Consciousness and Cognitive Science

Our human experience is rich: the thrill of falling in love, the spark of a new idea, the zing of table salt, the sharpness of pain. For thousands of years, philosophers, artists, and religious scholars have tried to explain our subjective experience. More recently, neuroscientists and artificial intelligence experts have contributed to this discussion, weighing in on whether we are “more than meat” (as Descartes famously put it), and whether computers can ever be sentient. In this class, we will begin with the big questions and an interdisciplinary overview of consciousness, then delve into psychology’s role. Using literature from perception, memory, emotion, metacognition, attention, and symbolic development, among other areas of psychology, we will see what empirical evidence can tell us about who we are, what we are able to know, and why we even have an experience of the world at all.