Preface:

How do minds work, whether in humans, animals, or machines…or in single-celled organisms, plants, ant colonies, or societies? This course surveys a wide range of answers to this question from disciplines ranging from philosophy to artificial intelligence to neuro-science, on topics including perception, learning, memory, decision making, number cognition, language, and more. The course shows how the different views from the parent disciplines interact and identifies some common themes among the theories that have been proposed. The course will introduce some simple computational and mathematical models (high school algebra will be enough to understand these!), which make clear the ‘mechanics’ of minds. We will also discuss the main directions of current research in the field.