The Nature of the Mind

Nature of the MInd: Perspectives from philosophy, meditation, psychedelics, and Ai

I taught this course during the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020. The entire course was over Zoom and taught through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Over four classes, we covered philosophical discussions about the nature of consciousness, whether consciousness could be embodied in a robot, whether there is more to consciousness than computation, the role of a physical body in creating consciousness, how artificial intelligence should be treated, what meditative and psychedelic states can reveal about notions of “self”, whether pure awareness could ever be isolated, where consciousness “comes together”, how language mediates our perception, whether we can ever really know how we “understand” something, and other related topics. It was a fascinating learning experience for me, and I look forward to teaching further iterations of this course. The original syllabus was designed for a 13 week course, but was condensed to four weeks due to constraints from the pandemic. The course syllabus, and the lecture slides are included below: