Declared Cognitive Science independent major

I have just declared my major in cognitive science (combining psychology/neuroscience, computer science, philosophy of mind).

I have been interested in various topics connecting to intelligence and cognition, so it was the best choice for me. I also would like to introspect and explore my own thinking about thinking (cognitive science is one of the interesting disciplines which are recursive).

The potential fields I may want to work on in the future: 

Computer and information science (modeling, dynamic systems, AI, human(or brain)-machine interfaces)

Neurophilosophy/ philosophy of psychology/ philosophy of mind

Cognitive neuroscience 

Psychiatry (especially interested in mood disorders, schizophrenia, personality disorders)

In addition, I would like to address issues with discriminations, mental health, education for underrepresented students, connecting with my interests and my career.

The other relevant topics I'm interested to include:
abstraction (math, arts), analogical reasoning, time and space,  knowledge, consciousness, Biology and physics (adaptation, emergence, regularity)

The interested professions:

Scientist in the related fields to above 

Psychiatrist

Writer for a scientific magazine  

Informal proposal for the major

I have been intrigued by thinking about thinking for a long time. Thinking makes us intellectual creatures. Yet, thinking is one of the most elusive and fluid entities because of the intricate parameters of perceptions, bodies, environments, self, and consciousness. The representations we are forming in mind by interacting with the world are incredibly profound. In terms of neuroscience, this fluidity is defined as the plasticity of a brain, changeable nature of intellect from time to time. Thus, one of the challenges to address thinking and intelligence is that we cannot use the only ordinary approaches like framing the target of thinking and put it on the table for analysis because of the highly situated and embodied aspect of thinking.

We also encounter the limitation to overcome when we think about thinking, which is rooted in the fact that we also cannot escape from the intricacy of thinking within ourselves or disciplines we are familiar with. Here, there seems to at least two layers of this approach -- our disciplinary thinking (including interdisciplinary thinking) and meta-disciplinary thinking, which our target of thinking, intelligence, seems to demand, even though the former is indispensable. This complex structure that challenges our thinking styles and perspectives is one of the reasons why I have been immersed in this topic. I am always amazed by dynamism and contextuality of intelligence across different time scales.

These interests are probably attributed to the moratorium during high school. What I have been doing the past few years is to recognize and question the framework of thinking (rather than thoughts) which is situated in the context and embodied. One of the examples that allow us to look at the outside of the box where we are caged is that blind people see and possibly think about the world differently from many of us. In the world which lacks the visual information, the concept of a box, for example, which has inside and outside, might not be same as inside and outside which we recognize and think and many complicated thoughts are based on. This simple case suggests us that if we change one of the parameters on which thinking is embedded, it is possible to change the system of our intelligence dramatically. Furthermore, the insightful cases are from cyborg and artificial intelligence. Each case has unique situations about its perceptions, body, environments, self, and sociomaterial relations. These real entities which are capable of modifying or even constructing the systems of themselves have opened us to the entirely new world to update, design, and extend our thinking of intelligence. Ultimately, the aim of this study is to feed my curiosity on various disciplines, explore the relationships between intelligent systems (application to robotics and AI), and cultivate the knowledge about mental disorders to achieve the world with fewer limits, less stress, and fewer biases. One of the possible ways to achieve this to study the cognitive diversity or to extract the essence of human intelligence not constraint on sources of biases. (Written in October 2018)

The course catalog and the official proposal are here.

https://drive.google.com/a/depauw.edu/file/d/1psts6Ex9Q9UELXPbly2A1SWp-YVKyNNR/view?usp=drivesdk