I wrote a very broadly-defined paper for an Intro to Cognitive Science Class. It shows the chronological development of competing theories of mind and ends with a series of predictions regarding where I expect the discipline to go. Yes, it does feel weird putting this on the internet.
It’s very likely that his doesn’t interest you. That’s fine also. Just click here.

Cog Sci in ‘25
        Up until only two months ago, professionals in neuroscience, semantics, cognition, and artificial intelligence were bogged down with systems and theories too complex to master in even ten years. There was rarely a consensus among these professionals, and when there was, it was because the dominant approach was the only possible flailing towards an explanation of an extremely complex system. Twenty years ago, these infant fields of study were just learning to stand but today they are running. Before discussing the New Synthesis, a unified program that has facilitated several generational leaps in the study of mind, we will discuss the theories that led to the unification.
        The study of cognitive science began with the exploration of the nature of mind‚Äôs connection to the body. During the scientific revolution especially, the material and rule-based foundation of the world was being rapidly defined. As the great minds of the time looked towards the stars to discover irreducible laws, others looked introspectively (or anatomically) to try to answer questions of the mind. Though the concepts and theories of what governs the mind and body go back to Plato‚Äôs time, Descartes‚Äô ‚Äòwind of animal spirits‚Äô that connects the pineal gland to the immaterial soul began a more serious discourse on the nature of mind. For the most parts, the scientific community has thrown out strict dualism, but some maintain that epiphenomenalism addresses certain irreducible non-physical elements of mind.
        Along with the unveiling of once-mysterious aspects of the physical universe, the mind also has become a subject of meticulous scientific discovery. Reductionism, the belief that mind reduces to observable physical processes, hoped to address the lackadaisical soft science of belief-desire psychology popularized by Freud. Although the convergences of highly specialized technologies have made the study of the physical brain far easier, the search for reductionist frameworks are ironically just as correlational and ‚Äòsoft‚Äô as the belief-desire framework it hopes to replace.
        Because both the spiritual aspects of dualism and the purely physical aspirations of reductionism fail to completely address the multitude of feelings, skills, dreams, and sensory complexities that make up mental capacity, cognitive scientists have probed for complete reinventions of mind representation. Stemming from respect for formal systems like calculus and physics, the rise of the Computational Representational Theory of Mind took

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