Theater for the Emotions

During the course of this term, we explored how theater and science interact. It seemed to me that a challenge facing us at the beginning of the class was to find out how science, a stereotypically dry and factual area, could be turned into a show that would capture the attention and emotion of an audience. It was no surprise to me that we found ourselves gripped in the passions of the science plays that we read, but it did pique my interest. How do these shows make us feel so much about simple facts of the physical world? If we approach the question scientifically, we end up looking at how the physical emotion-maker (also known as the body, specifically, the brain) works. It is beyond the scope of this course to get into the neuroscience of emotions, but we did take a brief tour of cognitive science and I think we’re qualified to explore emotion in the context of several different theories of mind. Steven Pinker gave an explanation of emotion from an evolutionary standpoint, but he left the mental structure that implements emotion unspecified. The early part of the class focused on the life, work, and philosophies of Alan Turing, which form a theoretical basis for modern computational cognitive science. It seems that if we could write down a list of rules for a universal Turing See chapter 6 of Pinker.