Computation can be performed not only by silicon chips and electricity but also by many other things including tinker toys, billiard balls, water pipes, lights and mirrors, vats of chemicals, DNA, bacteria, and quantum mechanical systems. Furthermore, in some models of computation billions of events may take place simultaneously, with or without synchronization and with or without explicit programming. Some of these unconventional models of computing appear to provide advantages over current technology and may serve as the basis for more powerful computers in the future.

This course will introduce students to hands-on work in the artificial intelligence topics of neural networks and evolutionary computation, both as separate computer science fields and in collaboration with each other. While the course will start by exposing students to basic concepts in these fields, students will be expected to design, program and evaluate their own computer experiments.

All students in the cognitive, neural, and psychological sciences should be familiar with certain key concepts. This course surveys these central ideas to give students the vocabulary needed to approach the research literature without being intimidated by a barrage of technical terms and to hold intelligent conversations with other students and faculty members who are interested in matters of mind, brain, and machine. Readings in the course will be drawn from books and journals in the field. Students will complete a series of essay assignments concerning the concepts covered in the course.

Public diplomacy employs culture in international relations, whose principal means of exchange are political, economic and military. Increasingly, these traditional forms are augmented by culture, an important example of "soft power," a way of exerting global influence that appears to be unthreatening, even humanitarian.

This course surveys the main theoretical ideas in ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior. We explore the physiological, developmental, functional and evolutionary bases of behavior as well as related issues in the study of cognition. The main reading and discussion material for the course is drawn from journal articles in the professional scientific literature; students are also expected to read John Alcock's standard textbook, Animal Behavior.

What is the mind? Are mental states behavioral dispositions? Or brain processes? Or functional or computational states? Or is there no such thing as the mind, but only the brain? How is the mind related to the body? How can a physical event in space cause a mental event of which we become aware? Consciousness: what is it and what is it doing there in an otherwise physical universe? Is knowledge of experience knowledge of something physical? Why is there a gap between the physical world and what we experience?

This course will examine language learning from a cognitive perspective and consider the relative contributions of genetics and environment to the process of language acquisition. In the course we will examine how children learn words, how they learn to put words together to form sentences and how they learn to use language appropriately in social situations. We will look at children learning two or more languages simultaneously and at children who, in very rare cases, have been altogether deprived of language.

The experience of everyday politics for most Westerners is largely an aesthetic one. People partake in a cultural citizenship, where political actors, issues and institutions are but one more set of representations and simulations that compete for attention by offering pleasure. This situation is partly due to the shift away from direct political participation and partly the result of an increasingly mediatized public culture. We will explore this notion and its implications for democracy and the press, focusing primarily on the US, but also in "democratizing" countries.

Half of the world's six thousand or so languages are likely to disappear forever in the next few decades. This would be a reduction of human diversity on a scale equaling the most dramatic biological extinctions. Can it be stopped? Should it? In this course, students learn enough linguistics to understand why many linguists regard the impending death of so many languages as a scientific catastrophe, and we explore a range of issues in linguistic, cultural, and biological evolution.

This course will introduce students to some of the standard problems of philosophy: the concept of knowledge, justification, the existence of time, personal identity, the mind-body problem, freewill, the foundations of ethics and aesthetics, political philosophy, proofs of the existence of God, the problem of evil, and the nature of philosophical analysis. Emphasis is on the understanding of existing theories in the field and the development of students' own views through portfolio and notebook work.