Life of Mind

Part of an Innovative Curriculum

Studying something as vast and complex as the human mind requires a nimbleness in transcending disciplines.

"It's too big a subject matter for any discipline to own it," says professor Tony Chemero. "We all have a stake in it, we all have relevant knowledge."

Fortunately, F&M's interdisciplinary major Scientific and Philosophical Studies of Mind allows Chemero to teach just as much philosophy, evolutionary biology and artificial intelligence as psychology in his classes. In fact, students draw on this wealth of disciplines in their own research and analysis.

"I'm an interdisciplinary person - a philosopher who knows a fair amount of psychology, who is interested in artificial intelligence and cognitive science," he says. "Everything is a resource for understanding thinking. It's equally valid to draw on anthropology or cultural studies as it is to draw on neurosciences."As Chemero's students grow in their knowledge, he prods them to distill the relevant and essential, to add their own work to the scholarship that has preceded them.

"What's developing in college is a picture of the world and your place in it," he says of his students. "They're like sponges with all this knowledge that's soaked up. My job then is to squeeze them out and help them see what can be put together in coherent practice."

That process involves plenty of time-consuming, empirical labor, much of it in the College's artificial intelligence lab. There students design and train simple simulated brains, build robots and use simulated evolution to create artificial creatures. In doing so, they not only employ psychological, biological, and philosophical concepts, but also hone their practical skills in engineering and computer programming to run their experiments.

Currently, students are studying self-organization in living things, trying to refine the Kantian idea of a "special kind of causation" in the evolution of living systems and to discover whether the theory holds true for computer systems as well. "The idea is that the machine makes itself," he says, a theory he expects to prove, in collaboration with his students.

Although Chemero jokes that the research resonates with "math-y weirdos," the implications are much larger. This faculty-student collaboration across the disciplines, he says, helps answer the question of what it means to be alive.