Surfaces and Essences

Surfaces and Essences PDF Author: Douglas Hofstadter
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465018475
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
Shows how analogy-making pervades human thought at all levels, influencing the choice of words and phrases in speech, providing guidance in unfamiliar situations, and giving rise to great acts of imagination.

Surfaces and Essences

Surfaces and Essences PDF Author: Douglas Hofstadter
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465018475
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
Shows how analogy-making pervades human thought at all levels, influencing the choice of words and phrases in speech, providing guidance in unfamiliar situations, and giving rise to great acts of imagination.

I Am a Strange Loop

I Am a Strange Loop PDF Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465030785
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 537

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Book Description
Argues that the key to understanding ourselves and consciousness is the "strange loop," a special kind of abstract feedback loop that inhabits the brain.

Metamagical Themas

Metamagical Themas PDF Author: Douglas R Hofstadter
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786723866
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 622

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Book Description
Hofstadter's collection of quirky essays is unified by its primary concern: to examine the way people perceive and think.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Gödel, Escher, Bach PDF Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher: Penguin Group(CA)
ISBN: 9780140289206
Category : Art and music
Languages : en
Pages : 832

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Book Description
'What is a self and how can a self come out of inanimate matter?' This is the riddle that drove Douglas Hofstadter to write this extraordinary book. In order to impart his original and personal view on the core mystery of human existence - our intangible sensation of 'I'-ness - Hofstadter defines the playful yet seemingly paradoxical notion of 'strange loop', and explicates this idea using analogies from many disciplines.

Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies

Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies PDF Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780140258356
Category : Analogy
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
Hosftadter and his colleagues at The Fluid Analogies Research Group have developed computer models that help describe and explain human discovery, creation and analogical thought. The key issue of perception is investigated through the exploration of playful anagrams, number puzzles, word play and fanciful alphabetical styles, and the result is a survey of cognitive processes. This text presents the results.

The Mind's I

The Mind's I PDF Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780710803528
Category : Artificial intelligence
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description


Brother

Brother PDF Author: David Chariandy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635572002
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
"A brilliant, powerful elegy from a living brother to a lost one, yet pulsing with rhythm, and beating with life." --Marlon James "Highly recommend Brother by David Chariandy--concise and intense, elegiac short novel of devastation and hope." --Joyce Carol Oates, via Twitter WINNER--Toronto Book Award WINNER--Rogers' Writers' Trust Fiction Prize WINNER--Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction In luminous, incisive prose, a startling new literary talent explores masculinity, race, and sexuality against a backdrop of simmering violence during the summer of 1991. One sweltering summer in the Park, a housing complex outside of Toronto, Michael and Francis are coming of age and learning to stomach the careless prejudices and low expectations that confront them as young men of black and brown ancestry. While their Trinidadian single mother works double, sometimes triple shifts so her boys might fulfill the elusive promise of their adopted home, Francis helps the days pass by inventing games and challenges, bringing Michael to his crew's barbershop hangout, and leading escapes into the cool air of the Rouge Valley, a scar of green wilderness where they are free to imagine better lives for themselves. Propelled by the beats and styles of hip hop, Francis dreams of a future in music. Michael's dreams are of Aisha, the smartest girl in their high school whose own eyes are firmly set on a life elsewhere. But the bright hopes of all three are violently, irrevocably thwarted by a tragic shooting, and the police crackdown and suffocating suspicion that follow. Honest and insightful in its portrayal of kinship, community, and lives cut short, David Chariandy's Brother is an emotional tour de force that marks the arrival of a stunning new literary voice.

A Palette of Particles

A Palette of Particles PDF Author: Jeremy Bernstein
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674073649
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
From molecules to stars, much of the cosmic canvas can be painted in brushstrokes of primary color: the protons, neutrons, and electrons we know so well. But for meticulous detail, we have to dip into exotic hues—leptons, mesons, hadrons, quarks. Bringing particle physics to life as few authors can, Jeremy Bernstein here unveils nature in all its subatomic splendor. In this graceful account, Bernstein guides us through high-energy physics from the early twentieth century to the present, including such highlights as the newly discovered Higgs boson. Beginning with Ernest Rutherford’s 1911 explanation of the nucleus, a model of atomic structure emerged that sufficed until the 1930s, when new particles began to be theorized and experimentally confirmed. In the postwar period, the subatomic world exploded in a blaze of unexpected findings leading to the theory of the quark, in all its strange and charmed variations. An eyewitness to developments at Harvard University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Bernstein laces his story with piquant anecdotes of such luminaries as Wolfgang Pauli, Murray Gell-Mann, and Sheldon Glashow. Surveying the dizzying landscape of contemporary physics, Bernstein remains optimistic about our ability to comprehend the secrets of the cosmos—even as its mysteries deepen. We now know that over eighty percent of the universe consists of matter we have never identified or detected. A Palette of Particles draws readers into the excitement of a field where the more we discover, the less we seem to know.

Between Two Worlds

Between Two Worlds PDF Author: John Carriero
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691135614
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description
Between Two Worlds is an authoritative commentary on--and powerful reinterpretation of--the founding work of modern philosophy, Descartes's Meditations. Philosophers have tended to read Descartes's seminal work in an occasional way, examining its treatment of individual topics while ignoring other parts of the text. In contrast, John Carriero provides a sustained, systematic reading of the whole text, giving a detailed account of the positions against which Descartes was reacting, and revealing anew the unity, meaning, and originality of the Meditations. Carriero finds in the Meditations a nearly continuous argument against Thomistic Aristotelian ways of thinking about cognition, and shows more clearly than ever before how Descartes bridged the old world of scholasticism and the new one of mechanistic naturalism. Rather than casting Descartes's project primarily in terms of skepticism, knowledge, and certainty, Carriero focuses on fundamental disagreements between Descartes and the scholastics over the nature of understanding, the relation between the senses and the intellect, the nature of the human being, and how and to what extent God is cognized by human beings. Against this background, Carriero shows, Descartes developed his own conceptions of mind, body, and the relation between them, creating a coherent, philosophically rich project in the Meditations and setting the agenda for a century of rationalist metaphysics.

The Road to Reality

The Road to Reality PDF Author: Roger Penrose
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593315308
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1136

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Book Description
**WINNER OF THE 2020 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS** The Road to Reality is the most important and ambitious work of science for a generation. It provides nothing less than a comprehensive account of the physical universe and the essentials of its underlying mathematical theory. It assumes no particular specialist knowledge on the part of the reader, so that, for example, the early chapters give us the vital mathematical background to the physical theories explored later in the book. Roger Penrose's purpose is to describe as clearly as possible our present understanding of the universe and to convey a feeling for its deep beauty and philosophical implications, as well as its intricate logical interconnections. The Road to Reality is rarely less than challenging, but the book is leavened by vivid descriptive passages, as well as hundreds of hand-drawn diagrams. In a single work of colossal scope one of the world's greatest scientists has given us a complete and unrivalled guide to the glories of the universe that we all inhabit. 'Roger Penrose is the most important physicist to work in relativity theory except for Einstein. He is one of the very few people I've met in my life who, without reservation, I call a genius' Lee Smolin