In order to explore one aspect of the engaging nature of computer games, this study will propose a method that aims at classifying the experience of engagement in video games. Inspired by a literature review, we will focus on the fundamental causes of engagement that motivate a player so much that he or she wants to continue playing. By organizing this willingness to continue playing into six broad types of causes of engagement—intellectual, physical, sensory, social, narrative, and emotional—we describe a (...) typology of player engagement and a method that is intended to map players’ experience of engagement while playing video games. The engagement mapping method is inspired by card sorting found from a perspective of usability testing, and in order to exemplify the use of the method, occurrences of the six types of engagement were investigated during gameplay in Angry Birds and Wii Sports. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this study is to analyze how embedding of self-powered wireless sensors into cloud computing further enables such a system to become a sustainable part of work environment. Design/methodology/approach This is exemplified by an application scenario in healthcare that was developed in the context of the OpSIT project in Germany. A clearly outlined three-layer architecture, in the sense of Internet of Things, is presented. It provides the basis for integrating a broad range of sensors into smart (...) healthcare infrastructure. More specifically, by making use of short-range communication sensors, gateways which implement data transmission and low-level computation and cloud computing for processing the data. Findings A technical in-depth analysis of the first two layers of the infrastructure is given to prove reliability and to determine the communication quality and availability in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, two example use-cases that directly apply to a healthcare environment are examined, concluding with the feasibility of the presented approach. Practical implications Finally, the next research steps, oriented towards the semantic tagging and classification of data received from sensors, and the usage of advanced artificial intelligence-based algorithms on this information to produce useful knowledge, are described together with the derived social benefits. Originality/value The work presents an innovative, extensible and scalable system, proven to be useful in healthcare environments. (shrink)

Cloud Computing paradigm has reached a high degree of popularity among all kinds of computer users, but it may not be suitable for mobile devices as they need computing power to be as close as possible to data sources in order to reduce delays. This paper focuses on achieving mathematical models for users moving around and proposes an overlay mobility model for Fog Data Centres based on traditional wireless mobility models aimed at better allocating edge computing resources (...) to client demands. Additionally, the focus is also on providing a model as to how the computing assets related to each user follow it through the fog infrastructure so as to minimise the distance to the user according to a Fat-Tree based Data Centre topology. (shrink)

In the last half century we have gone from storing data on 5-1/4 inch floppy diskettes to cloud and now fog computing. But one should ask why so much data is being collected. Part of the answer is simple in light of scientific projects but why is there so much data on us? Then, we ask about its “interface” through fog computing. Such questions prompt this chapter on the philosophy of big data and fog computing. After some (...) background on definitions, origins and contemporary applications, the main discussion begins with thinking about modern data collection, management, and applications from a complexity standpoint. Big data is turned into knowledge but knowledge is extrapolated from the past and used to manage the future. Yet it is questionable whether humans have the capacity to manage contemporary technological and social complexity evidenced by our world in crisis and possibly on the brink of extinction. Such calls for a new way of studying societies from a scientific point of view. We are at the center of the observation from which big data emerge and are manipulated, the overall human project being not only to create an artificial brain with an attendant mind but a society that might be able to survive what “natural” humans cannot. (shrink)

Recent findings in evolutionary psychology explain how moral disciplining is connected to the need for collective action. Morals are strict in societies affected by war or perceived collective danger, but loose where peace and security prevail. This theory supplements the moral disciplining theory by providing an evolutionary explanation for the postulated link between puritanism and the need for cooperation.

A collective action problem exists not only in offensive warfare, but also in defensive situations. The collective action problem is dealt with in the same way in offensive and defensive warfare: by strong leadership, discipline, rewards and punishments, strong group identification, strict religiosity, and intolerance of deviants. This behavior is explained in terms of evolutionary psychology.

A group in intergroup conflict needs to overcome the collective action problem in order to defend itself against an external enemy. This leads to increasing complexity that cannot be adequately covered by just scaling up the model of intragroup conflicts. Research on cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology shows that external conflict has profound effects on group organization.

The PRDM family has recently spawned considerable interest as it has been implicated in fundamental aspects of cellular differentiation and exhibits expanding ties to human diseases. The PRDMs belong to the SET domain family of histone methyltransferases, however, enzymatic activity has been determined for only few PRDMs suggesting that they act by recruiting co‐factors or, more speculatively, confer methylation of non‐histone targets. Several PRDM family members are deregulated in human diseases, most prominently in hematological malignancies and solid cancers, where they (...) can act as both tumor suppressors or drivers of oncogenic processes. The molecular mechanisms have been delineated for only few PRDMs and little is known about functional redundancy within the family. Future studies should identify target genes of PRDM proteins and the protein complexes in which PRDM proteins reside to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the biological and biochemical functions of this important protein family. (shrink)

The idea of culture has been subject to critical debate in anthropology during the past decade as the result of a shift in emphasis from the bounded local culture to transnational cultural flows. But at the very same time that cultural mobility is being emphasized by anthropologists, the people they study are recasting culture as a place of belonging as they construct local identities. Siting Culture argues that it is only through rich ethnographic studies that anthropologists may explore the significance (...) of place in the global space of relations which mold the lives of people throughout the world. By examining the concept of culture through case studies from Europe, Africa, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean, it probes the methodological and theoretical implications of the divergent scholarly and popular concepts of culture. (shrink)

Since the 1970s, there has been an increased focus on gender in the research literature concerning British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, which most likely is caused by the increasing interest in the social aspects of gender inspired by poststructuralist thinking. Although such readings have been illuminative and fruitful, focusing on the social and the interconnections between Wollstonecraft and modernity seems to have brought with them a neglect of two interesting aspects of Wollstonecraft’s notion about gender. On the one hand, her thoughts (...) on the body seem somewhat underexposed, while her impact on the subsequent British romanticists is equally neglected. The article focuses on these two aspects. Here the analyses are based on Wollstonecraft’s discussions with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke about the relations gender has to nature, bodies, and aesthetics; discussions which inform a conception of gender that the later romantics would take inspiration from. (shrink)

In Sandrine Bergès’s article ‘Revolution and Republicanism: Women Political Philosophers of Late Eighteenth-Century France and Why They Matter’ [2021], neo-Athenian and neo-Roman principles of republicanism are fused in order to show the idiosyncratic political position of Olympe de Gouges, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland, and Sophie de Grouchy. As Bergès acknowledges, this amalgamation renders possible republican readings of women’s writings which so far have not been regarded as republican. Through my reading of Germaine de Staël and Mary Wollstonecraft, my aim will be (...) to show how Staël and Wollstonecraft embody the principles that Bergès highlights, but also venture into other areas tied to republican thinking that Bergès leaves untouched: religion and progress. Wollstonecraft and Staël both tie Christianity closely to their republicanism, maintaining that a future republican state will come through divine intervention. In this way, I hope to add complexity to Bergès’s project by expanding our knowledge of female republicans. (shrink)

One recursively enumerable real α dominates another one β if there are nondecreasing recursive sequences of rational numbers (a[n] : n ∈ ω) approximating α and (b[n] : n ∈ ω) approximating β and a positive constant C such that for all n, C(α − a[n]) ≥ (β − b[n]). See [R. M. Solovay, Draft of a Paper (or Series of Papers) on Chaitin’s Work, manuscript, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, 1974, p. 215] and [G. J. (...) Chaitin, IBM J. Res. Develop., 21 (1977), pp. 350–359]. We show that every recursively enumerable random real dominates all other recursively enumerable reals. We conclude that the recursively enumerable random reals are exactly the Ω-numbers [G. J. Chaitin, IBM J. Res. Develop., 21 (1977), pp. 350–359]. Second, we show that the sets in a universal Martin-Lof test for randomness have random measure, and every recursively enumerable random number is the sum of the measures represented in a universal Martin-Lof test. (shrink)

Since its conception nearly 20 years ago, Logic Programming - the idea of using logic as a programming language - has been developed to the point where it now plays an important role in areas such as database theory, artificial intelligence and software engineering. However, there are still many challenging research issues to be addressed and the UK branch of the Association for Logic Programming was set up to provide a forum where the flourishing research community could discuss important issues (...) of Logic Programming which were often by-passed at the large international conferences. This volume contains the twelve papers which were presented at the ALPUK's 3rd conference which was held in Edinburgh, 10-12 April 1991. The aim of the conference was to give a broad but detailed technical insight into the work currently being done in this field, both in the UK and by researchers as far afield as Canada and Bulgaria. The breadth of interest in this area of Computer Science is reflected in the range of the papers which cover - amongst other areas - massively parallel implementation, constraint logic programming, circuit modelling, algebraic proof of program properties, deductive databases, specialised editors and standardisation. The resulting volume gives a good overview of the current progress being made in the field and will be of interest to researchers and students of any aspects of logic programming, parallel computing or database techniques and management. (shrink)

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Computer Science Logic, CSL '97, held as the 1997 Annual Conference of the European Association on Computer Science Logic, EACSL, in Aarhus, Denmark, in August 1997. The volume presents 26 revised full papers selected after two rounds of refereeing from initially 92 submissions; also included are four invited papers. The book addresses all current aspects of computer science logics and its applications and thus presents the state (...) of the art in the area. (shrink)

Because humans cannot know one another’s minds directly, every form of communication is a solution to the same basic problem: how can privately held information be made publicly accessible through manipulations of the physical environment? Language is by far the best studied response to this challenge. But there are a diversity of non-linguistic strategies for representation with external signs as well, from facial expressions and fog horns to chronological graphs and architectural renderings. The general thesis of this dissertation is that (...) there is an impressively wide spectrum of conventional systems of representation, corresponding to the many ways that the problem of communication can be solved, and that these systems can be described and explained using the tools of contemporary mathematical semantics. As a partial corrective to the countervailing norm, this work concentrates on the class of systems arguably most different from language— those governing the interpretation of pictorial images. Such representations dominate practical communication: witness the proliferation of maps, road signs, newspaper photographs, scientific illustrations, television shows, engineering drawings, and even the fleeting imagery of manual gesture. I argue that systems of depiction and languages embody a parallel technologies of communication. Both are based on semantics: systematic and conventional mappings from signs to representational content. But I also provide evidence that these semantics are profoundly divergent. Whereas the semantics of languages are based on arbitrary associations of signs and denotations, the semantics of systems of depiction are based on rules of geometrical transformation. Drawing on recent research in computer graphics and computational vision, I go on to develop a precise theory of pictorial semantics. This in turn facilitates a detailed comparison of iconic, image-based representation, and symbolic, language-based representation. A consequence of these conclusions is that the traditional, language-centric conception of semantics must be overhauled to allow for a more general semantic theory, one which countenances the wide variety of interpretive mechanisms actually at work in human communication. (shrink)

Historically, there has been great deliberation about the limits of human knowledge. Isaac Newton, recognizing his own shortcomings, once described himself as “a boy standing on the seashore... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all underscored before me.” In _Ignorance,_ Nicholas Rescher presents a broad-ranging study that examines the manifestations, consequences, and occasional benefits of ignorance in areas of philosophy, scientific endeavor, and ordinary life. Citing philosophers, theologians, and scientists from Socrates to Steven Hawking, Rescher seeks to uncover the (...) factors that hinder our cognition. Rescher categorizes ignorance as ontologically grounded, or epistemically grounded. He then defines the basis of ignorance: inaccessible data; statistical fogs; secreted information; past data that have left no trace; future discoveries; future contingencies; vagrant predicates; and superior intelligences. Such impediments set limits to inquiry and mean that while we can always extend our existing knowledge-variability here is infinite-there are things that we will never know. Cognitive finitude also hinders our ability to assimilate more than a certain number of facts. We may acquire additional information, but lack the facility to interpret it. More information does not always increase knowledge; it may point us further down the path toward an erroneous conclusion. In light of these deficiencies, Rescher looks to the role of computers in solving problems and expanding our knowledge base, but finds limits to their reasoning capacity. As Rescher's comprehensive study concludes, ignorance itself is a fertile topic for knowledge, and recognizing the boundaries of our comprehension is where wisdom begins. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 17-29 [Access article in PDF] Intersections Form, Feeling, and Isomorphism Mary J. Reichling University of Louisiana at Lafayette These three concepts hold meanings that differ among musicians and aestheticians. In this essay I shall explore them in the writings of Susanne Langer. Contemporary musicians and aestheticians continue today to engage Langer albeit some favorably and others with disdain. Whatever their reasons, she (...) remains a dominant force in the philosophy of music.1 My purpose is not to defend her against her detractors, but rather to examine and to elucidate various aspects of these three concepts in her writing, as they are fundamental to an understanding of her aesthetic theory and to the construction of a philosophy of music and music education.First, I consider the broad and complex notion of form and the various ways Langer employs it in her aesthetic theory. Next, the rather all-encompassing idea of feeling as Langer conceives it is studied in relation to the form of the musical work. The intersection of form and feeling in the concept of isomorphism concludes the discussion. [End Page 17] Form In her various writings Langer uses several adjectives associated with the word "form" which seem to organize well into three groups. The first concerns the dynamic, living, organic, and vital qualities of form; the second speaks to its logical and abstract nature; and the last relates to the emotional or feeling aspect of form including expressive and significant characteristics.2 These groupings overlap and intertwine, but focusing on each specifically rather than all as a totality offers important insights.Form as dynamic, living, organic, and vital suggests metaphorical reference. Obviously the form is not physically, biologically, alive; reference is to the apparent movement, growth, and aliveness of the musical form as it is heard or performed. Thus this idea of form implies an actual performance to be realized or perceived. Langer is sometimes criticized for giving little attention to the actual making of music, that is, performance, yet her theory assumes music as heard. Essential to perceiving a dynamic form or hearing a feeling is a processual event, namely, performance or listening to a performance. Rarely a professional musician or gifted amateur might be able to engage this concept of form by reading through a score and hearing the music in imagination.Dynamic form parallels Eduard Hanslick's notion of tonend bewegte Formen. One might object that Hanslick and Langer are in conflict as Hanslick opposes while Langer supports the conviction that form is expressive of feeling, but that is moving beyond the matter at hand and suggests a superficial reading of both Hanslick and Langer. Hanslick asserts emphatically that music's meaning is not the arousal of emotion but does not deny feeling in music; Langer holds the same view. But Hanslick allows that "the words content and form are used not in the purely logical, but in an artistic sense." To me this suggests that he recognizes a nonliteral or metaphorical interpretation. He writes about the relationship of musical tones as "fraught with significance... congruity and opposition, their separating and combining, their soaring and subsiding-this is what comes in spontaneous forms before our inner contemplation and pleases us as beautiful." Certainly this parallels Langer's description of dynamic form.3 What is significant is that both philosophers are addressing the fluid, processual, active, movement-of-notes-through-time nature of musical form.The premise that forms are created by motion, are dynamic, is easily grasped by offering some examples. Fast cameras are able to take a series of photos of the movements of a pianist's hands giving still pictures of the moving forms created while performing a given passage.4 Alternately, forms are created by the movements of clouds or fog through the mist and early light; they are, in effect, quite literally moving forms. Cartoon characters generate moving forms through the [End Page 18] use of many drawings or more recently by means of computer animation. Time is a dynamic or moving form which we divide into hours... (shrink)

The sum, difference, product and quotient of two functions with different domains are usually defined only on their common domain. This paper extends these definitions so that the sum and other operations are essentially defined anywhere that at least one of the components is defined. This idea is applied to propositions and events, expressed as indicator functions, to define conditional propositions and conditional events as three-valued indicator functions that are undefined when their condition is false. Extended operations of "and", "or", (...) "not" and "conditioning" are then defined on these conditional events with variable conditions. The probabilities of the disjunction and of the conjunction of two conditionals are expressed in terms of the conditional probabilities of the component conditionals. In a special case, these are shown to be weighted averages of the component conditional probabilities where the weights are the relative probabilities of the various conditions. Next, conditional random variables are defined to be random variables X whose domain has been restricted by a condition on a second random variable Y. The extended sum, difference, product and conditioning operations on functions are then applied to these conditional random variables. The expectation of a random variable and the conditional expectation of a conditional random variable are recounted. Theorem 1 generalizes the standard result that the conditional expectation of the sum of two conditional random variables with disjoint and exhaustive conditions is a weighted sum of the conditional expectations of the component conditional random variables. Because of the extended operations, the theorem is true for arbitrary conditions. Theorem 2 gives a formula for the expectation of the product of two conditional random variables. After the definition of independence of two random variables is extended to accommodate the extended operations, it is applied to the formula of Theorem 2 to simplify the expectation of a product of conditional random variables. Two examples end the paper. The first concerns a work force of n workers of different output levels and work shifts. The second example involves two radars with overlapping surveillance regions and different detection error rates. One radar's error rate is assumed to be sensitive to fog and the other radar's error rate is assumed to be sensitive to air traffic density. The combined error rate over the combined surveillance region given heavy fog and moderate air traffic is computed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley HopkinsRichard D. LordThe Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins, by Franco Marucci; 261 pp. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994, $44.95.Paging one day through Hopkins’s notebooks in the library at Campion Hall, I was startled to find the draft of “Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves” placed directly opposite the (...) tortuous grade computations for one of his classes. This book presents a similar contrast—insights into “The Wreck of the Deutschland” buried in the technical language of structuralism, semiotics, and rhetoric.In his preface, the author calls his book “a revised and updated translation of my I fogli della Sibilla. Retorica et medievalismo in Gerard Manley Hopkins” (p. ix). As the title indicates, it is divided into two parts, the former dealing with Hopkins’s poetic rhetoric viewed synchronically and the latter with his “textuality as a confluence of... cultural codes” (p. 89).In the chapter introducing part one, Marucci dismisses, with few exceptions, criticism from 1918 to the present as being of little use to one investigating “the function and functionality of Hopkins’s poetic rhetoric” (p. 3). The exemplifying portion of this chapter (“Amplification”) addresses “God’s Grandeur” and “The Wreck of the Deutschland” as judicial speech (persuasive), with the reader performing the judicial function. The analysis is useful in providing insights into the poet’s rhetorical planning as he guides the reader in this persuasive process.Moving from the “Deutschland” to the “terrible sonnets” as exemplifications of “autocommunication,” Marucci notes that here the interlocutor gradually disappears as the sender-receiver relationship fades. He believes that Hopkins became “no longer capable of finding in himself (or, more probably, of offering to a receiver who had proved cold and indifferent) the necessary stimuli” (p. 76) and names the editor of The Month, Bridges, and other correspondents as the probable receivers.In the second (and major) part of the book, the author sets out to examine the cultural codes influencing the poet’s textuality. The chapter introducing this section, “‘Integrated’ and ‘Apocalyptic’ Writers,” first looks at “the global syntagmatic model of the Victorian Age” (p. 98) and then divides its texts according to this model into three categories. The first two either reflect or modify the syntagmatic codes (“integrated” writers) while the third opposes these codes (“apocalyptic” writers). The author’s thesis is that Hopkins is not fully any one of these, but that his Victorianism is subsumed in various ways and ultimately subordinated to his medievalism. His position is that Victorian codes essentially ceased to affect the poet after his entrance into the Society of Jesus, when they were replaced by medieval codes. This is developed in some detail in the chapter entitled “Hopkins and Duns Scotus.”Although the book takes a narrow critical approach to Hopkins, it still might [End Page 149] well have been enriched by allowing for the ways in which the Ignatian method of meditation, with its emphasis on the “application of the senses,” so clearly drew Hopkins to find a kindred spirit in Scotus. This, together with the kind of seminary training in vogue in the Catholic Church until after Vatican II, certainly contributed to the medievalism that Marucci finds in the later Hopkins.This is a useful and provocative book for scholars, but many of the footnotes seem unnecessarily long and some chapters conclude too abruptly. The highly specialized language of structuralism and semiotics requires an expertise that probably eludes most undergraduate students.Richard D. LordWillamette UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The War on Terror is an ambiguous term that has been used to circumvent the international laws of warfare. Instead of moving toward peace by way of limited warfare, and instead of preserving the independence of war and peace, War on Terror advances by masking itself in a fog of peace; it proliferates by overlapping the logic of “war-time” and “peace-time” operations. The fog of peace—as it shall herein be called—is a condition wherein the uncertainty qua “fog” of war,2 along (...) with its militarized logic, overlaps with and eventually replaces civilian peace-time-and-spaces. The War on Terror is thus not a limiting of war by way of the conventional modern mechanisms of international law and diplomacy; it is a continuation of war by other means, including the use covert, often black-boxed methods of information-capture and surveillance. Globally, states are expanding the powers of intelligence organs and deploying covert mass surveillance programs in the name of counter-terrorism. In this manner, counter-terrorism policies become instruments enabling states to become predatory, especially in relation to civilians. Under the banner of fighting terrorism, peace-time has unwittingly become colonized by the logic of war. (shrink)

Cognitive symptoms after COVID-19 have been increasingly recognized several months after the acute infection and have been designated as “brain fog.” We report a patient with cognitive symptoms that started immediately after COVID-19, in which cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers were highly suggestive of Alzheimer’s disease. Our case highlights the need to examine patients with cognitive symptoms following COVID-19 comprehensively. A detailed assessment combining clinical, cognitive, and biomarker studies may help disentangle the underlying mechanisms associated with cognitive dysfunction in each case. The (...) investigation of neurodegenerative processes in an early stage, especially in older patients, is probably warranted. (shrink)

Personal identity and social identity are two very different concepts and the idea of getting them together, as Bhikhu Parekh proposes, within an integrated bundle of some `overall identity' raises serious questions of coherence. Personal identity demands the `sameness' of a person (Who is this guy? Am I still the same person that I was ten years ago?). Social identity is focused instead on our social affiliations, such as identifying with others with, say, the same nationality, or the same religion, (...) or same political partnership. We can make reasoned choices about our priorities in social affiliation. Those who want to make our social affiliation a matter of `discovery' rather than of choice may frighten us by saying that we would lose our overall identity if we were to choose to affiliate differently (for example as an Indian and not just as a Hindu, or as British and not just as a Muslim). To understand that there is no threat to personal identity involved in such choices is important both for clarity of analysis and for standing up against the herd behaviour of identity politics. (shrink)

This paper connects information with computation and cognition via concept of agents that appear at variety of levels of organization of physical/chemical/cognitive systems – from elementary particles to atoms, molecules, life-like chemical systems, to cognitive systems starting with living cells, up to organisms and ecologies. In order to obtain this generalized framework, concepts of information, computation and cognition are generalized. In this framework, nature can be seen as informational structure with computational dynamics, where an (info-computational) agent is needed for the (...) potential information of the world to actualize. Starting from the definition of information as the difference in one physical system that makes a difference in another physical system – which combines Bateson and Hewitt’s definitions, the argument is advanced for natural computation as a computational model of the dynamics of the physical world, where information processing is constantly going on, on a variety of levels of organization. This setting helps us to elucidate the relationships between computation, information, agency and cognition, within the common conceptual framework, with special relevance for biology and robotics. (shrink)

The fog of war—poor intelligence about the enemy—can frustrate even a well-prepared military force. Something similar can happen in intellectual debate. What I call the *fog of debate* is a useful metaphor for grappling with failures and dysfunctions of argumentative persuasion that stem from poor information about our opponents. It is distressingly easy to make mistakes about our opponents’ thinking, as well as to fail to comprehend their understanding of and reactions to our arguments. After describing the fog of debate (...) and outlining its sources in cognition and communication, I consider a few policies we might adopt upon learning we are in this fog. (shrink)

This paper presents a theoretical study of the binary oppositions underlying the mechanisms of natural computation understood as dynamical processes on natural information morphologies. Of special interest are the oppositions of discrete vs. continuous, structure vs. process, and differentiation vs. integration. The framework used is that of computing nature, where all natural processes at different levels of organisation are computations over informational structures. The interactions at different levels of granularity/organisation in nature, and the character of the phenomena that unfold (...) through those interactions, are modeled from the perspective of an observing agent. This brings us to the movement from binary oppositions to dynamic networks built upon mutually related binary oppositions, where each node has several properties. (shrink)

We offer philosophical motivations for a method we call Virtual World Cognitive Science (VW CogSci), in which researchers use virtual embodied agents that are embedded in virtual worlds to explore questions in the field of Cognitive Science. We focus on questions about mental and linguistic representation and the ways that such computational modeling can add rigor to philosophical thought experiments, as well as the terminology used in the scientific study of such representations. We find that this method forces researchers to (...) take a god’s-eye view when describing dynamical relationships between entities in minds and entities in an environment in a way that eliminates the need for problematic talk of belief and concept types, such as the belief that cats are silly, and the concept CAT, while preserving belief and concept tokens in individual cognizers’ minds. We conclude with some further key advantages of VW CogSci for the scientific study of mental and linguistic representation and for Cognitive Science more broadly. (shrink)

Computation is central to the foundations of modern cognitive science, but its role is controversial. Questions about computation abound: What is it for a physical system to implement a computation? Is computation sufficient for thought? What is the role of computation in a theory of cognition? What is the relation between different sorts of computational theory, such as connectionism and symbolic computation? In this paper I develop a systematic framework that addresses all of these questions. Justifying the role of computation (...) requires analysis of implementation, the nexus between abstract computations and concrete physical systems. I give such an analysis, based on the idea that a system implements a computation if the causal structure of the system mirrors the formal structure of the computation. This account can be used to justify the central commitments of artificial intelligence and computational cognitive science: the thesis of computational sufficiency, which holds that the right kind of computational structure suffices for the possession of a mind, and the thesis of computational explanation, which holds that computation provides a general framework for the explanation of cognitive processes. The theses are consequences of the facts that (a) computation can specify general patterns of causal organization, and (b) mentality is an organizational invariant, rooted in such patterns. Along the way I answer various challenges to the computationalist position, such as those put forward by Searle. I close by advocating a kind of minimal computationalism, compatible with a very wide variety of empirical approaches to the mind. This allows computation to serve as a true foundation for cognitive science. (shrink)

This book compiles and reviews the most prominent linguistic theories into a single source that serves as an essential reference for future solutions to one of the most important challenges of our age.

Computability and Logic has become a classic because of its accessibility to students without a mathematical background and because it covers not simply the staple topics of an intermediate logic course, such as Godel's incompleteness theorems, but also a large number of optional topics, from Turing's theory of computability to Ramsey's theorem. This 2007 fifth edition has been thoroughly revised by John Burgess. Including a selection of exercises, adjusted for this edition, at the end of each chapter, it offers a (...) simpler treatment of the representability of recursive functions, a traditional stumbling block for students on the way to the Godel incompleteness theorems. This updated edition is also accompanied by a website as well as an instructor's manual. (shrink)

Gualtiero Piccinini articulates and defends a mechanistic account of concrete, or physical, computation. A physical system is a computing system just in case it is a mechanism one of whose functions is to manipulate vehicles based solely on differences between different portions of the vehicles according to a rule defined over the vehicles. Physical Computation discusses previous accounts of computation and argues that the mechanistic account is better. Many kinds of computation are explicated, such as digital vs. analog, serial (...) vs. parallel, neural network computation, program-controlled computation, and more. Piccinini argues that computation does not entail representation or information processing although information processing entails computation. Pancomputationalism, according to which every physical system is computational, is rejected. A modest version of the physical Church-Turing thesis, according to which any function that is physically computable is computable by Turing machines, is defended. (shrink)

This systematic investigation of computation and mental phenomena by a noted psychologist and computer scientist argues that cognition is a form of computation, that the semantic contents of mental states are encoded in the same general way as computer representations are encoded. It is a rich and sustained investigation of the assumptions underlying the directions cognitive science research is taking. 1 The Explanatory Vocabulary of Cognition 2 The Explanatory Role of Representations 3 The Relevance of Computation 4 The Psychological Reality (...) of Programs: Strong Equivalence 5 Constraining Functional Architecture 6 The Bridge from Physical to Symbolic: Transduction 7 Functional Architecture and Analogue Processes 8 Mental Imagery and Functional Architecture 9 Epilogue: What is Cognitive Science the Science of? (shrink)