What is Cognitive Science?
If you're anything like everyone else I've talked to, you're probably wondering "What the heck is Cognitive Science?" Well, as it turns out, that's a difficult question to answer with much depth so I'll just give you the overview and a few hints as to why it is such a tricky one to pin down.
The UCLA catalog describes the Cognitive Science major as focusing on the study of "intelligent systems, both real and artificial. While including a strong foundation in the traditional areas of psychology, the major is interdisciplinary in nature and emphasizes subject matter within cognitive psychology, computer science, mathematics, and related disciplines."
I'd like to quote from the UCLA Cognitive Science Handbook, if I may. It was written in 1990 (and revised in 1992) by a graduate student here at UCLA named Mike Anderson. The first question it answers is "What is Cognitive Science?"
In the early 70's researchers in such diverse fields as Cognitive Psychology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Philosophy, Linguistics, Neuroscience and Education came to recognize that they were trying to solve many of the same problems, from similar points of view, and that it would be useful to take advantage of each other's knowledge and skills. What ties these seemingly diverse disciplines together is their common goal of understanding how people and animals perform various cognitive activities -- such as thinking, remembering, learning, using language, and so forth and a common belief that computational ideas can help us make progress toward this goal. From these ties has emerged an exciting new interdisciplinary field: Cognitive Science.
Because Cognitive Science is composed of such diverse disciplines, the research approach and techniques used to tackle these problems range dramatically. Philosophically oriented Cognitive Scientists might ponder theories of knowledge or justified belief, while a computational Cognitive Scientist might investigate how to represent knowledge in a computer; this knowledge might be used to do intelligent tasks, such as problem solving, or understanding language. Psychological Cognitive Scientists might apply computational ideas to understand human cognition and conduct experiments to determine how people perform the incredible, ostensibly simple processes that make us intelligent.
But much of the excitement about Cognitive Science lies in the possibility that these diverse ideas and skills might be combined to understand issues in new ways. Cognitive Psychologists are implementing AI-based computational models of cognitive processing that help to clarify theories and generate predictions. Often these computational models are heavily influenced by ideas about how the brain computes information with neurons, representing another way in shich concepts in these fields interact. One can see that a research project in Cognitive Science might require quite a broad set of skills. Thus, the general intent of our Cognitive Science major is to provide students with sufficient background in each of the core disciplines to familiarize them with the language, tools, and research issues in those areas. In addition, the major also allows students (through spedially tailored tracks, composed of 3-4 courses) to specialize their interests in a particular research area, such as Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Cognitive Psychology, or Natural Language processing. With this strong interdisciplinary foundation, we hope to invest in our students a unique perspective, and the appropriage knowledge and skills to allow them to span intellectual boundaries of the component fields.
What's it all about?
But this description doesn't tell you what it's all about. The field of Cognitive Science is founded on the idea that consciousness is somehow computational in nature. What am I talking about? Well, how do I start to explain? Let's start with the first great thinkers that the world remembers in detail; the Greeks. Hippocrates (a Greek, in case you didn't infer the relationship from the name) believed that the brain was the center of consciousness, while Aristotle (much more famous than Hippocrates) believed that the brain was a complex cooling mechanism for the blood. But when it came down to it, none of them had any clues as to where the seat of consciousness might lie.
Much later in history, after a lot of mucking about in those musty "Dark Ages," Descartes concluded that the seat of consciousness must be the center of the brain (the pineal gland, which if I recall correctly, has optic sensors similar to those in the retina of the eye even though it is wrapped in brain, encased in skull, and for the lucky among us, capped with hair-growing scalp) which was said to contain a "homunculus" (or "tiny man") which was our "inner self." But as Ryle pointed out, we have to postulate that our homunculus is in turn controlled by a homunculus, and so on ad infinitum. So we're stuck in an endlessly recursive descent.
Then along came computers, which could perform some acts of logic (ie. basic arithmetic) with great facility despite the fact that there was no homunculus telling it what to do. It was all reducible to wires and circuits and explainable in terms of the basic physics of the underlying particles (electrons, etc.). So at last we've found an analogy of mind that short circuits Ryle's regression by basing it on a bottom level that does not rely on an even smaller intelligence to guide it.
The parallel in humans is obviously the neuron. Neurons are the miniscule components that make up the brain. Without going into too much detail, I'll just state that their actions seem to be computational in nature. So we have human beings (like, for example, you and me) made up of billions of these miniature computational devices, and each one of us has his or her own consciousness (most of the time). This draws the analogy further, so that we might conjecture that consciousness is composed at its lower levels of calculating "machinery."
The practical upshot of which is...
Cognitive Science is concerned with the discovery of the link(s) between these basic mechanisms and the cognitive functions such as memory, reasoning, creativity, learning, and all of the other mental processes and phenomena which were previously the exclusive domain of philosophers. My father always told me that "A degree in philosophy and a nickel will buy you a cup of coffee." Well, I'm hoping that a degree in Cognitive Science with specialization in computing, followed by a Masters in Computer Science will yield me $100,000/year, because you can't get a cup of coffee for a nickel anymore.
Does that pretty much explain it? I hope so.
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