Additions to the Bibliography on Mind and Consciousness
compiled by Piero Scaruffi
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Waddington Conrad: THE EVOLUTION OF AN EVOLUTIONIST (Edinburgh University Press, 1975)Waddington C.H.: PRINCIPLES OF DEVELOPMENT AND DIFFERENTIATION (Macmillan, 1966)Wagman Morton: COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND CONCEPTS OF MIND (Praeger, 1991)Waldrop Mitchell: MAN-MADE MINDS (Walker, 1987)Waldrop Mitchell: COMPLEXITY (Simon & Schuster, 1992)Walker, Evan: THE PHYSICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Perseus, 2000)Wallin Ivan: SYMBIOTICISM AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (?, 1927)Waltz David: SEMANTIC STRUCTURES (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989)Way Ellen Cornell: KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION AND METAPHOR (Kluwer Academic, 1991)Still, metaphor presents a number of obvious problems: how to determine its truth value (literally, metaphors are almost always false) and how to recognize an expression as a metaphor (metaphors have no consistent syntactic form). Way claims that literal language is not context-free either. Literal and figurative language are both context-dependent. Figurative cannot be reduced to literal, because literal is not primitive either. What determines literal or figurative speech is the intent of the speaker to select a particular perspective of a type hierarchy and how the concepts which are employed in the speech relate to how they are located in the hierarchy. The perspective intended by the speaker is revealed by the context, which is represented by a "mask" on the type hierarchy. If the perspective invoked by the context complies with the classification of natural kinds, speech is literal. Sentences translate into conceptual graphs, and conceptual graphs relate the concepts of the sentence to a type hierarchy. The meaning of a concept is a partial function of its location in a type hierarchy. The type hierarchy changes dynamically because of the continous change in cultural and social conventions. Way's formalism is based on Sowa's conceptual graphs, modified so that more perspectives ("masks") are possible. Way's model of metaphor is based on Black's interactionist model (metaphor involves a transfer of knowledge and actually creates similarity). Webelhuth Gert: GOVERNMENT & BINDING THEORY (MIT Press, 1995)The other articles provide an updated view on current research. Drawing from Fillmore's cases and Gruber's thematic relations, Edwin Williams discusses "theta theory" (the theory of thematic roles with respect to a predicate, or theta roles). James Huang examines the relationship between syntax (linguistic form) and semantics (logical form). Weber Bruce, Depew David & Smith James: ENTROPY, INFORMATION AND EVOLUTION (MIT Press, 1988)A number of essays provide historical surveys of nonequilibrium thermodynamics applied to evolutionary and ecological topics. By focusing on entropy, structure and information, the essays of this book shed some light on the relationship between cosmological evolution and biological evolution. Thanks to the advent of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, it is now possible to bridge thermodynamics and evolutionary biology. This step might prove as powerful as the synthetic theory of evolution, which merged the Mendelian genetics (a theory of inheritance) and evolutionary biology (a theory of species). Equilibrium is the state of maximum entropy: uniform temperature and maximum disorder. Entropy is a measure of disorder and it decreases with time, according to the second law of thermodynamics. Steven Frautschi points out that there is a striking parallelism between the evolution of the expanding universe and the evolution of life on earth: because life on earth has a steady free energy source (the sun), it does not need to come to equilibrium and may even evolve away from it (as it did when it created more and more complex beings, such as ourselves); because the universe has a steady free energy source (the uniform expansion itself), it does not need to come to equilibrium and may even evolve away from it (as it did when it created more and more complex clumps of matter, such as galaxies). Biological evolution and universe evolution are consequences of nonequilibrium processes. Dilip Kondepudi analyzes Louis Pasteur's discovery that living systems prefer molecules with a certain handedness (all proteins are made of L-amicoacids and genetic material is made of D-sugars), actually that this molecular asymmetry is the only difference between the chemistry of the living and of the dead matter. By looking for the origins of biomolecular chirality (i.e., of chiral-symmetry breaking in chemical systems), he finds similarities with parity violation in weak interactions and posits a fundamental asymmetry of the universe. Lionel Johnson thinks that emergent properties of biological systems reflect a response both to the physical environment in which the systems are currently existing and to the changing environments in which they have existed over the course of evolutionary time. Emergent properties include that: diversity increases over time (i.e., the number of species existing in the world during any one time period has increased over evolutionary time), diversity increases from the poles to the equator, complexity of evolutionary lines increases over time, the production/biomass ratio (a measure of the rate of energy flow through an ecosystem relative to the energy accumulated in the biomass, i.e. a measure of the rate at which new material must be produced to replace that lost through natural death, i.e. a measure of the rate of energy dissipation, i.e. a measure of the rate of entropy production) declines over time. Johnson defines diversity in a fashion similar to Shannon-Weaver's definition of information, which is similar to Boltzmann's definition of entropy. Eric Schneider shows that the initial stages of ecological succession are involved in growth and maximization of free energy and structure (Lotka's power law) while later stages involve the development of complexity and efficiency, which in turn require minimization of entropy production. Lionel Harrison suggests that increases of biological order can be explained in terms of kinetic theory as the result of diffusion and self-catalysis. Depew and Weber survey the problems encountered by neo-darwinism: the relation with theories of the origin of life, the complex structure of the genome, the punctuated pattern of the archeological record, etc. Weinberg Steven: DREAMS OF A FINAL THEORY (Pantheon, 1993)Weld Daniel & DeKleer Johan: QUALITATIVE REASONING ABOUT PHYSICAL SYSTEMS (Morgan Kaufman, 1990)Also includes Brian Williams' "Temporal qualitative analysis" and James Allen's "Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals", which provide techniques for reasoning about events taking place over time. Boi Faltings introduces a graph of places that share important features. For examples, places where parts touch each other are more relevant to the development of the world. Common sense perceives the world as connections between its parts. Wellman Henry: THE CHILD'S THEORY OF MIND (MIT Press, 1990)Wexler Ken & Culicover Peter: FORMAL PRINCIPLES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION (MIT Press, 1980)Whorf Benjamin Lee: LANGUAGE, THOUGHT AND REALITY (MIT Press, 1956)All higher thinking is dependent upon language. Language influences thought because it contains a hidden metaphysics. The structure of the language influences the way its speakers understand the environment. Whorf formulated the principle of linguistic determinism: grammatical and categorial patterns of language embody cultural models. Language contains an implicit classification of experience, and the language system as a whole contains an implicit world view. Every language is a culturally determined system of patterns that creates the categories by which individuals not only communicate but also think. Language therefore influences thinking. Wicken Jeffrey: EVOLUTION, INFORMATION AND THERMODYNAMICS (Oxford Univ Press, 1987)Wicken distinguishes between order (a statistical concept referring to the regularity in a sequence) and organization (which involves spatio-temporal and functional relationships among parts). Thermodynamics can only account for for the generation of structural complexity, but not for functional organization. Wicken proposes a generalized Lotka law: for any evolving system strategies that focus resources into the system while stabilizing its energetic interconnections will be preferred. Such a process increases biomass/throughput ratios and decreases specific entropy production. Wicken aims at bridging Darwin and Boltzmann by showing that the thermodynamic forces underlying the principles of variation and selection begin their operation in prebiotic evolution and lead to the emergence and development of individual, ecological and socioeconomic life. The prebiosphere is treated as a nonisolated closed system in which energy sources create steady thermodynamic cycles. Some of this energy is captured and dissipated through the formation of ever more complex chemical structures. Soon autocatalytic systems capable of reproduction appears. Living systems are but "informed autocatalytic systems". Wiener Norbert: "The Human Use of Human Beings" (Avon, 1950)Wiener Norbert: CYBERNETICS (John Wiley, 1948)Wierzbicka Anna: SEMANTICS, CULTURE, AND COGNITION (Oxford University Press, 1992)Wierzbicka therefore explores the languages of the world for the building blocks of emotions, moral concepts, names, etc. Wierzbicka, Anna: UNDERSTANDING CULTURES THROUGH THEIR KEY WORDS (Oxford University Press, 1997)Wierzbicka Anna: THE SEMANTICS OF GRAMMAR (Benjamins, 1988)Grammatical semantics is divided in semantics of syntax and semantics of morphology. A metalanguage is defined to express the meaning of an expression. Wierzbicka also proves that constructions peculiar to a language embody a view of the world specific to the culture of that language. Therefore, she argues for an "ethno-syntax". Wilensky Robert: PLANNING AND UNDERSTANDING (Addison Wesley, 1983)Wilber, Ken: "A Brief History of Everything" (Shambhala, 1996)Wilczek, Frank: "The Lightness of Being" (Basic Books, 2008)Wilks York: THEORETICAL ISSUES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989)Wilks discusses his "preference semantics", which expouses a constraint-based approach. Natural language understanding comes from the integration of language constraints (syntactic and semantic) with context contraints. One type of semantic constraint is "preferences". Similar to Schanks' expectations, they restrict the selection of senses of lexical entities. In preference semantics each sense of a word is associated to a structured semantic formula. During parsing formulas are bound together into templates and syntax plays a minor role. Semantic deviance considers a metaphor as a violation of restriction rules within a context. Metaphors are intentionally ungrammatical. Williams George: ADAPTATION AND NATURAL SELECTION (Princeton University Press, 1966)Wills, Christopher & Bada, Jeffrey: THE SPARK OF LIFE (Perseus, 2000)Wilson Edward Osborne: CONSILIENCE (Knopf, 1998)Wilson Edward Osborne: "The Social Conquest of Earth" (Liveright, 2012)Wilson Edward Osborne: SOCIOBIOLOGY (Belknap, 1975)Wilson Edward Osborne: THE DIVERSITY OF LIFE (Harvard University Press, 1992)Wilson Edward & Lumsden Charles: GENES, MIND AND CULTURE (Harvard Univ Press, 1981)Wilson, Frank: THE HAND (Pantheon Books, 1998)Click here for the full review Winograd Terry: LANGUAGE AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS (Addison Wesley, 1983)Winograd Terry: UNDERSTANDING NATURAL LANGUAGE (Academic Press, 1972)Winograd Terry & Flores Fernando: UNDERSTANDING COMPUTERS AND COGNITION (Ablex, 1986)In language the role of the listener is emphasized for the active generation of meaning. Language is ultimately based on social interactions, as proved by the speech act theory of Austin and Searle. The book concludes that the program of Artificial Intelligence must be changed to view the computer merely as a tool to improve the life of humans. Winson Jonathan: BRAIN AND PSYCHE (Anchor Press, 1985)Winston Patrick: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (Addison Wesley, 1993)Wittgenstein Ludwig: PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS (Macmillan, 1953)Foremost is the theory of family resemblance. A category like "game" does not fit the classical idea of categories being closed by clear boundaries and defined by common properties of their members. What unites the category is family resemblance, plus sets of positive and negative examples; and boundaries may be extended at any time. About language in generale, Wittgenstein argues that to understand a word is to understand a language and to understand a language is to master the linguistic skills. Wittgenstein systematically demolishes all pre-existing theories of meaning. In particular, he abandons Frege's notion of sense (and any intensionalist notion of sense). Wolf, Fred Alan: MIND INTO MATTER (Moment Point, 2001)Wolf, Fred Alan: STAR WAVE: MIND, CONSCIOUSNESS AND QUANTUM PHYSICS (Macmillan, 1984)Wolfram, Stephen: CELLULAR AUTOMATA AND COMPLEXITY (Addison-Wesley, 1994)Wood Mary McGee: CATEGORIAL GRAMMARS (Routledge, 1993)Categorial grammars, which originated from the logic of Adjukiewicz (1935) and the algebraic calculus of Joachim Lambek (1958), represent semantics directly in syntax. Categorial grammars represent a refinement of phrase-structure grammars as they assign an internal structure to category symbols. The set of categories is defined recursively: if X and Y are categories, then any function from X into Y is also a category. The book sketches the history of the field, from Bar-Hillel to Montague. The various types of categorial grammars, from Lambek calculus to more complex variants, are introduced. Woods William: SEMANTICS FOR A QUESTION-ANSWERING SYSTEM (Garland, 1967)Wrangham, Richard: CATCHING FIRE (Basic, 2009)Wright Larry: TELEOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS (Univ of California Press, 1976)Wright Robert: "The Evolution of God" (Little Brown & Co, 2009)Wright Robert: THE MORAL ANIMAL (Random House, 1994) |
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