After taking Professor Jonathan Phillips' Introductory Cognitive Science Course, Eli Hecht '23 was hooked on the mind. The following summer, he asked Professor Phillips if he could become involved in the PhilLab. The lab draws on a broad range of methods employed across psychology, Philosophy, Linguistics, and Computer Science to better understand questions about how our minds make choices when faced with an array of possibilities. Two years the pair sat down with 3D to discuss their work together.
How did you come to study cognitive science?
Professor Phillips: I studied philosophy as an undergrad and was interested in deep questions like 'How do you live the right life? What's a good moral decision? Do we act freely or not? ' That led me to related questions that we can answer pretty concretely: ' How do people make those moral decisions? How do we reason about what's possible? ' I started taking philosophical questions and thinking about them as cognitive science questions. I think Eli and I are very similar in loving deep insight into the mind.
Eli: Definitely. It's so fascinating to me that-through cognitive science-you can connect hard science with bigger questions about how people make decisions. I really like that cognitive science draws on information from different fields like linguistics, computer science and philosophy.
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3D Magazine: April 2023
3D is Dartmouth's undergraduate admissions magazine, celebrating a vibrant community framed by nature, with challenging and welcoming professors, an adventurous and friendly student body, and a rigorous yet flexible liberal arts curriculum.