Vassar’s Cognitive Science Department has the oldest undergraduate cog sci degree-granting program in the world. We invite you to explore minds and intelligence in whatever forms they occur.
We human beings take it for granted that we are possessed of minds. You know that you have a mind and you assume that other people do too. But what, exactly, are we referring to when we talk about the mind? Is a mind just a brain? What endows your mind with the property of being conscious? How does your mind allow you to extract music from sound waves, or relish the taste of chocolate, or daydream, or feel happy and sad, or reach for your cup when you want a sip of coffee? Are minds directly aware of the world out there? Or, when you think that you are perceiving reality, are you just consulting some representation of the world that your mind has built? How similar is your mind to the minds of other people? Do you have to be a human being to have a mind? Could other entities have minds so long as they were built the right way? Does your computer have a mind?
These are the kinds of questions that cognitive scientists want to address. Cognitive science is a broadly multidisciplinary field in which philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, neuroscientists, biologists, mathematicians, and computer scientists, among others, combine their respective theories, technologies, and methodologies in the service of a unified exploration of mind. The hallmark of the field is a genuinely multidisciplinary outlook in which the perspectives and methods of all of the component disciplines are simultaneously brought to bear upon a particular question.