Mind 14300, Spring 2008

 

Levels of Explanation

 

Website for Section 1

 

 

Contact information

 

Terry Regier, instructor (office: Green 414, email: regier at uchicago dot edu)

Tiffany Bloomfield, intern (office: Beecher 410, email: tbloomf at uchicago dot edu)

 

 

Supplemental readings

 

Locke, John (1690).  Essay concerning Human Understanding. [Excerpts].

 

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1703/1989). Preface to the New Essays (pp. 291-295). In R. Ariew & D. Garber (Eds.), Leibniz: Philosophical Essays. Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett.

 

Encylopaedia Britannica entries on Locke and Leibniz.

 

Kin selection.

 

Reciprocal altruism. 

 

 

Simulations

 

A Hopfield network as associative memory.

 

A Hopfield network applied to a completely different task, the “traveling salesman problem”.  Press the “start” button to watch it settle on a solution.

 

 

Grading criteria

 

In your writeups, please go beyond the material in the readings and lecture.  A good way to do this is to extract the general principles of a reading or readings, and explore whether/how these principles apply elsewhere.  Weekly writeups are graded according to these criteria:

 

0 = Didn’t turn in a writeup.

1 = Misunderstood, misinterpreted, and/or didn’t discuss week’s topics.

2 = No evidence of more than skimming the readings, or just gave summary of 1 or more readings.

3 = Addressed something of importance from readings and lecture, but didn’t go beyond the obvious.

4 = A really good response: got at the heart of important issues, integrated the readings, lecture, and beyond.