How the Mind Comes Into Being

How the Mind Comes Into Being PDF Author: Martin V. Butz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198739699
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
Provides an interdisciplinary perspective, helping the reader to develop an understanding of how the mind works that goes beyond disciplinary boundaries Adopts a computational approach, helping the reader to understand the mind on a functional level, in contrast to purely conceptual, verbalized levels Includes exercises and examples, helping the reader to consolidate the covered material and encouraging them to think 'outside of the box'

How the Mind Comes Into Being

How the Mind Comes Into Being PDF Author: Martin V. Butz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198739699
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 403

Get Book Here

Book Description
Provides an interdisciplinary perspective, helping the reader to develop an understanding of how the mind works that goes beyond disciplinary boundaries Adopts a computational approach, helping the reader to understand the mind on a functional level, in contrast to purely conceptual, verbalized levels Includes exercises and examples, helping the reader to consolidate the covered material and encouraging them to think 'outside of the box'

How the Mind Works

How the Mind Works PDF Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393334775
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 673

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Book Description
Explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life.

How the Mind Comes into Being

How the Mind Comes into Being PDF Author: Martin V. Butz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191060178
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 607

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Book Description
More than 2000 years ago Greek philosophers were pondering the puzzling dichotomy between our physical bodies and our seemingly non-physical minds. Yet even today, it remains puzzling how our mind controls our body, and vice versa, how our body shapes our mind. How is it that we can think highly abstract thoughts, seemingly fully detached from the actual, physical reality? This book offers an interdisciplinary introduction to embodied cognitive science, addressing the question of how the mind comes into being while actively interacting with and learning from the environment by means of the own body. By pursuing a functional and computational perspective, concrete answers are provided about the fundamental mechanisms and developing structures that must bring the mind about, taking into account insights from biology, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy as well as from computer science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. The book provides introductions to the most important challenges and available computational approaches on how the mind comes into being. The book includes exercises, helping the reader to grasp the material and understand it in a broader context. References to further studies, methodological details, and current developments support more advanced studies beyond the covered material. While the book is written in advanced textbook style with the primary target group being undergraduates in cognitive science and related disciplines, readers with a basic scientific background and a strong interest in how the mind works will find this book intriguing and revealing.

The Book of Minds

The Book of Minds PDF Author: Philip Ball
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226822044
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
Popular science writer Philip Ball explores a range of sciences to map our answers to a huge, philosophically rich question: How do we even begin to think about minds that are not human? Sciences from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience, are seeking to understand minds in their own distinct disciplinary realms. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where to find them—including in plants, aliens, and God—Philip Ball pulls the pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. In so doing, he offers for the first time a unified way of thinking about what minds are and what they can do, by locating them in what he calls the “space of possible minds.” By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating questions: What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? Should we worry that AI is going to take over society? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary science: What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will? Informed by conversations with leading researchers, Ball’s brilliant survey of current views about the nature and existence of minds is more mind-expanding than we could imagine. In this fascinating panorama of other minds, we come to better know our own.

Self Comes to Mind

Self Comes to Mind PDF Author: Antonio Damasio
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307379493
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
A leading neuroscientist explores with authority, with imagination, and with unparalleled mastery how the brain constructs the mind and how the brain makes that mind conscious. Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years researching and and revealing how the brain works. Here, in his most ambitious and stunning work yet, he rejects the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, and presents compelling new scientific evidence that posits an evolutionary perspective. His view entails a radical change in the way the history of the conscious mind is viewed and told, suggesting that the brain’s development of a human self is a challenge to nature’s indifference. This development helps to open the way for the appearance of culture, perhaps one of our most defining characteristics as thinking and self-aware beings.

The Extended Mind

The Extended Mind PDF Author: Richard Menary
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262014033
Category : Cognition
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Leading scholars respond to the famous proposition by Andy Clark and David Chalmers that cognition and mind are not located exclusively in the head.

Mind in Life

Mind in Life PDF Author: Evan Thompson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674736885
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
How is life related to the mind? The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan Thompson explores in Mind in Life. Thompson draws upon sources as diverse as molecular biology, evolutionary theory, artificial life, complex systems theory, neuroscience, psychology, Continental Phenomenology, and analytic philosophy to argue that mind and life are more continuous than has previously been accepted, and that current explanations do not adequately address the myriad facets of the biology and phenomenology of mind. Where there is life, Thompson argues, there is mind: life and mind share common principles of self-organization, and the self-organizing features of mind are an enriched version of the self-organizing features of life. Rather than trying to close the explanatory gap, Thompson marshals philosophical and scientific analyses to bring unprecedented insight to the nature of life and consciousness. This synthesis of phenomenology and biology helps make Mind in Life a vital and long-awaited addition to his landmark volume The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (coauthored with Eleanor Rosch and Francisco Varela). Endlessly interesting and accessible, Mind in Life is a groundbreaking addition to the fields of the theory of the mind, life science, and phenomenology.

Where Mathematics Come From How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being

Where Mathematics Come From How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being PDF Author: George Lakoff
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
A study of the cognitive science of mathematical ideas.

How People Learn

How People Learn PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309131979
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
First released in the Spring of 1999, How People Learn has been expanded to show how the theories and insights from the original book can translate into actions and practice, now making a real connection between classroom activities and learning behavior. This edition includes far-reaching suggestions for research that could increase the impact that classroom teaching has on actual learning. Like the original edition, this book offers exciting new research about the mind and the brain that provides answers to a number of compelling questions. When do infants begin to learn? How do experts learn and how is this different from non-experts? What can teachers and schools do-with curricula, classroom settings, and teaching methodsâ€"to help children learn most effectively? New evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb. How People Learn examines these findings and their implications for what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess what our children learn. The book uses exemplary teaching to illustrate how approaches based on what we now know result in in-depth learning. This new knowledge calls into question concepts and practices firmly entrenched in our current education system. Topics include: How learning actually changes the physical structure of the brain. How existing knowledge affects what people notice and how they learn. What the thought processes of experts tell us about how to teach. The amazing learning potential of infants. The relationship of classroom learning and everyday settings of community and workplace. Learning needs and opportunities for teachers. A realistic look at the role of technology in education.

Mind, Body, World

Mind, Body, World PDF Author: Michael R. W. Dawson
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1927356172
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
Cognitive science arose in the 1950s when it became apparent that a number of disciplines, including psychology, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy, were fragmenting. Perhaps owing to the field's immediate origins in cybernetics, as well as to the foundational assumption that cognition is information processing, cognitive science initially seemed more unified than psychology. However, as a result of differing interpretations of the foundational assumption and dramatically divergent views of the meaning of the term information processing, three separate schools emerged: classical cognitive science, connectionist cognitive science, and embodied cognitive science. Examples, cases, and research findings taken from the wide range of phenomena studied by cognitive scientists effectively explain and explore the relationship among the three perspectives. Intended to introduce both graduate and senior undergraduate students to the foundations of cognitive science, Mind, Body, World addresses a number of questions currently being asked by those practicing in the field: What are the core assumptions of the three different schools? What are the relationships between these different sets of core assumptions? Is there only one cognitive science, or are there many different cognitive sciences? Giving the schools equal treatment and displaying a broad and deep understanding of the field, Dawson highlights the fundamental tensions and lines of fragmentation that exist among the schools and provides a refreshing and unifying framework for students of cognitive science.