DeCal

For Spring 2018 information please go to our Piazza page: https://piazza.com/class/jdf1ibhhu4545d

For course notes, check out our Medium page: https://medium.com/philosophy-of-computation-at-berkeley/

Class meets weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6:10pm to 7pm in 229 Dwinelle.

Office hours: Fridays 12:10pm – 2pm, Caffe Strada, and dinner after class

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Fall 2017 Syllabus

Week of Monday, November 27th, 2017: Last Meeting

• Worksheet: Meeting 8: Culture, Computation, Morality

Week of Monday, November 13th, 2017

• Worksheet: Meeting 7: Eastern, Western, Computational Moral Philosophy
• Assignment submission portal: https://goo.gl/forms/tPG2TaGtgShlmBcs2
• Readings:
  1. Piaget’s Constructivism
  2. Lecture 1: The Normative Question of The Sources of Normativity
  3. (Optional) Uncomputability and free will
  4. (Optional) Culture, Computation, Morality
  5. (Optional) The Value Function of Human-Compatible AI
     • The last two optional readings are my own rough drafts of ideas that led to this class, in case you’re interested.
• Assignments and readings are due 11/20/2017 at 5:09 pm.

Week of Monday, November 6th, 2017

• Worksheet: Meeting 6: Philosophy East and West
• No assignments or readings, please focus on your final project.

Week of Monday, October 30th, 2017

• Worksheet: Meeting 5: Meaning, Poetry, and Word Vectors
• Assignment submission portal: https://goo.gl/forms/yLj81C3dIzTOy17r1
• Readings:
  1. Culture, Dialectics, and Reasoning about Contradiction by Kaiping Peng
  2. Chinese Philosophy in the English-Speaking Word: Interview with Bryan Var Norden
  3. (Optional) Hegel’s Philosophy of History
• Assignment and Readings are due 11/6/2017 at 5:09 pm.

Week of Monday, October 23rd, 2017

• Assignment submission portal: https://goo.gl/forms/5VTg8uiPkqzpzeNt1
• Readings:
  1. The amazing power of word vectors 
  2. (Optional) Linear algebraic structure of word meanings
  3. (Optional) Multimodal Distributional Semantics
• Assignment and Readings are due 10/30/2017 at 5:09 pm.

Week of Monday, October 16th, 2017

• Worksheet: Meeting 4: What Is Math?
• Assignment submission portal: https://goo.gl/forms/XyfLKuTekCOrnlXg1
• Readings:
  • Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of The Triggering Town
• Assignment and Readings are due 10/23/2017 at 5:09 pm.

Week of Monday, October 9th, 2017

• Worksheet: Meeting 3: Computational Complexity
• Assignment submission portal: https://goo.gl/forms/CrKSyoyXiMPnpE8J3
• Readings:
  1. Introduction (p1-11) of Where Mathematics Comes From, by Lakoff and Núñez.
  2. “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics on the Natural Sciences” by Eugene Wigner
  3. (Optional) “Organized Complexity: Is Big History a Big Computation?” by Delahaye and Vidal
• Assignment and Readings are due 10/16/2017 at 5:09 pm.

Week of Monday, October 2nd, 2017

• Worksheet: Meeting 2: The Halting Problem
• Solution to Newcomb’s Paradox: Halfway down this page https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec18.html
• Assignment submission portal: https://goo.gl/forms/vmb3M5RMCXdwd5aF3
• Readings:
  1. “Learning Math with Psychological Safety”: https://betterexplained.com/articles/math-psychological-safety/ 
     • This is similar to what I was trying to get at on the first part of class on Monday.
  2. Not a reading, but a video. A nice introduction to computational complexity: “P vs. NP and the Computational Complexity Zoo”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX40hbAHx3s
  3. Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, up to p. 49
     • You can find a PDF here: https://www.physixfan.com/wp-content/files/GEBen.pdf
     • The PDF is fine, but has some typos that make it annoying to read. You can buy a copy for about 20 bucks. Gödel, Escher, Bach is the Bible of philosophy of computation, and if you are committed to this field in any way at all, I highly recommend you buy it… 😉
  4. Short excerpt from I Am a Strange Loop, also by Douglas Hofstadter: https://jrbenjamin.com/tag/douglas-hofstadter/
  5. Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity by Scott Aaronson, up to p. 16: https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf
  6. (Optional) Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, Chapter 8, Typographical Number Theory: p. 209-239; Chapter 13, BlooP and FlooP and GlooP: p. 397-437
• Assignment and Readings are due 10/7/2017 at 5:09 pm.

Week of Monday, September 25, 2017

• Class canceled.
• Assignment submission portal: https://goo.gl/forms/hFnJFBTHQOmRi5g13
• Readings:
  1. The Information by James Gleick: Chapter 12, The Sense of Randomness (p. 324-354)
  2. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem“ by Alan Turing:  https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf
  3. “On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica, and Related Systems” by Kurt Gödel: https://www.ii.uni.wroc.pl/~kosciels/pi/canon00-goedel.pdf
  4. “Analogies and Metaphors to Explain Gödel’s Theorem” by Douglas Hofstadter: https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/22/Polya/00494925.di020701.02p0020k.pdf
  5. “Understanding the Halting Problem” by Craig Kaplan: http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/csk/halt/
  6. (Optional) Gödel’s Proof of God, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_ontological_proof
• Don’t worry about reading the Turing paper (2) or the Gödel paper (3) too thoroughly. They are included in the readings just so that you may be exposed to some primary sources.
• Assignment and Readings are due 10/2/2017 at 5:09 PM.

Week of Monday, September 18, 2017

• Worksheet: Meeting 1: Talking Drums, Babbage and Lovelace, the Political Economy of Mathematics, and the “Laws of Thought”
• Assignment submission portal: https://goo.gl/forms/JddWnMnqV8Kgm4Pw1
  • Assignment is due 9/25/2017 at 5:09 PM.
• Readings, from The Information by James Gleick:
  1. Chapter 6, New Wires, New Logic (p. 168-203)
  2. Chapter 7, Information Theory (p. 204-232)
  3. Chapter 8, The Informational Turn (p. 233-268)
  4. Chapter 9, Entropy and Its Demons (p. 269-286)
• Please focus on chapters 6 and 7, especially the part about the Incompleteness Theorem and the Halting Problem. Chapter 9 is semi-optional but highly recommended.
• Assignment and Readings are due 9/25/2017 at 5:09 PM.

Week of Monday, September 11, 2017

• Worksheet: Meeting 0: Paradoxes
• Assignment submission portal: https://goo.gl/forms/XaQ57EIl9KjmlISH3
• Readings, from The Information by James Gleick:
  1. Chapter 0, Prologue (p. 3-12)
  2. Chapter 1, Drums that talk (p. 13-27)
  3. Chapter 4, To Throw the Powers of Thought into Wheel-Work (p. 78-124)
  4. Chapter 5, A Nervous System for the Earth (p. 125-167)
• Chapters 2, 3 are optional.
• Assignment and Readings are due 9/18/2017 at 5:09 PM.

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