Introduction

The Yale course in the coursera.

The astonishing hypothesis:

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

Mind = Brain -> Materialism

Descartes(1596 - 1650) proposed Dualism:

I think, therefore, I am.

Though, the radical bodily changes personal identity. See Phineas Gage.

Neurons

The neurons use binary, the continuality comes from the number or frequency of firing.

Parts of Brain

Subcortical structures: medulla, cerebellum, hypothalamus.

Psychology only focus on Cerebral Cortex:

• Apraxia: problem of doing actions.
• Agnosia: psychic blindness.
• Aphasia: speaking issue.
• Acquired Psychopathy.

Our two brains

Visual Crossover and motor crossover.

The left brain and right brain are connected by corpus callosum.

The mind is a computer: sensory, motor ..

The consciousness, such as subjective experience, qualia.

Sigmund Freud

Unconscious Motivation and unconscious dynamics.

Psychoanalytic division of the mind:

• Id, animalistic, according to the Pleasure Principle.
• Ego, pragmatically to reconcile your desire with the society.
• Superego: internalization of society’s moral standards.

Stage of Development

1. Oral Stage: birth - 1 year, related to breast feeding.
2. Anal: 1 - 3 years, pot training poorly.
3. Phallic: Oedipus Complex.
4. Latency: 5 - puberty, sexual feelings repressed
5. Genital: puberty, sexual feelings re-emerged.

Defense Mechanism

• Displacement: redirect energy to more appropriate target.
• Sublimation: displacement activities that valued are by society.
• Projection: reducing anxiety by attributing unacceptable impulses to someone else.
• Rationalization: reasoning away anxiety-producing thoughts.
• Regression: retreating to a mode of behavior of earlier stage.
• Reaction formation: replacing threating wishes with their opposites.

Scientific assessment

Falsifiability. But the core of Freuds, the unconsciousness is intact.

B.F. Skinner

Theory of behaviorism:

1. Emphasis on learning
2. Anti-mentalism: stimulation -> response.
3. No differences across species

Habituation: A decline in the tendency to respond to familiar stimuli.

Classical conditioning: Association between one stimulus and another. Ivan Pavlov.

reinforced trials vs. unreinforced trials.

Instrumental Conditioning: shaping the approximated behaviors by rewarding.

Schedule of reinforcement:

• fixed ratio
• variable ratio: slot machine
• fixed interval
• variable interval

Scientific assessment of Skinner

• Emphasis on learning: unlearned knowledge exists.
• Anti-Mentalist: Observables are discussed in general.
• No differences across species: animals are different in learning.

Chomsky says the behaviorism false or empty such as the reinforcement is too vague.