Oğul Can Yurdakul

Oğul Can Yurdakul

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Essays on Philosophy of Cognitive Science

89 minute read

Published:

These are the weekly quizzes for the COGS517 Philosophy of Cognitive Science course I took during the Fall 2022 semester. They are relatively short (2-3 A4 sheets at most), so I decided to gather them in a single post as I write them. They are in chronological order, and as the course progresses they -more or less- follow a certain progression of topics and questions. While they start off heavily philosophy of mind centric, I expect them to turn more to the philosophy of cognitive science each week.

Social Cognition in the Emergence of Comprehension

12 minute read

Published:

I wrote this essay as a midterm assignment in class for the PHIL408 Philosophy of Mind II course I took during the Spring 2022 semester, as a follow-up of the previous semester’s PHIL407. We had been discussing the ideas of Dennett, Frith and Gallese among many on cognition and social cognition, embodied simulation and comprehension out of competence. Because it was an in-class midterm and we had limited time (2 hours), our professor had spared us from the obligation of citing our sources explicitly, which is why there are not any in the below text aside from one place (and that is more a name-dropping than a proper citation). I can only state this is absolutely not a presentation of my ideas but of the scientists and philosophers I mentioned earlier, but in my own comprehension and words, with my own examples to the best of my knowledge.

Living With MATLAB

49 minute read

Published:

This is a MATLAB tutorial that I prepared for the students of METU EEE department, specifically for the course EE306 and EE230. I wrote it assuming the students had some basic MATLAB syntax knowledge and built on that to introduce some best-practices in MATLAB regarding clean & efficient coding, report writing, and an introduction to probabilistic computations in MATLAB. I decided to share it here in full open source-spirit. Naturally, everyone is welcome to use it and download it provided they give due credit.

Intrusion of Personal Space as a Cause for Violence: An Inverse Reinforcement Learning Problem on Laboratory Mice

20 minute read

Published:

This is the final project I delivered for the COGS566 Probabilistic Models of the Mind course I took during the Fall 2021 semester. This is was a course project of two parts, a literature review and a final report, which I present here. The goal of the project was to make use of probabilistic programming to solve a cognitive science-related problem. I chose the problem and the dataset myself, made the literature review, designed the model and trained it in WebPPL. Despite my best efforts, my model did not work (learn), and so I accepted my fate and decided to write something like a negative result report. I wasn’t very optimistic about it because of this failure, but the positive feedback I received from my instructor, Barbaros Yet, makes this project dear to me. I learned that analysing a model that does not work is a part of scientific process and to value negative results.

An Attempted Defence of Functionalism Against the Cross-wired Brain Thought Experiment

28 minute read

Published:

I wrote this final essay for the PHIL407 Philosophy of Mind I course I took during the Fall 2021 semester. I had been waiting patiently for this course to fit in my course schedule so that I could take it, and I did not hesitate one bit from taking it when I noticed that it clashed with none of my courses at the beginning of my course. It was one of the best decisions of my undergraduate education (I was still continuing my maths double major, so I was still an undergrad), and I did continue to take the second course PHIL408. There is also a short version that I wrote as a submission to SCSS2022, but sadly I wasn’t accepted.

A Review on Innateness and Emergentism

31 minute read

Published:

This is the final essay I delivered for the COGS504 Natural and Artificial Minds course I took during the Fall 2018 semester. It was the first course I took from the Cognitive Science department and I enjoyed it immensely, thanks to our instructor Ceyhan Temürcü. I wanted to share it because it is the first piece of writing I prepared in the topics I aim to work on, and I really did work hard on it at the time. Aside minor fixes, I share it exactly as it is content-wise.

Side Gigs

5 minute read

Published:

Here I talk about some of my extracurricular, not-necessarily-academic interests and activities. It used to be a page on its own, but then I decided it is more suitable here as a blog post now that I actually have a blog. The date published on the blog is not real, I just wanted to have it under all the other blog posts, but I will keep this page updated as I continue these activities (and more, maybe?).

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