Suggested Term Paper Topics

The following are some suggested topics for your term paper.  However, I encourage you to suggest your own topic, or a variant on one of these topics. Have you reached some conclusions of your own on some of the issues we have discussed?  Is there some issue about which you would like to find out more?  Finally, if you have questions on the topics below, please email me or ask in class.

  1. Summarize the arguments pro and con connectionist models in cognitive science and artificial intelligence.  State and defend your own position.
  2. Suppose a prize of one million dollars is to be given to the first person to achieve genuine artificial intelligence and that it is your job to decide the criteria by which the prize will be awarded.  Describe your criteria and defend them against all reasonable philosophical objections.
  3. Summarize and critique the arguments pro and con the existence of a “language of thought.”
  4. Summarize Dreyfus’s phenomenological arguments against information-processing models in cognitive science and artificial intelligence.  Defend your own position on Dreyfus’s critique.
  5. It has been argued that connectionist architectures do not change any of the arguments for or against machine intelligence, or for or against the Physical Symbol System Hypotheses, since connectionist systems can be simulated on Turing machines (indeed, they are routinely simulated on ordinary digital computers).  Evaluate this argument.
  6. Why is embodiment relevant to abstract theories of cognition?  What is the relevance to artificial intelligence of theories of embodied intelligence?
  7. Review and critique current research in the Robotic Life lab at MIT.  Note their publications page.
  8. Review and critique some of Hans Moravec’s publications on the future of robotics, including his “Robots, Re-evolving Mind.”
  9. Write a careful review and analysis of the debate concerning Bereitschaftspotential experiments by Kornhuber and his successors (Copeland, 142).
  10. Review current theories of the neuropsychology of consciousness.
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Last updated: 2006-09-04.