One of the core distinctive characteristics of human beings is our capacity to make meaning using symbols. The purpose of this course is lead students to explore why this matters to our understanding of what makes us human and to ask and address a family of questions this involves: What moves us to laugh at a joke or brings us to tears at a movie? How is it possible that sounds or marks can convey full thoughts from one mind to another? What happens so that infants can grow from perceiving their environment to experiencing a world? What is the difference between how a sentence can convey meaning and how a painting can? In this course, we put this human capacity to “make sense” under a microscope and explore important ideas developed to explain it. We trace the impact of some of these ideas, eventually showing how one old idea about meaning was recently rediscovered and applied to computers. The result was Generative AIs like ChatGPT. What was this old idea? Does it show that machines can mean? We will think through questions like these together.

One of the core distinctive characteristics of human beings is our capacity to make meaning using symbols. The purpose of this course is lead students to explore why this matters to our understanding of what makes us human and to ask and address a family of questions this involves: What moves us to laugh at a joke or brings us to tears at a movie? How is it possible that sounds or marks can convey full thoughts from one mind to another? What happens so that infants can grow from perceive their environment to experiencing a world? What is the difference between how a sentence can convey meaning and how a painting can? In this course, we put this human capacity to “make sense” under a microscope and explore important ideas developed to explain it. We trace the impact of some of these ideas, eventually showing how one old idea about meaning was Recently rediscovered and applied to computers. The result was Generalized AIs like ChatGPT. What was this old idea? Does it show that machines can mean? We will think through questions like these together.

To be provided by instructor

To be provided by instructor