Sample final exam

PHIL/PSYCH 256, FINAL EXAM
Winter, 1994

Answer all questions in the exam booklet. Be sure to put your name and ID # on the booklet.

A. Answer 5 of the following 6 questions (5 marks each).

1. Why is consciousness a big problem for some theories of mind?
2. What is Johnson-Laird's theory of consciousness? Is it plausible?
3. What does Johnson-Laird see as the limitations of learning by backward error propagation?
4. Can empathy be understood as a computational process?
5. What is the ecological challenge to cognitive science? How should cognitive science respond to it?
6. What is distributed artificial intelligence? How does it differ from connectionism?

B. Answer 2 of the following 3 essay questions (10 marks each).

1. Are mental images an important part of human thinking? Is imagery compatible with the computational view of mind?
2. Does connectionism provide a complete theory of mind? What are its central claims? Are these plausible?
3. Is the mind a chaotic dynamic system? Is the dynamic-system view of mind compatible with the connectionist and traditional versions of the computational/ representational view of mind?