Assignment 1
In 2005 Nature published an article that opened as follows: “Is a single cell
in your brain devoted to Jennifer Aniston or Bill Clinton? Maybe so,
according to new research. A recent experiment showed that single
neurons in people's brains react to the faces of specific people.
Researchers see the findings as evidence that our brains use fewer cells to
decode a given image than previously thought.” Explain why passages
such as these show that the identity theory is still (implicitly) present in
the style of thinking of many contemporary neuroscientists.
Assignment 2
In 2009, the Scientific American published an article on a device that lets
blind people explore their environment with the help of a small camera
that is connected to a small plate with electrodes that subtly stimulate the
person’s tongue: “Neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita hypothesized in the
1960s that "we see with our brains not our eyes." Now, a new device
trades on that thinking and aims to partially restore the experience of
vision for the blind and visually impaired by relying on the nerves on the
tongue's surface to send light signals to the brain.” Explain why this
development supports a functionalist conception of vision.
Assignment 3
The DSM IV mentions Asperger’s syndrome as a diagnosis for specific high
functioning autistic people. In the DSM V, however, Asperger’s syndrome is
no longer mentioned as a distinct diagnosis, because the notion of an
Autistic Spectrum Disorder obviated the need for this category. If we
consider the replacement of the DSM IV by the DSM V scientific progress,
one may argue that Asperger’s syndrome is eliminated, in the same way
that Paul Churchland argues folk-psychology should be eliminated. Use
Churchland’s reasoning to explain why it might be argued that Asperger’s
Syndrome is eliminated form our scientific worldview. Furthermore,
explain why you agree or disagree with the elimination of this category.
Assignment 4
The following quote about the nervous system of an octopus is from the
online magazine The Atlantic (May 30, 2017): “Two-thirds of the roughly
500 million neurons in an octopus are found in its arms. (…) For the
octopus, with thousands of suckers studding symmetric arms, each of
which can bend at any point, building a central mental representation of
how to move seems like a computational nightmare. But experiments
show that the octopus doesn’t do that. “The brain doesn’t have to know
how to move this floppy arm,” Cheng said. Rather, the arm knows how to
move the arm. Readings of electric signals show that when a sucker finds
a piece of food, it sends a wave of muscle activation inward up the arm. At
the same time, the base of the arm sends another wave of clenched
, muscles outward, down the arm. Where the two signals meet each other,
the arm makes an elbow—a joint in exactly the right place to reach the
mouth.”
Many psychologists and philosophers take the fact that the octopus’s
arms are semi-autonomous, each with their own complex nervous system,
as an indication that the organism consist of eight cognitive systems
instead of just one. The idea behind this reasoning is that cognition is done
in the nervous system alone. How would an enactivist who thinks along
the lines of embodied cognition respond to this? Explain why she would
agree/disagree with the idea that an octopus consists of eight cognitive
systems.
Assignment 5
In a 2004 paper entitled Understanding Interpresonal Problems in Autism,
Shaun Gallagher writes: “When I am interacting with you in a second-
person relationship—in conversation or while working together on a
project, for instance—my experience is not one of acting as an observer,
attempting to formulate an explanation or prediction of your behavior.
Explaining and predicting are specialized and relatively rare modes of
understanding others, and they involve, not interaction, but standing back
in an observational attitude. For the most part, according to the
phenomenological evidence, we are in interactive relations with others
that involve modes of understanding that are pragmatic and evaluative.
Our interaction is based on environmental and contextual factors, rather
than mentalistic or conceptual, explanatory or predictive attitudes.” What
do you assume Gallagher would think of the false belief test? Explain why
you assume this.
Assignment 6
Therapist A can predict whether or not a couple argues in any 5-minute
period of observation based on whether one or both people felt insecure in
the preceding 5 minutes. He finds some cases where couples argue but
neither rated feeling insecure beforehand. He concludes that his theory is
still correct, but these apparently discrepant cases arise when the
insecurity is unconscious. Allowing for unconscious insecurity, he finds all
data from a further 20 couples fit his theory: On 80% of the occasions they
argue that they state being insecure before the argument, and thus the
remaining 20% can be attributed to unconscious insecurity. Has A
established his theory?
Therapist B can predict arguments based on style of conversation
just beforehand. He divides conversational style into two types and
proposes that one type invariably precedes an argument. He finds a
number of cases that do not fit. He devises a new way of categorizing
conversational styles: 30 styles, roughly equiprobable across all 20
couples in his sample. He proposes one and only one of the 30 styles
always precedes an argument. This new generalization holds true for a
further 20 couples. Has B established his theory?
