Seminars
The twelve-week teaching schedule: what happens in each seminar, what to prepare, and what leaves the room.
Lectures are Mondays and seminars are Thursdays, which gives you three days with the reading and the argument before you have to say anything about either. The seminar is where the course actually happens; the lecture exists to put the evidence in front of you so that the seminar can do something with it.
Each week below lists what you should be able to do by the end of it. Those are written so that you can tell whether you have met them without asking us — if you cannot state the thing in your own words, you have not met it yet, and the seminar is the cheapest place to find that out.
Regarding preparation: there is reading every week, and it is primary literature rather than a textbook. The papers are listed on each week's page. Most weeks one of them is the paper the seminar is built around, and the where nobody has read it are visibly worse, which is the only enforcement mechanism we have and in practice it is enough.
Weeks 8 to 10 look like a change of subject and are not. They are the control group — lineages that solved the same problems on different hardware — and they are there to test whether the account built in weeks 1 to 7 was an account of intelligence or just an account of us.
A world too large
The constraint the whole course runs on, and the grading scheme you will use every week after this one.
Week 1 · 25 February 2027
Measurement
What a sense organ is for, and the case that settles it — an animal with twelve colour channels that discriminates colour worse than a goldfish.
Week 2 · 4 March 2027
The trace
Memory without a nervous system, and the century-long mistake that comes with it — a finding discarded in 1906 because the replication used the wrong species.
Week 3 · 11 March 2027
Association
The first mechanism that can be systematically fooled, and why nothing inside it can tell the difference between a cause and a reliable coincidence.
Week 4 · 18 March 2027
Structure not sensed
The internal map, and the result that suggests it was never really about space at all.
Week 5 · 25 March 2027
Prediction
The week the course turns over. Perception as mostly construction, and illusions as the mechanism working rather than failing.
Week 6 · 1 April 2027
The self-model
The modeller starts modelling itself, and finds that introspection reports a summary rather than the process that produced it.
Week 7 · 8 April 2027
Small brains
Everything so far, running on a million neurons — and the collapse of the brain-size story that made it puzzling.
Week 8 · 15 April 2027
Alien architecture
A nervous system built on a different plan, and a famous question that may be malformed.
Week 9 · 22 April 2027
Offloaded
Cognition pushed outside the individual, and the discovery that a group's failures are not the sum of its members'.
Week 10 · 29 April 2027
The catalogue, and its own problem
The human case, and the week the course grades its own sources — most of the famous literature about how badly you reason has not replicated.
Week 11 · 6 May 2027
The blind spot
Nothing is added. You apply eleven weeks of account to your own judgement, and the question from week 1 comes back in a form no card will find.
Week 12 · 13 May 2027