PSY304   Co-operative Models of Mind   (10 credits)

Description

Most of the most interesting properties of the human mind - psychological entities such as 'ideas', 'feelings', even 'consciousness' -seem to disappear when we try to break the system down into components and consider each part individually. We could say that the mind is emergent, it appears through the co-operation of many simpler systems that are, in themselves, mindless. This property is not unique to brains. Throughout the natural world we find complex systems that 'self-organise' to form higher-order structure without a detailed plan for that structure having to exist beforehand. This module will explore the interplay between nature and nurture showing how theories of emergence resolve the mystery of how a human being is able to develop from a single cell and how we are able to master complex skills such as language understanding without a detailed imprint for language existing in our genes. A central focus will be on emergence in the developing mind, linking insights from modelling approaches, such as connectionism, to theories of child development such as the dynamic systems perspective and Piaget's constructivism.

Reading List