Course Outline

1. Introduction: What is cognition? Why study cognition in a media art school?

2. Introduction to phenomenology via modern art: The work of Pierre Schaffer as an instance of phenomenological practice. The idea of reduced listening. Basic concepts of phenomenology: consciousness and intention. The phenomenological critique of science. Phenomenology and visual perception. The form and identity of phenomenal objects (figure and ground, grouping, object permanence, constancy), the perception of depth and motion. The phenomenology of time consciousness. The method of free variation.

3. Alternatives to phenomenology: empiricism, reductionism, eliminativism. Is consciousness only a Brain Process? Recent developments in the study of the brain.

4. Naive realism vs. representational realism. Knowledge representation: the rationalist tradition. Different forms of representation: rules, concepts, schemata, frames, etc. Reasoning and problem solving. Cognitive theories of art and cinema. Vision and representation.

5. The critique of knowledge representation: Perception and embodiment. The ecological theory of perception. Embodied Perception and the Heidegger-Merleau Ponty tradition of phenomenology. Debates about the nature of planning: Improvisation, Situated Action, and human-machine interaction. The influence of embodied phenomenology on contemporary art and art theory. Technology as an extension of the body.

6. The mind as a machine: symbol systems. Classical AI grew out of the rationalist tradition: it assumed the idea of knowledge representation. Additional philosphical background: dualism, behaviorism, and functionalism. The computational theory of mind. Can machines think? Debates about AI. Short introduction to the question of consciousness. New trends in AI (connectionism, embodied AI) related to the question of embodied perception and traditional knowledge representation.

7. The so-called hard problem of consciousness. The question of what it is like to be something. This is a problem mainly for computational models of mind.

8. The self: the ego and multiple selves. Altered states of consciousness. Social Cognition. “Happenings”, contemporary art, and social cognition.
9. Buddhism and consciousness. Consciousness in Chinese culture.