Additions to the Bibliography on Mind and Consciousness
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Paivio Allan: IMAGERY AND VERBAL PROCESSES (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971)Parfit Derek: REASONS AND PERSONS (Oxford Univ Press, 1985)Parkin Alan: EXPLORATIONS IN COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY (Blackwell, 1996)Pattee Howard Hunt: HIERARCHICAL THEORY (Brazillen, 1973)Pawlak Zdzislaw: ROUGH SETS (Kluwer Academic, 1991)Peacock Christopher: A STUDY OF CONCEPTS (MIT Press, 1992)Peak David & Frame Michael: CHAOS UNDER CONTROL (W.H.Freeman, 1994)Pearl Judea: HEURISTICS (Addison Wesley, 1984)Pearce John: ANIMAL LEARNING AND COGNITION (Psychology Press, 1997)Pearl Judea: PROBABILISTIC REASONING IN INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS (Morgan Kaufman, 1988)Pearl's causal networks (conditional dependency's graphical notation) are direct acyclical graphs in which nodes represent casual variables (which can have any value) and arcs express dependecies among them. By using Bayes' inversion formula the conditional probability of the nodes of the graph can be computed as information becomes available. A causal net is isotropic, i.e. it can be used to perform inferences in both ways, top-down (to "predict" an event) and bottom-up (to "diagnose" an event). Pearl thinks that experience is transformed into causal models so that it be possible for the mind to make decisions. Pearl's belief function measures how close a proposition is to necessity, as opposed to classic probability which measures how close a proposition is to truth. Peirce Charles: COLLECTED PAPERS (Harvard Univ Press, 1931)The theory of signs was originally developed by Charles Peirce and then revised by C.W. Morris. A sign is something that stands for something else. Syntax is the study of the relations that signs bear to other signs. Semantics is the study of the relations that signs bear to what they stand for. Pragmatics is the study of the relations that signs bear to what they stand for and their users. Icons are signs that work by virtue of a relation of resemblance to what they stand for (e.g., photographs). Indices are signs that work by virtue of a relation of cause or effect with what they stand for. (e.g., dark clouds suggest rain). Symbols are signs that work by virtue of a conventional association to what they stand for (numbers, nouns, etc). For all three categories of signs, types are kinds of things, tokens are their instances. Penfield Wilder: MYSTERY OF THE MIND (Princeton Univ Press, 1975)Penrose Roger: THE EMPEROR'S NEW MIND (Oxford Univ Press, 1989)Penrose Roger: SHADOWS OF THE MIND (Oxford University Press, 1994)Penrose Roger: THE LARGE THE SMALL AND THE HUMAN MIND (Cambridge Univ Press, 1997)Penrose Roger: THE ROAD TO REALITY (Oxford University Press, 2004)Pereira Nelson & Grosz Barbara: Natural Language Processing (MIT Press, 1994)Piaget Jean: "Equilibration of Cognitive Structures" (University of Chicago Press, 1985)Pilcher, Helen: "Life Changing" (2020)Pinker, Steven: WORDS AND RULES (Basic, 1999)Pinker Steven: HOW THE MIND WORKS (Norton, 1997)Pinker Steven: THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (William Morrow, 1994)Pinker, Steven: THE BLANK SLATE (Viking, 2002)Pinker Steven: THE STUFF OF LANGUAGE (Viking, 2007)Platts Mark: WAYS OF MEANING (MIT Press, 1997)Plotkin Henry: DARWIN MACHINES AND THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE (Harvard University Press, 1994)Plotkin Henry: THE ROLE OF BEHAVIOR IN EVOLUTION (MIT Press, 1988)David Hull discusses interactors and replicators in general. Replicators are units that reproduce their structure directly. Interactors are entities that interact directly with their environment. The difference between Hull's interactors and Dawkins' "vehicles" is not trivial: genes are both replicators and interactors (they have a physical structure that interacts with an environment), and some interactors are also replicators (the paramecium that splits in two). Robert Brandon, inspired by Lewontin and others, offers a hierarchy of interactors. The biosphere is hierarchically arranged and selection operates at all levels. Robert Brandon defines natural selection as the process of differential reproduction due to differential fitness to a common selective environment. The "selective" environment (measured in terms of the relative fitnesses of different genotypes across time or space) is distinguished from the "external" environment and the "ecological" environment (measured using the organism itself as the measuring instrument so that only that part of the external environment that affects the organism's contribution to population growth is taken into account). The selective environment is the one that is responsible for natural selection. Plotkin Henry: EVOLUTION IN MIND (Allen Lane, 1997)Plotkin Henry: LEARNING, DEVELOPMENT, AND CULTURE (Wiley, 1982)Polya George: MATHEMATICS AND PLAUSIBLE REASONING (Princeton Univ Press, 1954)Volume one is devoted to induction and analogy. Volume two is devoted to patterns of plausible inference, nondemonstrative thinking and the theory of probability. Plotkin Henry: EVOLUTION IN MIND (Allen Lane, 1997)Polya George: COLLECTED PAPERS (MIT Press, 1974)Polya George: HOW TO SOLVE IT (Doubleday, 1957)Polya George: MATHEMATICAL DISCOVERY (Wiley, 1965)Popper Karl: THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY (Hutchinson, 1959)Popper Karl & Eccles John: THE SELF AND ITS BRAIN (Springer-Verlag, 1977)Popper Karl: KNOWLEDGE AND THE BODY-MIND PROBLEM (Routledge, 1994)Popper distinguishes objective knowledge ("I know that water is liquid") from subjective knowledge ("I know that I am wrong"). Popper posits the existence of a first world (the world of physical bodies), a second world (the world of mental states) and a third world (the world of products of the mind). The second world communicates with both the others. Objective knowledge belongs to the third world. The third world evolves through the growth of objective knowledge. Objective knowledge confers a degree of autonomy to the third world (numbers are created by the mind, but then mathematical laws determine what happens to them, regardless of the mind). Popper derives biological phenomena of survival and evolution from the same formula that determines the growth and evolution of objective knowledge (basically, trial and error). Consciousness emerged evolutionary with the faculty of language. Consciousness emerges during growth with the faculty of language. Therefore it must be related to the brain region that deals with speech. Porges Stephen & etc.: PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY SYSTEMS PROCESS (Guilford, 1986)Port Robert & Van Gelder Timothy: MIND AS MOTION (MIT Press, 1995)Posner Michael: FOUNDATIONS OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE (MIT Press, 1989)Power Michael: COGNITION AND EMOTION (Psychology Press, 1997)Priest Stephen: THEORIES OF MIND (Houghton Mifflin, 1991)Pribram Karl: LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN (Prentice Hall, 1971)A sensory perception is transformed in a "brain wave", a scheme of electrical activation that propagates through the brain just like the wavefront in a liquid. This crossing of the brain provides the interpretation of the sensory perception in the form of a "memory wave", which in turn crosses the brain. The various waves that travel through the brain can interfere. The interference of a memory wave and a visual wave generates a structure that resembles an hologram. Consciousness is due to fields within the cerebral hemispheres. Because of the physical properties of fields, they can store information in a form analogous to holograms. Pribram Karl & Eccles John: RETHINKING NEURAL NETWORKS (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993)Pribram Karl: BRAIN AND PERCEPTION (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990)The theory employs Fourier transformations to deal with the dualism between spacetime and spectrum, and Gabor's phase space to embed spacetime and spectrum. All perceptions (and not only colors or sounds) can be analyzed into their component frequencies of oscillation and therefore treated by Fourier analysis. Dirac's "least action principle" (which favors the least expenditure of energy) constrains trajectories in such a space. Gabor's uncertainty principle sets a limit with which both frequency and spacetime can be concurrently determined (the fundamental minimum is Gabor's "quantum of information"). A rigorous description of transformations leading from perceptions to feature extraction is provided for a variety of visual and cognitive activities. Processes local to specific brain regions are studied in neurophysiological detail. Pribram expresses a few innovative viewpoints along the way. Both distributed and localized functions characterize brain functions. Structure and process are two aspects of the same entity, distinguished only by the scale of observation (from a distance an entity looks like a structure, but close enough it is a process). The formalism of quantum theory applies to the modeling of brain functions such as vision (brain microprocesses and physical microprocesses can be described by the same formalism). Pribram Karl: ORIGINS (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994)Pribram Karl & Broadbent Donald: BIOLOGY OF MEMORY (Academic Press, 1970)Price Huw: TIME'S ARROW AND ARCHIMEDE'S POINT (Oxford University Press, 1996)Priest, Stephen: THEORIES OF THE MIND (Houghton Mifflin, 1991)Prigogine Ilya: THE END OF CERTAINTY (Simon & Schuster, 1997)Prigogine Ilya: INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS OF IRREVERSIBLE PROCESSES (Interscience Publishers, 1961)Prigogine Ilya: FROM BEING TO BECOMING : TIME AND COMPLEXITY IN THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES (W. H. Freeman, 1980)Prigogine shows, using Boltzmann's theorem, that irreversibility is the manifestation at macroscopic level of randomness at microscopic level. A theory of "instability", based on Aleksander Lyapounov's, is made necessary by two observations: that classical Thermodynamics is about destruction of structure, while structures spontaneously appear in nature; and that near instabilities large fluctuations invalidate probability theory (upon which Thermodynamics is founded). Prigogine attempts a microscopic formulation of the irreversibility of laws of nature. He associates macroscopic entropy (or Lyapounov functions) with a microscopic entropy operator. Time too becomes an operator, no longer a mere parameter. Both time and entropy are therefore operators. This way, Prigogine turns the table around: instead of having a basic theory expressed in terms of wave functions (i.e., of individual trajectories), he obtains a basic theory in terms of distribution functions (i.e., bundles of trajectories). Time itself depends on the distribution and therefore becomes itself a stochastic quantity, just like entropy, an average over individual times. As a consequence, just like entropy cannot be reversed, time cannot: the future cannot predicted from the past anymore. This formulation unifies physical and biological phenomena. Traditionally, physical space is geometrical, biological space (the space in which biological form develops) is functional (for example, physical time is invariant with respect to rotations and translations, biological space is not). This is the concept of time used by Nicholis and Prigogine in their "bifurcation theory" (Thom's catastrophe theory being a particular case). Prigogine Ilya & Stengers Isabelle: ORDER OUT OF CHAOS (Bantham, 1984)Living organisms function as dissipative structures, structures that form as patterns in the energy flow and that have the capacity for self-organization in the face of environmental fluctuations. Dissipative systems maintain their structure by continous dissipation of energy. Classical science (and quantum mechanics) describes a world as a static and reversible system that undergoes no evolution, whose information is constant in time. On the other hand the second law of thermodynamics describes the world as evolving from order to disorder, while biological evolution is about the complex emerging from the simple (structure, i.e. order, arises from disorder). Irreversible processes are an essential part of the universe. Conditions far from equilibrium foster phenomena such as life that classical physics does not cover. Prigogine focuses on the peculiar properties exhibited by systems far from equilibrium. Non-equilibrium conditions favor the spontaneous development of self-organizing systems (i.e., dissipative structures), which maintain their internal organization, regardless of the general increase in entropy, by expelling matter and energy in the environment. Most of Nature is made of dissipative systems, of systems subject to fluxes of energy and/or matter. Dissipative systems conserve their identity thanks to the interaction with the external world. The concept of organization is deeply rooted in the physical universe. Prigogine considers living organisms as dissipative structures in states of non-equilibrium. A system that is not in equilibrium exhibits a variation of entropy which is the sum of the variations of entropy due to the internal source of entropy plus the variation of entropy due to the interaction with the external world. The former is positive, but the latter can equally be negative. Therefore total entropy can decrease. An organism "lives" becausa it absorbs energy from the external world and processes it to generate an internal state of lower entropy. An organism "lives" as long as it can avoid falling in the equilibrium state. Probability and irreversibility are closely related. Boltzman had already proved that entropy grows because probability grows. Prior Arthur: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE (Clarendon Press, 1967)Time is formalized by means of modal operators that express properties such as "always" and "sometimes", "before" and "after", "while" and "when". Prior's theory finds a logical correspondent to many past and future tenses by reducing them to two fundamental modal operators, one for the past and one for the future. Nonetheless, Prior cannot represent "since" and "until", which can easily be expressed by classical logic. Prior Arthur: WORLDS, TIMES, AND SELVES (Duckworth, 1977)Purves Dale: NEURAL ACTIVITY AND THE GROWTH OF THE BRAIN (Cambridge Univ Press, 1994)Putnam, Hilary: THE THREEFOLD CORD: MIND, BODY AND WORLD (Columbia Univ, 1999)Putnam Hilary: MIND, LANGUAGE AND REALITY (Cambridge Univ Press, 1975)Putnam Hilary: REASON, TRUTH AND HISTORY (Cambridge Univ Press, 1981)Putnam Hilary: REPRESENTATION AND REALITY (MIT Press, 1988)Pylkkanen Paavo: MIND, MATTER AND ACTIVE INFORMATION (Univ. of Helsinki, 1992)Pylyshyn Zenon: COMPUTATION AND COGNITION (MIT Press, 1984)Pylyshyn recognizes three levels of description for cognitive tasks: the knowledge level (which explains actions of the system as functions of what it knows and its goals), the symbolic level (which codifies the semantic content of the knowledge and the goals), and the physical level. Unlike Marr, Pylyshyn believes that all three levels must be studied to understand cognitive functions. The primitive operations of the mind's cognitive architecture can be recognized because they are those defined solely by the biology of the brain, that is those that cannot be altered by no other cognitive activity, that are "cognitively impenetrable". Images are simply the product of the manipulations of knowledge encoded in the form of propositions. |
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