A Nobel Prize-winning scientist and a leading brain researcher show how the brain creates conscious experience.

Having laid the groundwork in his critically acclaimed books Neural Darwinism (Basic Books, 1987) and Topobiology (Basic Books, 1988), Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman now proposes a comprehensive theory of consciousness in The Remembered ...

The author takes the reader on a tour that covers such topics as computers, evolution, Descartes, Schrodinger, and the nature of perception, language, and invididuality. He argues that biology provides the key to understanding the brain. Underlying his argument is the evolutionary view that the mind arose at a definite time in history. This book ponders connections between psychology and physics, medicine, philosophy, and more. Frequently contentious, Edelman attacks cognitive and behavioral approaches, which leave biology out of the picture, (...) as well as the currently fashionable view of the brain as a computer. (shrink)

Concise and understandable, the book explains pertinent findings of modern neuroscience and describes how consciousness arises in complex brains.

The brains of higher mammals are extraordinary integrative devices. Signals from large numbers of functionally specialized groups of neurons distributed over many brain regions are integrated to generate a coherent, multimodal scene. Signals from the environment are integrated with ongoing, patterned neural activity that provides them with a meaningful context. We review recent advances in neurophysiology and neuroimaging that are beginning to reveal the neural mechanisms of integration. In addition, we discuss concepts and measures derived from information theory that lend (...) a theoretical basis to the notion of complexity as integration of information and suggest new experimental tests of these concepts. (shrink)

Reading this book is, I imagine, very much like having a conversation with—by which I mean listening to—Gerald Edelman on topics of great interest: evolution; the brain; consciousness; and the nature and limits of human knowledge. Normally, this would be a great recommendation for a work, as one would assume the informality of style and intimacy of tone would make more accessible the ideas being conveyed. In this case, however, there are a couple of problems. The first is (...) that, at any point in this particular conversation, at most one person understands what is being said; the other problem is that it isn’t always Edelman. (shrink)

The distinction between receptive field and conceptual field is appealing and heuristically useful. Conceptually, it is more satisfactory to distinguish between information from the environment and from the brain. We emphasize here a selectionist view that considers information transmission within the brain as modulated by a stimulus, rather than information transmission from a stimulus as modulated by the context.

제럴드 에델만은 단순히 뇌의 작용만이 아니라 뇌와 몸, 환경의 사이에서 일어나는 광범위한 상호작용을 통해 인식이 이루어지면서 마음이 창발 한다고 주장한다. 의식이란 앎의 기능을 수행하는 신경작용의 ‘과정’일 뿐이므로, 뇌의 인식 과정을 밝히면 자연스럽게 의식의 발생과 마음을 이해할 수 있다는 것이다. 이러한 주장의 바탕에는 신경구조들과 신경구조들로부터 생성되는 의식이 인과적 관계를 가지며, 이러한 인과적 관계를 해명하는 것으로 인식과 심신문제를 충분히 해결할 수 있다는 믿음이 깔려 있다. 본 논문의 목적은 이러한 그의 주장이 정당화될 수 있는지를 비판적으로 고찰하는 것이다. 에델만은 인식을 지각 범주화, 기억, 재유입과 (...) 가치-범주 기억체계의 메커니즘으로 분석한 다음 이를 종합적으로 설명함으로써 의식과 의식의 일원성을 설명한다. 과학적 설명만으로 마음을 해명하는 데에는 많은 한계가 있다. 칸트의 심신 상호작용론은 마음의 문제가 개념적으로 접근해야 할 문제임을 보여준다. 이러한 이유들을 통해 에델만의 주장이 정당화되기에는 역부족임을 입증할 것이다. (shrink)

For many years, most AI researchers and cognitive scientists have reserved the topic of consciousness for after dinner conversation. Like "intuition," the idea of consciousness appeared to be too vague or general to be a good starting place for understanding cognition. Work on narrowly-defined problems in specialized domains such as medicine and manufacturing focused our concerns on the nature of representation, memory, strategies for problem-solving, and learning. Some writers, notably Ornstein and Hofstadter, continued to explore the ideas, but implications for (...) cognitive modeling were unclear, suggesting neither experiments, nor new computational mechanisms. (shrink)

Although there is little empirical doubt of the cerebral base of consciousness, it still has an unapproachable quality about it. Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi offer a hypothesis that should give us the tool to start disentangling the 'world knot', an image Arthur Schopenhauer used to describe the problem of the origin of consciousness. Their primary focus is not the richness in everyday experience, but the conditions that allow us that experiential richness -- a difficult enough task, as (...) most would admit reading the book. It shows how the cranial barrier can be overcome by new observation techniques, producing a plethora of experimental data in support of the concepts and theories described in the book. This material leads to the formulation of the dynamic-core hypothesis which describes the necessary biological conditions for consciousness. (shrink)

Two books published within months of each other, each critical of the reigning family of working assumptions known as cognitive science, each calling for a more biological vision of the mind and even sharing a slogan: we must see the mind as "embodied". Is this merely a striking coincidence or perhaps a case of convergent evolution of scientific ideas? There are further striking similarities. Francisco Varela, the principle author of The Embodied Mind, is an immunologist-turned-neuroscientist, and so is Gerald (...) Edelman, author of Bright Air, Brilliant Fire. Both books call for a biological counter-revolution to succeed the cognitive revolution, but neither are attracted to the even more radically revolutionary "quantum gravity" speculations of Roger Penrose. (shrink)

Preface -- Prolegomenon : Hayek's three unsettling theses -- Beyond human nature -- Beyond moral justification -- Beyond human governance -- Three enquiries on the open society -- The rise of a normative species -- A natural history of moral order -- The "starting point" -- The egalitarian revolution -- Self-interest, reciprocity and altruism -- Internalized, enforced, social rules -- The other side of morality -- Cultural evolution -- Part I : the rise and fall of inequality -- A complex (...) moral species -- The diversity and self-organized complexity -- Liberalism and the open society -- Understanding diversity -- Autocatalytic diversity -- Diversity and complexity -- Too much complexity? -- The morality of self-organization -- The social contract -- A self-organization model -- Moral diversity In the open society -- Part II: the complexities of self-governance -- Self-governance -- Macro control -- Macro structure -- Strategic dilemmas and polycentricity -- Meso-level goal pursuit -- Sectoral policy -- Self-governance from the bottom-up : simplifying the problems of governance -- Our moral nature and governance in the open society -- Liberal democracy -- Epilogue -- Appendix A -- Appendix B. (shrink)

This contemporary, comprehensive, and practical text helps you discover and determine your own guidelines for helping within the broad limits of professional codes of ethics and divergent theoretical positions. This text is the relied-upon, essential text for students in any helping field-the book many students return to well into their professional careers. The authors raise what they consider to be central issues, present a range of diverse views on the issues, discuss their position, and present opportunities for you to refine (...) your own thinking and actively develop your own informed position. Questions explored include: What role do the therapist's personal values play in the counseling relationship? What ethical responsibilities and rights do clients and therapists have? What considerations are involved in adapting counseling practice to diverse client populations? And more... (shrink)

Shanahan’s eloquently argued version of the global workspace theory fits well into the emerging understanding of consciousness as a computational phenomenon. His disinclination toward metaphysics notwithstanding, Shanahan’s book can also be seen as supportive of a particular metaphysical stance on consciousness — the computational identity theory.

Intelligent systems are faced with the problem of securing a principled (ideally, veridical) relationship between the world and its internal representation. I propose a unified approach to visual representation, addressing both the needs of superordinate and basic-level categorization and of identification of specific instances of familiar categories. According to the proposed theory, a shape is represented by its similarity to a number of reference shapes, measured in a high-dimensional space of elementary features. This amounts to embedding the stimulus in a (...) low-dimensional proximal shape space. That space turns out to support representation of distal shape similarities which is veridical in the sense of Shepard's (1968) notion of second-order isomorphism (i.e., correspondence between distal and proximal similarities among shapes, rather than between distal shapes and their proximal representations). Furthermore, a general expression for similarity between two stimuli, based on comparisons to reference shapes, can be used to derive models of perceived similarity ranging from continuous, symmetric, and hierarchical, as in the multidimensional scaling models (Shepard, 1980), to discrete and non-hierarchical, as in the general contrast models (Tversky, 1977; Shepard and Arabie, 1979). (shrink)

Nicolai Hartmann hat philosophische Studien zur Erkenntnistheorie, Ontologie, Ethik, Philosophie des Geistes und Naturphilosophie geschrieben. Die Beiträge des Bandes gehen davon aus, dass seine Arbeit auf all diesen Feldern im Zeichen der Verabschiedung der Systemphilosophie sowie der Begründung einer Konzeption systematischen Philosophierens steht. Im Zentrum von Hartmanns Denken steht das "Kategorienproblem", d. i. die Frage nach den elementaren Strukturen der Wirklichkeit und der menschlichen Erkenntnis. In seinem Bezug auf die philosophische Tradition und seiner Hinwendung zu den Natur- und Sozialwissenschaften unter (...) Einbeziehung auch der alltäglichen Erfahrung macht Hartmann deutlich, dass er an dem Anspruch festhält, die Phänomene der Lebenswelt, Wissenschaft und Geschichte in einem einheitlichen "Aufbau der realen Welt" zu integrieren, ohne ihre Heterogenität und Selbständigkeit zu leugnen. Die Beiträge konzentrieren sich daher auf das Konzept einer "Neuen Ontologie", das Programm der "Kategorienforschung", den Wissenschaftsbezug von Hartmanns Denken, dessen Relevanz für die philosophische Anthropologie und die Problematik des geistigen Seins, der Freiheit sowie der Geschichte. (shrink)

This book, originally published in 1987, considers how the science of linguistics creates its own objects of study. It argues that language is the one essential tool in the ¿social construction of reality¿ ¿ the way in which our environment as we perceive and respond to it is actually created by the cultural constructs we bring to bear on it ¿ and that it is also the means by which this reality, once constructed, is preserved and transmitted from person to (...) person and from generation to generation. Hence it is entirely appropriate to refer to the linguistic construction of reality. (shrink)

In public debates over biotechnology, theologians, philosophers, and political theorists have proposed that biotechnology could have significant implications for human nature. They argue that ethical evaluations of biotechnologies that might affect human nature must take these implications into account. In this book, Gerald McKenny examines these important yet controversial arguments, which have in turn been criticized by many moral philosophers and professional bioethicists. He argues that Christian ethics is, in principle, committed to some version of the claim that human (...) nature has normative status in relation to biotechnology. Showing how both criticisms and defences of this claim have often been facile, he identifies, develops, and critically evaluates three versions of the claim, and contributes a fourth, distinctively Christian version to the debate. Focusing on Christian ethics in conversation with secular ethics, McKenny's book is the first thorough analysis of a controversial contemporary issue. (shrink)

A theory is presented to explain how accurate, single-joint movements are controlled. The theory applies to movements across different distances, with different inertial loads, toward targets of different widths over a wide range of experimentally manipulated velocities. The theory is based on three propositions. (1) Movements are planned according to “strategies” of which there are at least two: a speed-insensitive (SI) and a speed-sensitive (SS) one. (2) These strategies can be equated with sets of rules for performing diverse movement tasks. (...) The choice between SI and SS depends on whether movement speed and/or movement time (and hence appropriate muscle forces) must be constrained to meet task requirements. (3) The electromyogram can be interpreted as a low-pass filtered version of the controlling signal to the motoneuron pools. This controlling signal can be modelled as a rectangular excitation pulse in which modulation occurs in either pulse amplitude or pulse width. Movements to different distances and with loads are controlled by the SI strategy, which modulates pulse width. Movements in which speed must be explicitly regulated are controlled by the SS strategy, which modulates pulse amplitude. The distinction between the two movement strategies reconciles many apparent conflicts in the motor control literature. (shrink)

Long awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman's Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity-a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape. Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, designates the antagonism, the structuring negativity, preventing that order from achieving coherence. But when certain types of persons get read as literalizing queerness, the negation of their negativity can (...) seem to resolve the social antagonism and totalize community. By translating the nothing of queerness into the something of "the queer," the order of meaning defends against the senselessness that undoes it, thus mirroring, Edelman argues, education's response to queerness: its sublimation of irony into the meaningfulness of a world. Putting queerness in relation to Lacan's "ab-sens" and in dialogue with feminist and Afropessimist thought, Edelman reads works by Shakespeare, Jacobs, Almodovar, Lemmons, and Haneke, among others, to show why queer theory's engagement with queerness necessarily results in a bad education that is destined to teach us nothing. (shrink)

Short essays that touch many topics-anxiety, consciousness, death, happiness, morality, stupidity, & truth-that make the case for realism & help set expectations with regard to the human condition.

L'utopie des posthumains est a notre porte. A nous, qui ne croyons plus aux lendemains qui chantent, elle promet que demain nous entrerons dans une nouvelle ere. Nous aurons dit adieu a notre miserable condition humaine: nous vivrons dans un monde a la mesure de notre demesure, habite par des surhommes technologiques, a la fois humains et machines, oscillant entre une realite reelle et virtuelle, immortels dans l'ignorance du temps, vivants dans l'ignorance de la vie. Depasser la condition humaine - (...) vaincre la mort et conquerir la vie eternelle - semble une quete ancestrale de l'humanite. Que vivrait ce nouvel homme dans ce rien eternel, dans ce non-temps, lui qui n'aurait rien a gagner, rien a aimer ni hair, rien a regretter, rien a pleurer, rien a esperer? Reprenant les grandes analyses sur l'immortalite, depuis le paradis perdu jusqu'a l'humanite augmentee, Bernard Edelman s'interroge sur ce qui donne sens a la vie. (shrink)

Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea is the first comprehensive history of the concept that answers the question, "who, or what, am I?" Gerald Izenberg contends that our most important identities, while historically conditioned, are rooted in permanent categories of human existence, such as sexuality, sociality, and labor.

In this diverting collection of essays, Gerald Weissmann looks back at the past few decades of his long career working at the intersection of the arts and sciences. The Fevers of Reason features some of his best and most representative works, alongside eleven new essays that have never before been published in book form. Masterfully drawing from an array of subject areas and time periods, he tackles everything from Ebola to Eisenhower, Zika to Zola, Darwin to Dawkins, and once (...) again shows that he is one of the most important voices in humanistic science writing today. (shrink)

Up-to-date and comprehensive, this practical best seller provides students with the basis for discovering their own guidelines for helping within the broad limits of professional codes of ethics and divergent theoretical positions. Respected authors Gerald Corey, Marianne Corey, and Cindy Corey raise what they consider to be central issues, present a range of diverse views on the issues, discuss their position, and provide opportunities for students to refine their thinking and develop an informed position. With new material in every (...) chapter and an emphasis on critical thinking, ISSUES AND ETHICS IN THE HELPING PROFESSIONS, 10th Edition, is useful for students as well as practicing professionals. This edition features MindTap®, the digital learning solution that helps instructors engage and transform today's students into critical thinkers and successful helpers. (shrink)

The only viable formulation of perception, thinking, and action under uncertainty is statistical inference, and the normative way of statistical inference is Bayesian. No wonder, then, that even seemingly non-Bayesian computational frameworks in cognitive science ultimately draw their justification from Bayesian considerations, as enlightened theorists know fully well.

L'homme des droits de l'homme eut une belle vie, pleine de bruit et de fureur, mais aujourd'hui, il n'est plus. En lieu et place a surgi un nouvel homme, égoïste, hédoniste, à la recherche de son seul plaisir ; sa préoccupation première, essentielle, c'est l'amour de soi, l'émerveillement de soi, la satisfaction de soi, et l'Etat est sommé d'y satisfaire. Car l'Etat n'est plus ce tyran féroce, avide de pouvoir, ce despote aux aguets qui attend l'occasion pour soumettre ces sujets (...) ; il ne fait plus vraiment peur ; il a été assagi, apprivoisé et sa fonction est de gérer un nouveau pacte social : non plus de faire respecter la liberté de tous mais celle de chacun ; non plus d'établir l'égalité pour tous mais pour chacun ; non plus de protéger un «moi commun», une nation, une collectivité, mais un moi individuel ; les hommes ne se sont pas réunis pour leur sécurité et leur conservation, mais pour mieux jouir les uns des autres. (shrink)

This integrative volume proposes major revisions to the APA ethics code and works toward creating an ethics code applicable across psychology, psychiatry, and related mental health professions. Careful analysis identifies theoretical and structural deficits in the principles and standards comprising the existing APA code, corrects its ambiguities, and provides scientific and compare-contrast illustrations to address current and potential controversies arising from current gray areas. Proposed revisions are informed by the American Medical Association, Canadian Psychological Association, and international ethics codes, emphasizing (...) not only clearer language and diverse situations but also deeper conceptualizations of professional skills such as decision-making and client engagement. Ideally, the resulting universal code would be more inclusive of evolving ethical challenges in increasingly complex work environments and society. Included in the coverage: Comparison of the APA and CPA ethics codes. Proposing five core and five supplementary ethical principles and their sub-principles. Analyzing the APA's ethical standards toward revising the APA ethics code. Elucidating new standards, domains, sub-domains, and meta-principles. Culling lessons from the 2017 AMA medical ethics code. Examining ethical decision-making: fallacies/biases and models. Proposing new concepts, such as participatory ethics and psychological co-regulation. Giving concrete and practical recommendations toward revising the APA ethics code and creating a universal mental health ethics code. An exhaustive text that spans clinical, research, teaching, and education domains, Revising the APA Ethics Code is essential reading for ethics scholars, practitioners, and the APA administrative and ethics committee hierarchies. These real-world guidelines will help ensure that the mental health professions remain both modern and moral. (shrink)

Consider a stylized contrast between medical and business ethics. Both fields of applied ethics focus on a profession whose activities are basic to human welfare. Both enquire into obligations of professionals, and the relations between goals intrinsic to the profession and ethical duties to others and to the society. I am struck, however, by a fundamental difference: whereas medical ethics takes place against a background of almost universal consensus that the practice of medicine is admirable and morally praiseworthy, the business (...) profession is embedded within the framework of firms in a capitalist market economy, and for the last century and a half there has been sustained debate about the moral and economic justifiability of such an economy. To be sure, even under socialism there might be an “ethics of socialist managers,” and there would be some overlap between such an ethic and contemporary business ethics. Nevertheless, many of the characteristic problems of business ethics — e.g., what are the obligations of a corporation to its shareholders? — arise only in the context of a private property-based market economy. This raises a deep problem for business ethics: can one develop an account of ethical practices for an activity (i.e., business) while ignoring that the context in which this activity occurs (i.e., capitalism) is morally controversial? It is as if the work in medical ethics proceeded in the midst of widespread disagreement whether medicine was a good thing. Another way of thinking about the problem is: if one teaches business ethics, does this commit you to accepting that business can be ethical? And doesn’t this commit you to accepting that capitalism is justifiable?1 I suspect that this is a serious problem for many teachers of business ethics. Many were trained in academic philosophy, and within academic philosophy there are many who think — or at least suspect — that capitalism is basically unjust, or perhaps that only a greatly modified capitalism would be acceptable.. (shrink)

This almost self-contained introduction to higher recursion theory is essential reading for all researchers in the field.