Connectionists: Resources for teaching cognitive science and AI

[Tom Griffiths]

Dear colleagues,

If you are preparing a course on cognitive science or AI for the Fall, I wanted to share some resources that might be useful.  

Over the last decade I have been doing oral history interviews with cognitive scientists and am releasing them in a podcast called the Cognition Project. Currently we have interviews posted with Jerome Bruner, Molly Potter, Susan Carey, Lila Gleitman, Noam Chomsky, Jean Berko Gleason, Tom Bever, Dan Slobin, Richard Atkinson, Gordon Bower, Roger Shepard, Rich Shiffrin, Elizabeth Loftus, Ewart Thomas, Phil Johnson-Laird, Donald Norman, Eleanor Rosch, and Douglas Hofstadter (and Dedre Gentner will be posted this week). The interviews so far have focused on the cognitive revolution, mathematical psychology, and the first cognitive science conferences, but we’re moving into a section on different approaches to AI and the origins of neural networks. The interviews are designed to be accessible to undergraduates so they can be assigned in classes where you cover the work of these researchers.

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cognition-project/id1872765981
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7rhwBGhEQCtO9cBguazFsq

I also wrote a book for a general audience based on these interviews that introduces different approaches researchers have taken in trying to use mathematics to understand the mind, starting with the symbolic approach of Leibniz and Boole and then introducing neural networks and probability and statistics. The book, The Laws of Thought, is also designed to be assigned in undergraduate courses as a supplement to primary sources: it focuses on the stories of the people behind these ideas, putting the ideas in context. Here are some kinds words from readers:

Tom Griffiths’ The Laws of Thought is a magnificent piece of work. Very few scholars today bother with the history of contemporary concepts and methods, but Griffiths does so in a very entertaining and informative manner. And the crystal-clear explanations of the math were unprecedented in my experience. The book will be very useful and enlightening for students of cognitive science at all levels for generations to come.
— Michael Tomasello, James F. Bonk Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University

For those of us who study how the brain gives rise to thought, Tom Griffiths has written something extraordinary: a clear-eyed account of the mathematical ideas that have come closest to capturing the mind. The Laws of Thought is more than an intellectual history — it is a roadmap of the mind itself, and one that neuroscience has only begun to read. It sets a bold new agenda for our field.
— Edward Chang, Professor and Chair of Neurosurgery, University of California, San Francisco

The Laws of Thought is a remarkable achievement: lucid enough for general readers, rich enough for scholars, and illuminating for anyone interested in intelligence, human or artificial. Griffiths offers an insight on every page and a revelation in every chapter.
— Tamar Gendler, Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy, Yale University

What makes this work exceptional is the synthesis. You move from Aristotle to Boole to Turing to modern transformers without ever feeling like you’ve left the same intellectual thread.  
— Brian Keating, Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of California, San Diego

Publisher: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250358363/thelawsofthought/
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250358353

Best wishes,

Tom.

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Tom Griffiths
Director, Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence
Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness and Culture
Departments of Psychology and Computer Science
Princeton University

http://cocosci.princeton.edu/tom/