Lecture: Why Cognitive Science is the Most Important Thing in the World

Question 1

What is important?

Answer 1

Making the world better. Part of that is reducing problems

Question 2

What world problems are on the decline?

Answer 2

• War and torture
• Crime
• Starvation
• Disease
• Short life span
• Inequality

Question 3

What problems are getting worse?

Answer 3

• Environmental damage (getting worse more slowly than it used to be though)
• Social capital (lacking rich social connections that we used to have)

Question 4

How do we fix climate change?

Answer 4

Reduce carbon emissions

• Technological solution: come up with an alternate, safe energy source–> Fund science and engineering to do it
• -> Get more people to care so our representatives will make it happen–> Market the problem –> Get money to market the problem
• How? A lot of the solutions come down to money, you work down the ladder and arrive at this solution
• Social solution: convince people to use (much) less oil
• -> Market the problem –> Get money to market the problem
• How? Hard to convince people to consume less

Question 5

How are all problems intellectual?

Answer 5

• The reason we cant solve all the problems in the world, is, ultimately because we don’t know how to do it
• Figuring out how to do it requires thinking and problem-solving
• Guess what field is best suited to study thinking and problem-solving?
• E.g., artificial blood vessel (co-worker thought she was better than doctors putting in the blood vessels and Jim said he was one up from her cause he was studying her and why she came up with solution)

Question 6

What is the relationship between cognitive science and problem-solving?

Answer 6

• The human modelling side of cognitive science studies how people actually solve problems and all of the other cognitive functions it takes to do it (using AI to solve milaria)
• The AI engineering side of Cog Sci. tries to make programs that can solve problems for use, often better than us.

Question 7

In what ways are AI, better than us?

Answer 7

• Stock trading (move faster than us, cant compete with them. Their only disadvantage is competing against other Ais who may be closer to the source of the trade because of the speed of light. Buying a stock in new york is faster speed of light than Chicago)
• Arithmetic and statistics
• Scheduling
• Search engines and aggregating (google better than a person answering questions)
• Many games

Question 8

In what ways are we better than AI’s?

Answer 8

• Language
• Physical movement
• Creativity (arts, science, etc.)
• Science
• Social interaction
• Vision
• Many games
• Most everyday tasks, etc.

-However, AIs and other programs can make humans more effective, used as tools

Question 9

What could help us all solve all these problems?

Answer 9

• Perhaps Cognitive Science Can Help Us Solve All of These Problems
• Even if there is some other problem you think is more important, you can apply cognitive science to the problem solving in that problems
• That’s what I did for a time (post doc at Queens)
• Jim was working on can we get from primary structure to viewed without internal structure with AI? Applying cognitive science directly applied to physics and chemistry

Question 10

Richard Dawkins TEDtalk on the queer universe

Answer 10

• We are evolved to understand the world in certain ways
• We evolved to think of certain kinds of things as real
• Most of what we perceive of as matter is empty space (atoms are empty space). WE perceive and experience the world the way we evolved to need to experience (might try to walk through a desk if we perceived it as empty space)
• It is very easy to take the contents of our perception as reality

Question 11

How have we evolved to perceive some things as real?

Answer 11

• Solid things are mostly empty space
• The nucleus of an atom is like a fly in a stadium
• We see them as solid because that how we interact with them. Our hands don’t go through rocks.

Question 12

What do we perceive the world as?

Answer 12

• We perceive the world as “middle world”
• Not too big, fast, slow or small (We think forests are peaceful but in reality if it was sped up we would see the intense competition that takes place between trees etc. Quantum physics are too fast to understand)
• We see ourselves as objects
• But atoms are going in and out all the time (our atoms/cells are completely replaced every 7 years)
• We are more like a wave in the ocean (changing all the time, little continuity). You are not your atoms.

Question 13

What is our perception of time?

Answer 13

• We understand a day and seasonal cycle
• But a creature that lives one day would never comprehend these things
• What time scales are we intuitively unaware of?
• Trees, stars and glass appear to be immobile
• Time dilation due to relativity seems weird Because we move slowly

Question 14

What is our social perception?

Answer 14

We live in a social world so we see social entities where there are not any