SSP-100 (007) Designing a Mind

Flip Phillips, Associate Professor of Psychology

What are the critical components of ‘mind’? Can words like mind, conciousness, behavior, and awareness be adequately defined in order to properly answer this question? In this seminar, we survey the philosophical, psychological, biological, computational and design notions of what it would take to implement a mind. Discussions of the current and future state of our understanding of mind are replete with such notions as ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘expert systems’, and other trans- and post-human concepts. Are any of these existing frameworks adequate to yield a veridical implementation of mind? Will some other approach be necessary? Or, are we ultimately destined to fail at this task?