Cognitive-science research shows that people improve learning efficiency by practicing the set of specific cognitive tasks required for their area of expertise.11. K. A. Ericsson, R. T. Krampe, C. Tesch-Römer, Psych. Rev. 100, 363 (1993); https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363A. Ericsson, R. Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, HarperOne (2017). Although that approach is based on learning research, it is uncoincidentally quite similar to the ideal master–apprentice method for traditionally teaching a craft (see figure 1).

when we attribute sensory experiences to 00:06:39 ourselves for instance like the experience of red or the experience of seeing blue the model is external properties and we think of there as being inner properties just like those external properties that somehow we are 00:06:52 um we are seeing immediately

This course is an introduction to computational theories of human cognition. Drawing on formal models from classic and contemporary artificial intelligence, we will explore fundamental issues in human knowledge representation, inductive learning and reasoning. What are the forms that our knowledge of the world takes?

so number one uh societal transformation is necessary if we're to avoid catastroph catastrophe and maintain and improve social and ecological well-being 00:18:00 that's the starting that's this that's where this whole thing starts that's something that's transformation is necessary number two uh one kind of societal transformation is is a science driven transformation 00:18:13 you know you can imagine all kinds of there could be war uh revolution could be a a type of of transformation and i'm not talking about revolution here i'm talking about a science-driven 00:18:24 evidence-based uh development of and migration to fundamentally new systems so we're talking about dinovo de novo design from scratch right this is so we're not 00:18:38 improving uh capitalism for example or represented democracy where we're looking at conceivable de novo designs that might be fit or among the most 00:18:52 fit of all possible designs number three is uh now um you know if i were a genius which which i'm not but if i were a genius and i came up with the 00:19:05 greatest plan that everyone could you know we could rearrange society according to this you know this design uh if there were no way to a practical way to implement that then i would have been wasting my time 00:19:19 so a big part of this series is actually especially paper number two is really focused on what what is a how could this actually be done in the real world how can how can you do this 00:19:32 um so i i claim at least that there is a viable and affordable uh way to go about transformation that within a reasonable span of time 00:19:44 uh and i and i when i consider 50 a 50-year program here to be a reasonable span of time transformation could spread to near global levels so um you know we're talking about a 00:19:57 concerted effort over a long period of time to reach a global scale change but that does not mean that no change happens until the 49th year it means that change happens 00:20:11 exponentially fast so maybe in the first few years there's you know there's not a lot going on but it goes exponentially fast from there and those communities local communities that participate in this 00:20:24 r d program would be obviously be the first to reap the benefits uh number four the and this is maybe one of the key world view aspects of this paper number one is all 00:20:37 about world view the proposed program views society as a cognitive organism and its societal systems as a cognitive architecture so you know that 00:20:50 if indeed society is a cognitive organism and ours and our systems are part of the cognitive architecture that already lends itself to ideas of how you might measure fitness now you're starting 00:21:02 we're starting to get an idea of what is a system supposed to do so we'll be getting more into that today number five the intrinsic purpose of a society now obviously if we're going to 00:21:17 build a new system we have to know for what is a new system supposed to do like what is an economic system supposed to do what is a governance system supposed to do what is the what is the purpose of them so uh uh 00:21:30 purpose is also a big part of the world view in the first paper and the i one of the points of the fifth point is that the intrinsic purpose of a society of societal uh cognition and thus also of societal 00:21:42 systems is to achieve and sustainably maintain social and economic ecological viability and vitality probably broadly defined now if you're listening carefully and 00:21:55 you're of the active inference persuasion you'll you'll already see active inference in here when i talk when we talk about um sustainably maintain that means and 00:22:07 anticipation of the future all right uh i also say here the cognition is largely focused on reducing the uncertainty that our intrinsic purpose will be successfully fulfilled 00:22:22 now and in the expected future so uh again we have a concept from active inference that is uncertainty um the cognitive view opens up many new opportunities for research 00:22:35 and and i feel like this view is really critical if we are to truly uh have some kind of of 00:22:46 optimally beneficial societal systems and uh number seven the last one this proposed r d program like i already mentioned it represents uh it's conceptual now but it represents a partnership 00:23:03 between local communities and the global science community um and the you know neither of those are monolithic the global science 00:23:15 community is you know it was a whatever however you might want to envision it a hundred labs or a thousand labs around the world or individual researchers or groups of researcher teams interdisciplinary teams at one 00:23:28 institution teams across institutions that is what i'm that is really who i'm speaking i'm in the in this series i'm speaking to the science world and i'm 00:23:38 suggesting or offering or or you know hoping that the science community might find this perspective interesting and see the the benefits that would be the 00:23:53 scientific benefits that would come of this the the research gains that would come of this the possibilities that would come of this and and and get engaged right so it's kind of a 00:24:06 like i'm asking the science community to get engaged in this problem in it and in a particular kind of way and in what some people have called a second to you know whatever the phrase escapes me 00:24:19 in the moment so i forget what the uh what is the title their second second i'm gonna just call it second order science but i think there's a slightly different phrase very interesting i remember reading this 00:24:36 second order yeah yeah second order science

so obviously the word transformation is in the title of the 00:10:54 series so this you know the general topic is societal transformation and although that term alone is a little bit you know people have different ideas of what societal transformation means so i 00:11:07 want to make a few things clear i especially in the second paper i make the distinction between reform and trends and transformation 00:11:19 and by reform i mean anything that would you know improve our government system and prove our our economic system improve our legal system you know 00:11:33 one example might be uh levying taxes on the wealthy or something and then you know using those fees to to provide medical services or something 00:11:45 or altering how long a representative can be in and you know in congress in the legislature or something like that or ways to vote or things like that those really 00:11:59 those are all what i would consider reforms and i'm interested in a different question i'm interested in the question out of all conceivable ways to organize the societal systems and by 00:12:11 societal systems i really focus on a few of them uh governance systems economic systems uh legal systems educational systems and i think maybe one or two others out of 00:12:24 out of that i i view those systems as the cognitive architecture of a society that is that's how society thinks through 00:12:35 those systems it it learns it adapts it decides and and evolves kind of through that kind of cognitive architecture and my question 00:12:49 is out of all possible conceivable ways out of all con for example out of all conceivable economic systems what ones might be best for 00:13:01 uh for demonstratively showing that that they're you know they excel at in improving or maintaining um social environmental well-being 00:13:13 so so even that even there we have uh the concept of a fitness coming into this that is what out of all conceivable systems which are the most fit for purpose and now now 00:13:26 soon we can talk about what purpose might be but you know that that is a new question that's that is a question that's hardly been asked in the in the history and i think maybe um it's only now 00:13:38 that science has the tools and the theoretical understandings that maybe it's maybe this is right maybe maybe it is time that we can talk about the purpose of a society and 00:13:50 how fit a given system design might be

The effects of spiritual practices are now being investigated scientifically as never before, and many studies have shown that religious and spiritual practices generally make people happier and healthier.

Retrieval practice boosts learning by pulling information out of students’ heads (by responding to a brief writing prompt, for example), rather than cramming information into their heads (by lecturing at students, for example). In the classroom, retrieval practice can take many forms, including a quick no-stakes quiz. When students are asked to retrieve new information, they don’t just show what they know, they solidify and expand it. Feedback boosts learning by revealing to students what they know and what they don’t know. At the same time, this increases students’ metacognition — their understanding about their own learning progress. Spaced practice boosts learning by spreading lessons and retrieval opportunities out over time so that new knowledge and skills are not crammed in all at once. By returning to content every so often, students’ knowledge has time to be consolidated and then refreshed. Interleaving — or practicing a mix of skills (such as doing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems all in one sitting) — boosts learning by encouraging connections between and discrimination among closely related topics. Interleaving sometimes slows students’ initial learning of a concept, but it leads to greater retention and learning over time.

Activities such as time spent on task and discussion board interactions are at the forefront of research.

A few cognitive scientists – notably Anthony Chemero of the University of Cincinnati, the author of Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009) – now completely reject the view that the human brain works like a computer. The mainstream view is that we, like computers, make sense of the world by performing computations on mental representations of it, but Chemero and others describe another way of understanding intelligent behaviour – as a direct interaction between organisms and their world.

Misleading headlines notwithstanding, no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.

Agreementis the good stuff in science; it’s the high fives.But it is easy to think we’re in agreement, when really we’re not. Modeling ourthoughts on heuristics and pictures may be convenient for quick travel down the road,but we’re liable to miss our turnoff at the first mile. The danger is in mistaking ourconvenient conceptualizations for what’s actually there. It is imperative that we havethe ability at any time to ground out in reality.