Multidisciplinary Perspectives on "Mind"
USP Module UWC2101R
Investigates the mind from the points of view of biology, philosophy, and psychology.

What is "the mind" and what is its place in the natural and cultural order of things? Do animals have "minds"? What about machines? Is "mind" just a kind of brain activity—or is it more than just the electro-chemical exchange of neurons? Can a "mind" ever comprehend itself in its act of "mind"-ing? Or is "mind" just an archaic folk-term for a biologically evolved Operating System—a particular kind of activity-managing software program that nature has evolved to run on the hardware of brains, but one that may someday just as effectively be run on silicon… or even on other people's brain tissue?

As minded creatures with brains ourselves, the ways in which we delimit the mind/brain relation have enormous consequences for the ongoing construction of our legal, social, medical and ethical lives. In this module, we will study how different notions of "the mind" have arisen within philosophy, neurobiology, and the social sciences.

Clothing Identities
USP Module UWC2101N
Investigates how clothing relates to identity from the points of view of literature, history, and sociology.

The subject we will think, read, and write about in this module is the relationship between clothes and identities.

We often think that the clothes we wear express some fact about ourselves, some aspect of what we consider our “identity.” For instance, many of us dress to indicate that we are men or women, or to express our masculinity or femininity. But we also say that “clothes make the man” (or woman), as if clothes do not so much express some sort of innate truth about us, but rather help construct our sense of identity. We seem to feel, for example, that we become more ethnic when we wear a traditional ethnic costume. Why do we think this? How, in fact, is it possible to “become” more ethnic?

Are clothes therefore an expression of who we are, a construction of who we want to be, or something else altogether?

Evolution
USP Module ULS2202
Investigates competing theories and asks why some are accepted over others.

The theory of evolution is controversial, though surprisingly little opposition comes from within science, where evolution is accepted as a unifying cornerstone of natural sciences. In this module, students are challenged to separate science from faith, fact from preconception. We will focus on the theory of evolution and its power to explain the diversity of life and adaptation; however we will not let the theory go unchallenged. We will examine seemingly incompatible phenomena, like “altruism”, where individuals risk their own lives to help others, and “sexual selection”, which leads to excessive (and life threatening) ornamentation such as the peacock’s tail. We will study key events, such as the origin of sex, and seemingly insignificant ones, such as the event that led to the evolution of humans from a chimpanzee-like ancestor. Above all, we will focus on evolution as the theory that explains the mind-boggling diversity of life on Earth today, all as the result of a single observation, that DNA—the blueprint for life—replicates itself almost, but not quite, perfectly.