CSC 191/291 Course Description

Can machines show self-awareness? Could robots and other machines have subjective sensory and emotional experiences? Could they have a moral sense? These questions are becoming increasingly relevant in our age of increasingly intelligent machines. We will explore these issues through readings from the AI literature as well as from philosophy and cognitive science. Homework will include written answers to questions, essays, Lisp exercises and -- for 291 students only -- a team programming project intended to demonstrate the possibility of some degree of self-awareness in a computer. The course is optionally available for writing credit. (4 hours, Spring).

191 Prerequisites: a programming course; sophomore or higher standing (or consent of instructor); a prior course in AI, cognitive science, linguistics, or philosophy is an advantage.

291 Prerequisites: CSC 173 and one of 200, 240, 212(HCI), 242, 280, or 282. (See comments below.)

Lectures:   Tuesday and Thursday, 11:05p.m. to 12:20 p.m., Online Room 20

Comments on Prerequisites

Students should meet the prerequisite requirements (sophomore standing and some programming experience--minimally the equivalent of CSC 108 or, better, CSC 161 or CSC 171--for 191. For CSC 291 students the requirement of having taken at least one of CSC 200, 240, 212, 242, 280, or 282 will ensure that they can handle the "self-aware system" team programming assignment. Students are advised not to undertake this course lightly. It is expected to be a significant amount of work. The course has an extensive reading list, and requires getting a broad grasp of philosophical, cognitive, and AI issues pertaining to machine consciousness and self-awareness, and includes a programming component. For CSC 291 students, homeworks and the programming project will be evaluated on the assumption that these students have previously attained some programming maturity, and have previously been exposed to basic AI topics such as computer vision, knowledge representation, problem solving, language understanding, etc. However, students who have taken the undergraduate problem seminar CSC 200 or a theory course such as CSC 280 or CSC 282 probably have sufficient maturity in the more formal aspects of computer science to be able to make up for lack of a prior AI course. The projects may well require the use of multiple source files and libraries, so experience with basic linux commands, and web utilities such as overleaf for document developmet and github for code development is an asset.

Goals of the course

Tests, Homework, and Grading

For 191 students, 40% of the grade will be based on approximately 5 homework assignments; 34% on a midterm test and a final noncumulative test (each requiring about 80 minutes but answered overnight); and 26% on 2 staged Lisp exercises (oriented towards "self-awareness").

For 291 students, the approx. 5 written homeworks will count as 35% of the grade, the two tests as 24%, the 2 Lisp exercises as 16%, and the project as 25%.

The homework assignments will ask you to answer questions and write essays about the readings. These readings include several required books (as follows) and a number of technical articles. (In addition, 291 students will probably be looking at some further scientific literature to help with the Gridworld consciousness project -- see below.)

Required books

Consciousness is often regarded as being of two sorts: access consciousness -- the ability introspect and answer questions about oneself -- and phenomenal consciousness -- our subjective experience of colors, sounds, smells, pains, joy, etc. For access consciousness, one can see rather readily how to achieve that in machines, at least in principle; it's essentially an AI question. Whether machines could also have phenomenal consciousness is a more difficult question, though it's also surely of interest in AI and robotics. Hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been written, and continue to be written, about consciousness, but there is very little worthwhile literature on consciousness from an AI perspective. The most useful book taking that perspective remains the first in the following list.

Time permitting, additional readings may be chosen from the further books list (see link below). This might include some chapters of Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine (Amazon.com 2006), and possibly from Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (Basic Books 2007), and/or Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind (Viking 2012), and/or Murray Shanahan, Embodiment and the Inner Life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds (Oxford U. P. 2010).

Some articles of particular interest

Links to further books and articles

The following are links to some further books from which some readings may be selected (for you or by you) and many articles of related interest.

Writing guidelines

You will be asked to answer questions in writing, and to write essays of various lengths.

One kind of place to look for examples of the kind of writing to strive for is in book reviews, in refereed journals, of some of the readings for this course.

Typically, essays will be graded on 3 dimensions, roughly as follows:

Project: Implementing a limited example of (self)awareness

As noted, 25% of the work in CSC 291 will be devoted to a semester-long project, carried out in teams of about 1-3, developing "Gridworld" agents that show or simulate some degree of perceptual awareness, activity of some sort, emotional response, and self-awareness. Such a system should contain a simple model of the system itself, i.e., a representation that includes a symbol for itself and symbolic representations of other relevant entities in the "world" and how they relate to the agent and each other. It should also be able to do some simple inferencing. The existing Lisp-based "Gridworld" environment for creating agents and simulated worlds will be made available and also discussed in a lecture (and perhaps a recitation).

THE CONSTRUCTED AGENTS SHOULD SHOW SOME LIMITED QUESTION-ANSWERING ABILITY CONCERNING THEIR CURRENT PERCEPTIONS AND SITUATION, AND THEIR OWN GENERAL PROPERTIES, SINCE THIS IS THE MOST NATURAL WAY TO PROVIDE OVERT EVIDENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. ANOTHER HIGHLY RECOMMENDED FEATURE IS TO INCLUDE SOME EMOTIVE OUTPUTS, SUCH AS "MM... THE PIZZA IS DELICIOUS!" WHEN SOME REWARD IS GAINED, OR "I'M SO HUNGRY" IF APPROPRIATE." (More ambitious goals would include being able to say something about past events, or handling more than one mobile agent, or a changing world. There is a multiple-agent version pf the Gridworld, and "exogenous" changes to the world, i.e., ones not caused by the agent, could be implemented by expanding the "go!" function, which causes the agent to make new plans and perform a further action, so that this also alters the world incrementally.)

The prior Lisp exercises assigned to both 191 and 291 students will be designed to resemble, in a very limited way, what can be done in Gridworld.

Each team in the 291 class will attempt to go as far as possible in demonstrating the above sorts of capabilities. Teams should form, with the help of the grad TA, by about Spring Break, and project proposals by those teams should be provided to the instructor and the TAs no later than Thu. Mar 26, so that they can receive feedback about content and feasibility. The proposals should be about 1 printed single-spaced page in length. (There is no prescribed organizaton or grade for the proposal -- it should just lay out your ideas and approach to achieving the above project goals, so that you can get feedback before getting too deeply into an attempted implementation.)

Final project presentations will be given near the end of the semester, and reports on the projects will be submitted. Besides a system description and examples of behavior, the final report should state conclusions about what has been learned, about the implications for consciousness, and connections between the project and topics/readings in the course.

Attendance and tests

Attendance via Zoom is essential for keeping up with the material and doing well on the tests. The instructor should be informed of unavoidable absences in advance (whenever feasible).

Essays and reports must be handed in in time. Exceptions will be made only under dire circumstances.

Academic Honesty

Student conduct in CSC 191/291 is governed by the College Academic Honesty Policy, the Undergraduate Laboratory Policies of the Computer Science Department, and the Acceptable Use Policy of Academic Technology Services (see especially sec. III of the full pdf document).

As in all intellectual endeavors, proper attribution of work is crucial in the essays and project reports you submit. 291 students also need to be sure to provide proper references to the software and documentation they acquire for the project (naturally, describing any additions or modifications they made). In your homework answers, essays and reports, provide citations in standard form for any text and ideas taken from other sources. Use of unattributed material is plagiarism.


Last Change: 19 April 2022 / Len Schubert