Thursday, August 03, 2006

liveblogging: Anderson and Stufflebeam on teaching the nature of persons using techno geeky stuff.

They are from The Mind Project, funded by NIH and NSF to teach cog sci using tech to undergrads.

Ooh, he just said "in the next hundred years the debate over what it is to be a person will heat up." I love it when people think in the hundred year time frame.

The talk web page is here.

They say there are actually three problems of personal identity.

1. What makes a person a person. (This is what I introduce as the moral status question. He distinguishes person and human being here.)

2. What makes this person a different individual.

3. What makes a person the same person over time.

They push a mind oriented answer to all these questions. I let my students resist this. He really loves the STNG episode where they hold a hearing to see if Data has rights. So do I. I would use it if I didn't already use Leiber.

A good clip on dualism: Robin Williams What Dreams May Come.

Now they are talking about software for teaching theories of mind (functionalism, etc.) they are just giving us links.


An animation that explains the difference between analogue and digital computers.

The one guy says that once you teach the Chinese Room argument the students all believe it. He must teach it differently than I do. My students are never convinced by it. I think this means I teach it right, and he teaches it wrong. For some reason, these guys have to use a whole seminar on connectionism to convince students that Searle is full of shit.

I didn't realize there were electrical dendrite to dentrite synapses. I thought they were always chemical and axon to dendtrite. Animation here.

They are doing the animations for something called "consciousness: the movie"

Ooh cool, a program to illustrate computer learning. Students never believe computers can learn. It's got a curriculum to go with it, and a sequence of exercizes.

Turing test software!

Robots! With moral beliefs!

(I never did get around to making a lego robot for my classes. But I am still really enamored of the lego platform.)

The periphery of your vision is actually black and white. I did not know that. And I've been seeing my whole life.

They have edited down a bunch of movies--total recall, regarding harry--to fit into a single class.

This is too much stuff. I should definitely use some of this in my intro.

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