Psych/Cogst 231 — written assignments

schedule

grade components

The idea that self-knowledge is a personal goal worthy of dedicated pursuit — if not the central intellectual challenge facing humanity — is deeply rooted in philosophical thinking, both Western and Eastern. In Greece, the birthplace of the modern West, a commandment for self-knowledge (gnothi seauton, "know thyself") adorned the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the seat of the famous Oracle, to which one turned with questions that could not be answered anywhere else. The lack of self-knowledge in a person was considered by Plato to be risible, in a collective — lamentable. Some of the Greek philosophers wanted to know how everything, not just their own minds, worked; once this thirst for knowledge finally shrugged off the fetters of religious doctrine (in the Europe of Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton), it took only three centuries for the mind's quest for knowledge to turn upon itself with conceptual and physical tools of hitherto unheard of power and promise. One of my aims in the present course is to help you realize how great the power of the contemporary science of the mind is, and how close it is to fulfilling its promise.

In the ancient East, yearning for self-knowledge motivated the Hindu thinkers, from Uddalaka to Shankara: in the Bhagavad Gita, jnaan or "(self-)knowledge" has the same root as the Russian znanie, the Greek gnosis and, indeed, the English "knowledge". The realization of the liberating value of self-knowledge lies at the core of the various schools of Buddhism. In India, Theravada or Southern Buddhism focused on jnanna, a concept cognate (yet another "gn" root!) to that of jnaan of the Bhagavad Gita. In China, a succession of great masters of Ch'an refined the Mahayana Buddhist tradition brought from India by Bodhidharma, and developed it into a doctrine of sudden enlightenment. Crossing the Sea of Japan, these ideas became the foundation of the many varieties of Zen.

In learned discourse, as well as in philosophical thinking both in the East and in the West, the concept of mind, or self, developed over millennia a curious tendency for disregard towards, and disengagement from the constraints of, the physical world. Gradually, it became fashionable to define self-knowledge as elusive and, at best, as doomed to culminate in a realization of emptiness. This motif, most famously expressed in the Ch'an/Zen doctrine of no-mind (wu xin), is equally characteristic of the reflections on the Tao by Chuang-Tzu, of the Sufi mysteries of Farid ud-Din al-Attar (the Persian author of Mantiq al-Tair — The Parliament of Birds, mentioned by Borges in The Approach to al-Mu'tasim), and of the Gnostic teachings of the Nag Hammadi corpus (which greatly influenced that unique 20th-century visionary, Philip K. Dick).

Nowadays, an obfuscatory — agnostic at best, prescriptive at worst — attitude towards human nature is considered de rigueur among humanist thinkers and literary "theorists", who profess the need for self-knowledge, yet shun the sciences of the mind. Among the general public, the idea of self-knowledge translates into inspired nonsense, "holistic" or "spiritual" verbiage, and pseudo-scientific quackery. Regrettably, these attitudes prevail in an age when self-knowledge — not just of motives, but of mechanisms — is being brought within our grasp by progress in disciplines that the contemporaries of Archimedes, Galileo, Newton or Einstein never dreamed of: computation, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences.

Ironically, the same scholars who are vigorously extending the boundaries of mind science are frequently averse to attempts to place the pieces of the puzzle they retrieve in the context of the "big picture". With the specialization and the increasing dependence on arcane technical skills that characterize contemporary science, few scientists are qualified, and even fewer dare, to theorize about the mind, or about human nature, leaving the field to the mystifiers and the quacks. And yet, as I intend to convince you during the next few weeks, a big picture does emerge, bit by bit, from the fog, and, surprisingly, it is usefully illuminated by the transcendental traditions, just as its pieces are being revealed through the work of down-to-earth cognitive scientists. In a single sentence, it can be described thus: the mind is what the brain does (a poignant quip of Marvin Minsky's). The stress on action, or function, is not accidental: what the brain does is support a loose assembly of computational processes. The mind does disappear when you look at it closely (as the Buddhist sages have intuited), but only in the same sense that one cannot see the forest for the trees — or the brain for the neurons.

Thus, by looking at just the right scale, we shall be able to see, and understand, some of the mind's main components, in terms of their function (what do they do? how do they do it, and why?), and of the brain mechanisms that support them. In that, we shall rely equally on the insight afforded by the unique intellect and the literary genius of Borges, and on the wealth of findings reported in the current scientific literature. The progress in this undertaking will be gauged through writing: the best way to learn something about Nature is to read a good story — or to write one.

what and how to write

content

form

• A short story. The ultimate challenge: compete with Borges on his own turf. Some of you will be tempted to write a parody of a Borges story. Although this is not an entirely untrodden path, be forewarned that the style developed by Borges makes him his own best parodist, so that if your parody really hits the target, you'll be likened to a person who coins counterfeit money out of pure gold.
• A TiCS-style paper. It only seems easier. Choose one:
  • Review. Survey the scientific (psychological, computational, neurobiological) literature on one of the weekly topics (memory, happiness, etc.) and write a review that summarizes the findings, the theories used to interpret them, and the prospects.
  • Opinion. Choose one (or more) of the weekly topics and write a paper that describes and supports a particular (usually, novel or controversial) stance on the relevant issues.
• A traditional "compare and contrast" essay. Discuss an article taken from one of the three genres against a background provided by items from the other two genres. For example, if you focus on The Circular Ruins (Borges), you might compare it to some neurophilosophical papers from TiCS.

the weekly questions

In the message containing your first question, please include some information about yourself (your interests, what you like to read, books you have read recently, your expectations from this course, other courses you are taking this semester, your major, your career goals, anything else you think I should know about you to help you make the most of this course).

essay 0

the main essay

peer review

In literature, the reviewers are usually critics who face the finished, immutable product and express their opinion thereon (in some cases, authors are willing to revise their manuscripts extensively on the advice of the editors, if publication in a prestigious periodical or under a coveted imprint is at stake).

My goal is to encourage you to strive towards exemplary writing, no matter what style you choose to adopt. To that end, we shall combine the focus on content inherent in the peer review process that is customary in science with the attention to form that one expects to find in literature and in beaux arts.

Thus, your charge as a reviewer is to ask insightful questions that will make the author think more deeply (1) about his or her ideas and (2) about their presentation. I expect you to spend a minimum of two hours on your review. Make sure your comments are legible. Here are the suggested guidelines for reviewing a paper.

1. The first reading.
   • Read the entire essay without thinking about how you would respond to it. Gather GENERAL impressions without writing anything on the paper. Do you like the paper? Do you understand what the author is trying to say?
   • Then, in a few sentences or a paragraph, try to capture the author's main idea. Is this idea interesting or is it commonplace? Do you agree? Disagree? Why?
   • If you can't capture the author's main idea, why not?
2. Next, reread the essay, this time trying to determine why you reacted the way you did the first time you read it. Consider the following:
   • Is there a clear thesis stated early in the paper? If so, does the body of the paper support the thesis statement, or does it go off on tangents? Does the beginning grab you and make you want to read on?
   • Look for "empty material": words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs that do not provide interesting, useful information. Ask yourself, "Is this piece of information needed to support the thesis?"
   • Does the essay only skim the surface of the issues that are involved, covering too much too superficially, or does the essay explore a clearly defined topic in depth?
   • Are the points of the essay clearly explained and illustrated?
   • For each paragraph, consider the following:
     • Is there a clear, informative topic sentence? Is it clear to you what the point of the paragraph will be?
     • If yes, does what follows illustrate, explain, or elaborate on the topic sentence?
     • If no, what is being discussed?
     • Does the paragraph contain more than one topic? If so, how would you divide the paragraph?
     • Is there "empty" material that does not directly relate to the topic of the paragraph? If so, what would you eliminate?
   • Does the conclusion conclude? Does it effectively wrap up the paper, with pizzazz?
3. Also pay attention to the author's use of language:
   • Are there places where the language is particularly expressive?
   • Is your mind numbed by sentences of the same length punctuated only with commas (,) and periods (.), or does the author vary sentence length and make effective use of punctuation, asking you questions (?), drawing attention to key points (:), linking ideas together (;), and clarifying or highlighting points (—)?

revising your writing

1. Try to cut out unnecessary or overly wordy passages — ask yourself about each passage or example in your paper if there is any way that you could make the point more concisely, or better yet: could you cut this passage out altogether? Try to keep in check the tendency to make grand sweeping claims that stay at the level of the extremely general — this won't impress your reader or convince her or him. Make your points as precise and concrete as possible. Sometimes you may find it hard to cut out something; after all, they are your words and you worked hard to write them. It may help in this case if you think of writing a paper as like making a sculpture. The first version of your paper achieves the rough shape, but now you need to apply your chisel! Remove everything that stands in the way of helping your reader to appreciate the real beauty of your work of art.
2. At the same time, you should also expand those parts of your paper that could be developed and made clearer — ask yourself if your reader will be able to follow you at each point. Have you really laid out the parts of the argument as clearly as you can? Have you shown how the different parts together lead to the conclusion? Is there some additional information that would help make things clearer? Would an example help to illustrate a difficult passage that you are trying to explain? Try to increase the fullness and substance of your paper. Give it heft, make it a piece of writing that says something in its few pages.
3. Finally, think about the overall organization of your paper. Do the paragraphs seem to follow one another in a logical order? Is there any way that you could rearrange the different parts of your paper so that the overall shape of your paper becomes more coherent, and thereby easier to understand and more convincing?

1. The following are basic problems that each of us has in our writing; you should address them in your revision:
   • Grammatical, mechanical, and stylistic errors
   • Misspellings
   • Unnecessary use of the passive voice
   • Wordiness and repetition
   • Ambiguity of pronouns
   • Inconsistency or lack of agreement in tense and number
   • Imprecise vocabulary
   • Shifts in sentence structure (lack of parallelism)
   • Overuse of rhetoric
   • Nominalizations
2. The following are more substantial problems that each of us has in our writings; you should devote much of your time to them in your revision:
   • Focus: Do I know the main point of my paper and how all that I say contributes to that main point?
   • Metadiscourse: Have I made clear to the reader what it is I am doing, why, and how?
   • Abrupt shifts in tone or argument: do my transitions make sense?
   • Vague and ambiguous statements: are all my statements clear and direct?
   • Discussion of unnecessary points and arguments: is everything I say relevant? How?
   • Unargued-for conclusions: do I argue for each of the points in my paper?
   • Lack of possible objections to your argument: have I made my argument strong by arguing against possible objections to my position?