditionally been referred to as the soul. This seems obvious but there is still a very persistent...
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February 24th, 2008
Neurons
Neural computation is important because it is the mechanism that the brain uses to create the mind. This is the neurobiological level of study and corresponds to the hardware of our computational organ. This is the lowest level of abstraction in psychological analysis and inquiry, and is the...
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February 28th, 2008
This lecture deals with how we get 3-d perception from two 2-d images on our retinas, as well as the basis of stereoscopic vision (depth perception).
Illusions
Illusions are extremely important because they give us a tool with which to study perception, as well as illustrate the predictable fallibility...
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March 1st, 2008
The world is full of objects in three-dimensional space, but our retinal images are two dimensional images with all the images smooshed together. One of the major tasks of perception is to recover objects and scenes and make sense of the 2-d images. M.C. Escher's drawings show how fallible this can be...
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March 9th, 2008
The Computational Theory of Mind is powerful not just as an explanatory device, but also because it directs research and describes how questions of the mind should be framed. The research program outlined by the Computational Theory of Mind is one which specifies mental representations, algorithms, inputs,...
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March 9th, 2008
Memory
The most fundamental distinction in memory is between short-term and long-term memory, but this can be broken up quite a bit further as well. There is extensive experimental evidence for this distinction. When a list of words is given and people are told to memorize it they exhibit what are...
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March 25th, 2008
"Systematically inaccurate mental models of the world can [often] confer functional benefits to organisms whose aim is not to explain the world but rather to survive and reproduce in it" -from a piece by Peter M. Todd, Ralph Hertwig, & Ulrich Hoffrage
This lecture has a theme that has been present...
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March 26th, 2008
Language is an immensely important human universal. It has vast expressive power as a result of its rule-based combinatorial structure. Many have in fact argued that language is the primary reason that humans have taken over all of the terrestrial ecosystems on earth. As a social species language is...
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April 7th, 2008
I am going to start this blog by clarifying two related technical terms, domain general and domain specific, that will be used in this lecture. These terms are related to the history of psychology and an ongoing debate as to how specific aspects of cognition are processed. The traditional view is that...
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April 7th, 2008
I just want to briefly mention that up to this point this class has dealt with the brain's communication processes as local, acting at the level of the neuron, and this lecture is working with endocrine communication, which is much more extended in its action, and can include the whole body. Endocrine...
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April 16th, 2008
This lecture is going to deal with social emotions that do not involve mating and kinship, which will be dealt with in a future lecture. These are social/moral emotions but are a fundamentally different kind of social emotion due to how evolution works, and so will be dealt with next lecture.
This...
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April 20th, 2008
One way in which altruism can evolve without invoking group level selection/adaptation is reciprocity, which was discussed last lecture, this lecture will be about another way in which selfish genes can create altruistic individuals. Reciprocity works when the benefits that individuals receive through...
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April 21st, 2008
Love and sex has been a touchy topic historically because of its immense importance, and strong emotions, which are overlaid on a system that is fraught with conflict, which seems to exist between any logical arrangement of individuals, mate-mate, male-male, female-female, cross-generational, etc. This...
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April 29th, 2008
This is just a continuation of last lecture, and will pick up where the last blog left off.
Psychology of Beauty
The hypothesis that will be advocated in this lecture is that beauty is an external cue for the biological fitness of other people (especially as mates).
Beauty is important for ...
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April 29th, 2008
"[Without organized society] there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much...
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May 3rd, 2008
The lecture opens with a video of a classic set of experiments known as the Milgram Experiments that tested obedience to authority. These experiments were a direct product of trying to understand how atrocities such as the holocaust could have been carried out. Here's more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
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May 4th, 2008
There are two extreme views of the self: the romantic theory of the authentic self, and Erving Goffman's theory of the self as an actor from his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The first view is the common sense view that we have a "true self" and we change a small bit given the social...
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© 2008 TheFinalClub.org, All rights reserved.
TheFinalClub.org has no affiliation with Harvard University.
User-generated content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution
Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.