scaruffi p thinking about thought- towards a unified theory of life, mind and matter 2001

SCIENCE'S LAST FRONTIERS: Consciousness, Life and Meaning

Thinking About Thought

Paradigm shifts in modern science and the new science of mind

Towards a Unified Theory of Life, Mind and Matter

Piero Scaruffi

Inquire about purchasing the book | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind Title | Index | Preface | Author | Annotated Bibliography

Mind | Brain | Cognition | Common Sense | Connectionism Consciousness | Consciousness: History of | Consciousness: Physics of | The Self and Free Will

Memory | Dreams | Emotions | Machine Intelligence | Language | Metaphor | Pragmatics | Meaning

Ecological Realism | Evolution | Life Self-organization | Quantum & Relativity Theory

TM, , Copyright 1998 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.

I continuously update the chapters as new scientific data and theories come available. You are welcome to download and distribute what is available now on this website, but please do not

assume it will never change. It does change almost weekly. Register to my mailing list if you want to receive monthly updates.

Ancient Greeks thought that there exists a consciousness substance and named it Thymos.

"The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible" (Albert Einstein)

"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless" (Steven Weinberg)

"The more familiar I get with the universe, the less familiar I feel with myself" (piero scaruffi).

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"O you proud Christians, wretched souls and small, Who by the dim lights of your twisted minds

Believe you prosper even as you fall, Can you not see that we are worms, each one

Born to become the angelic butterfly That flies defenseless to the Judgement Throne?" (Dante, Canto 10, "Purgatorio")

"To do is to be - Descartes To be is to do - Voltaire

Do be do be do - Frank Sinatra" (Anonymous - Men's Restrooms, Greasewood Flats, Scottsdale)

"We are born naked, wet and hungry. Then things get worse."

(Anonymous - Signature found on the Internet)

Last of all, he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of it in the water, but he will see it in its own proper place,

and not in another; and it will contemplate it as it is. (Plato, "Republic")

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Thinking About ThoughtPiero Scaruffi

Inquire about purchasing the book | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind

l Title l Index l Preface l Mind and Matter l Machine Intelligence l Common Sense: Engineering the Mind l Connectionism and Neural Machines l Cognition: A General Property of Matter l Memory and Beyond (Conscious and Unconscious) l Dreams l Emotions l Ecological Realism: The Embodied Mind l Evolution: Of Designers and Design l The Physics Of Life l Inside the Brain

l Language: What We Speak l Metaphor: How We Speak l Pragmatics: Why We Speak l Meaning: Journey to the Center of the Mind l Self-organization and the Science of Emergence l The New Physics: The Ubiquitous Asymmetry l A History of Consciousness l Consciousness: the Factory of Illusions l A Physics Of Consciousness l The Self and Free Will: do we think or are we thought l Finale

I continuously update the chapters as new scientific data and theories come available. You are welcome to download and distribute what is available now on this website, but please do not assume it will never change.

It does change almost weekly. Register to my mailing list if you want to receive monthly updates.

Inquire about purchasing the book | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind Permission is granted to download/print out/redistribute this file provided it is unaltered, including credits.

http://www.thymos.com/tat/index.html25/07/2003 14:19:42

Thinking About Thought: Consciousness, Life and Meaning


Piero Scaruffi

(Copyright 1998-2001 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini d'uso )


Preface

By the time you finish reading this book you will be a different person. Not because this book will change the way you think and act, but simply because the cells in your body, including the neurons of your brain and the genes inside your cells, are continuously changing. By the time you finish reading this book you will "literally" be a different body, a different mind. By the time you finish reading this book only a tiny part of your body and of your brain will still be the same that it is now. Every word that you read is having an effect on the connections between your neurons. And every breath you take is pacing the metabolism of your cells. And, as you read, your cells keep copying mutated variants of your original DNA to the new cells.

This book is about what just happened to you.

Who is this book for?

m Casual readers, who are looking for interesting scientific topics to enlighten themselves or their friends

m Educated intellectuals aiming at completing/ broadening their knowledge of modern scientific disciplines

m Professional philosophers and psychologists who are interested in the debate on consciousness and cognition

m Students and researchers who are looking for an easy-to-use summary of theories of consciousness and cognition

As with any book worth reading, the objective of this book is to fill a gap. In my case, the gap is a lack of books that provide an interdisciplinary account of the studies on the mind being conducted around the world. While many books carry that label, most of them focus on the one or two disciplines that the author is familiar with.

First and foremost, my book aims at providing an accessible, illuminating and stimulating introduction to

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those studies across a number of disciplines: Philosophy, Psychology, Computer Science, Mathematics, Biology, Neurophysiology and Physics.

Second, this book also attempts to define a common background among disciplines that approach the subject from different perspectives, as a preliminary step to building a unified science of the mind.

Third, this book highlights the paradigm shifts that are occurring in Science. There are a number of new ideas that could revolutionize our understanding of the world.

Fourth, this book also offers a humble personal opinion on what the solution to the mystery of mind may be. We may have already found the solution, even if we don't have conclusive evidence.

Fifth, this book raises a lot of questions and answers very few of them, leaving room for the reader to engage in her own philosophizing.

Interest on the subjects of mind, consciousness and life is growing exponentially and is affecting a growing number of disciplines. What used to be the exclusive domain of philosophical speculation is now part of scientific research conducted by neurophysiologists, biologists, physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists and cognitive psychologists. All of a sudden new fascinating horizons have been opened for science. A variety of new disciplines have established themselves: Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Cognitive Science, Systems Theory, Self-organizing Systems, etc. Even more important, a new vision of the world we inhabit has begun to materialize, one in which order is spontaneous, one in which the properties of life and intelligence "emerge" from matter, from energy and from a few fundamental laws. For the first time ever, it seems possible to reconcile mind and matter, to unify in one powerful theory both Physics and Psychology.

My book is a humble attempt at providing an overview for ordinary humans of one of the most exciting fields of study of our days. I start with a survey of the philosophical debate on the relationship between mind and matter, then I delve into neurophysiological models of the brain and computational theories of cognition. Along the way, I explore memory, reasoning, learning, emotions, common sense, language, metaphor, mental imagery and even dreams from different perspectives. I survey the work and the ideas of the protagonists of each field. I introduce the mathematical disciplines of Connectionism and Cybernetics. I deal with the meaning of meaning. I discuss the importance of pragmatics in human communication and of the environment in animal behavior. I briefly summarize the salient features of modern Physics (Quantum Theory and Relativity Theory). Finally, I tackle life and consciousness, the ultimate subjects of the human quest for truth. It is a fascinating journey around the world of the scientific ideas that are likely to shape the intellectual scenario of the third millennium.

I pay attention to phenomena of our mind that have been traditionally neglected, notwithstanding the fact that they occur every day in our minds: jokes, dreams, emotions, metaphors, tools, games. There is little of exceptional value in being able to remember. as memory may well be a ubiquitous property of all living and even non-living matter; but jokinghave you ever seen a stone make a joke or laugh?

Physics has explained everything we have found in the universe. We know how the universe started and



how it will end. We know what drives it. We know what makes it. Our knowledge of fundamental forces and elementary particles is increasing daily. Two things remain to be explained: how am I alive and how do I think. What does it take for something to be alive and to think? Can we "build" a machine that thinks and is alive? What is thought (consciousness)? And what is life? Physics has no answer. It never tried to give an answer. Life and thought were "obviously" beyond the reach of formulas. Well, maybe the formulas are wrong. Or maybe religious convictions kept scientists from viewing living and thinking as physical phenomena to be studied the same way we study galaxies and electricity. The most important revolution of our century may be the idea that thinking and living can (and must) be explained by Science, just like any other phenomena in the universe. Science may never be the same again, literally. Any scientific theory that does not provide a credible account for consciousness and life is faulted from the beginning, as it ignores the two phenomena its own existence depends upon. We are alive and we are conscious.

The final step of the scientific program that started thousands of years ago, when humans first started asking themselves questions about the universe, will then be to find out the meaning of all this: why are we conscious and why are we alive? why is the universe the way it is and why are we in it? Meaning has become the ultimate goal of science. As much as we think we know, we still don't know much: we don't even know why we know what we know.

A new view of nature is emerging, which encompasses both galaxies and neurons, gravitation and life, molecules and emotions. As a culmination of centuries of studying nature, mankind has been approaching the thorniest subject of all: ourselves. We are part of nature, but science leaves us in the background, limiting our role to the one of observers.

For a long time we have enjoyed this privileged status. But we seem no longer capable of eluding the fundamental issue: that what we have been studying for all these centuries is but us, albeit disguised under theories of the universe and theories of elementary particles. And now it is about time that we focus on the real subject. The mind appears to us as the ultimate and most refined product of life. And life appears to us as the ultimate and most refined product of matter. Life and mind must follow from a logical inference on the essence of the universe. If we had the right theory of the universe, we would need no effort in explaining why life happened and what the mind is.

The fact that we do not have yet a good theory of the mind means that probably we do not have a good theory of the universe. Therefore, in a sense, the new science of the mind is doing more than just studying the mind: it is indirectly reformulating the program of Science in general.

New insight in mind, cognition and consciousness may come from a revision of science. At every point in the history of science, a paradigm shift allows to explain previously unexplained phenomena. Modern science has introduced and is introducing a number of "paradigm shifts" that are changing our perception of the universe and of who we are. Namely:

m Henry Simon's symbolic processing paradigm

m Jerry Fodor's computational functionalism



m Kenneth Craik's representational paradigm

m Charles Darwin's theory of evolution

m Albert Einstein's theory of relativity

m Ilya Prigogine's thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems

m Gerard Edelman's theory of neural selection

m Fredrick Bartlett's reconstructive memory

m William James' connectionism

m Noam Chomsky's generative grammar

m Stuart Kaufman's self-organization

m Humberto Maturana's autopoiesis

m George Lakoff's cognitive metaphor

m Roger Penrose's quantum theory of consciousness

m Lotfi Zadeh's fuzzy logic

m Rodolfo Llina's brain model

m Allan Hobson's theory of dreaming

m Richard Dawkins' memes

My book indulges in these and other paradigm shifts because they may allow us to achieve a better understanding of what "thought" is, how it related to the matter of the brain and matter in general, and why we think at all.

This book is also, and mainly, a history of the ideas that Science neglected in the past.

Therefore, besides "informing" the reader on what is going on, this book emphasizes these recurring themes:

m The mystery of life can be explained by science and it is being explained as a property of



matter, no less than electricity or evaporation

m Mind in the sense of "cognition" could be explained by science but science has been trapped in vague and unscientific definitions of "mind", "intelligence", "thought"

m Once "mind" is restricted to "cognition" (memory, learning, reasoning, etc.), it will be reduced to another property of matter, actually ubiquitous in nature

m Consciousness is the real mystery, still unexplained, and the cause may very well lie in a fundamental inadequacy of our science, a fundamental limit in our Physics to explain natural phenomena

Signs of a new science, which could accommodate a theory of consciousness, are visible.

Thanks to progress in all fields, from Mathematics to Neurobiology, our knowledge has been immensely enriched by a wealth of empirical data and by a wealth of theoretical tools. While differing on the specifics, many scientists and philosophers feel that mankind is now ready for a momentous synthesis. The main theme of such a synthesis may be that of the spontaneous "emergence" in our universe of such unlikely properties as life and consciousness. If we can explain how it developed, we can explain what it is and how it works. And what it means.

And what we are.

Ultimately, this book is about the gap between "I" and "me".

Piero Scaruffi

Redwood City, November 1997

Post Scriptum

I don't make a big deal of my own ideas. I hope that this book is going to be useful, first and foremost, as a survey of what is going on, so that many more people can be informed. My own ideas, as exposed mostly at the end of each chapter, can be summarized as follows.

I believe in the existence of a common underlying principle that governs inanimate matter (the one studied by Physics), living matter and consciousness. And I believe that principle to be a form of Darwinian evolution.

The second underlying principle is "ex nihilo nihil fit": nothing comes from nothing. Life does not arise by magic: it must come from properties of matter. Ditto for cognition. Ditto for consciousness. Many schemes have been proposed to explain how life or consciousness may be "created" from inanimate and unconscious matter, how a completely new property can arise from other properties. I don't believe this is



the case. Both life and consciousness are ultimately natural phenomena that originate from other natural phenomena, just like television programs and the motion of stars.

The term "mind" has been abused so much that I have become hostile to it. The terms that I accept are "brain" and "consciousness". The brain is made of neural assemblies and consciousness is made of what we call (for lack of a better term) "thoughts". Neural assemblies are interconnected neurons and thoughts are made of interconnected emotions. The dynamics of both systems is controlled by a law of selection: neural assemblies and thoughts are continuously generated and experience determines which ones get stronger and which ones get weaker.

The substance of the brain and the substance of consciousness are the same. Brain processes and thoughts arise from different properties of the same matter, just like a piece of matter exhibits both gravitational and electric features. The feature that gives rise to consciousness is therefore present in every particle of the universe, just like the features that give rise to electricity and gravity.

What we call "mind" is actually two things, which must be carefully kept separate: "cognition" (i.e., the faculties of remembering, learning, reasoning, etc.) and consciousness. Cognitive faculties do not require consciousness. Cognition and consciousness are related only because we have not explained them yet. Cognition is a feature of all matter, whether living or not: degrees of remembering, learning, etc. are ubiquitous in all natural systems. They can be explained without revolutionizing Science. The "emotions" associated with them belong instead to consciousness, just like the emotions of tasting or pleasure. The explanation of consciousness does require a conceptual revolution in Science, specifically the introduction of a new feature of matter, which must be present even in the most fundamental building blocks of the universe.

Biology and Physics offer us completely different theories of Nature. Physics' view is "reductionist": the universe is made of galaxies, which are made of stars which are made of particles. By studying the forces that operate on particles, one can understand the universe. Biology's view is Darwinist: systems evolve. Consciousness, like all living phenomena, can be more easily explained in the framework of Biology than in the framework of Physics.

Reconciling the two views is the great scientific challenge of the next century.

We know that the world of living beings is a Darwinian system: competition, survival of the fittest, evolution and all that stuff. We know that the immune system is a Darwinian system. We are learning that the brain is also a Darwinian system, where the principles of natural selection apply to neural connections. It is intuitive that memory is a Darwinian system: we remember the things that we use frequently, we forget things we never use. I claim that the mind is a Darwinian system as well: competition, survival of the fittest and evolution work among thoughts as well. The Darwinian system recurs at different levels of organization, and one of them happens to be our thought system, i.e. our mind.

The main addition to the Darwinian paradigm that I advocate is a crucial role for endosymbiosis: I believe that new organisms can be created by "merging" two existing organisms. If each organism is made of smaller organisms, then it is not surprising that a Darwinian law governs each level of organization: each



component organism "was" a living organism, and, like all living things, was designed to live and die and evolve according to the rules of natural selection. The organism that eventually arose through the progressive accretion of simpler organisms is a complex interplay of Darwinian systems. It is not surprising that muscles, memory, the immune system and the brain itself all exhibit Darwinian behavior (get stronger when used, weaker when not used, etc.).

I also believe that the solution to the mystery of consciousness lies in a fundamental flaw of Physics. The two great theories of the universe that we have today, Quantum Physics and Relativity Theory, are incompatible. They both have an impressive record of achievements, but they are incompatible. One or both must go. I believe that once we replace them with a theory that is equally successful in explaining the universe, consciousness will be revealed to be a trivial consequence of the nature of the world.

My explanation of where our mind comes from goes like this.

If consciousness is ubiquitous in nature, then it is not difficult to accept the idea that it was there, in some primitive form, since the very beginnings of life, and that it evolved with life. It became more and more complex as organisms became more and more complex. Early hominids were conscious and their consciousness, while much more sophisticated than the consciousness of bacteria, was still rather basic, probably limited to fear, pain, pleasure, etc. In mammals and birds consciousness was related to sounds (i.e., fear to screaming). Early hominids had a way to express through sounds their emotions of fear and pain and pleasure.

Conscousness was a factor, a skill, that helped in natural selection. Minds were always busy thinking in very basic terms about survival, about how to avoid danger and how to create opportunities for food.

What set hominids apart from other mammals was the ability to manufacture tools. We can walk and we can use our hands in ways that no other animal can. The use of tools (weapons, clothes, houses, fire) relieved us from a lot of the daily processing that animals use their minds for. Our minds could afford to be "lazy". Instead of constantly monitoring the environment for preys and predators, our minds could afford to become "lazy". Out of that laziness modern consciousness was born. As mind had fewer and fewer practical chores, it could afford to do its own "gymnastics", rehearsing emotions and constructing more and more complex ones. As more complex emotions helped cope with life, individuals who could generate and deal with them were rewarded by natural selection. Emotions underwent a Darwinian evolution of their own. That process is still occurring today.

Most animals cannot afford to spend much time philosophizing: their minds are constantly working to help them survive in their environment. Since tools were doing most of the job for us, our minds could afford the luxury of philosophizing, which is really mental gymnastics (to keep the mind in good shape).



In turn, this led to more and more efficient tools, to more and more mental gymnastics. As emotions grew more complex, sounds to express them grew more complex. It is not true that other animals cannot produce complex sounds. They cannot produce "our" set of complex sounds, but they could potentially develop sound systems based on their sounds. They don't need sound systems because they don't produce complex emotions. They have the sounds that express the emotions they feel. Human language developed to express more and more complex emotions. The quantity and quality of sounds kept increasing. Language trailed consciousness.

Ideas, or "memes", also underwent Darwinian evolution, spreading like viruses from mind to mind and continuously changing to adapt to new degrees of consciousness.

The history of consciousness is the history of the parallel and interacting evolution of: tools, language, memes, emotions and the brain itself. Each evolved and fostered the evolution of the others. The co-evolution of these factors led to our current mental life.

This process continues today, and will continue for as long as tools allow more time for our minds to think. The software engineer son of a miner is "more" conscious than her father. And his father was more conscious than his ancestor who was a medieval slave.

Consciousness is a product of having nothing better to do with our brain.


Studies on Consciousness, Mind and Life

THYMOS Studies on Consciousness, Mind and Life

What does Thymos mean | My personal website | My e-mail Versione italiana | Version francaise | Version espanola | Deutsche Version | Japanese Version

Research Interests:

l Cognitive Science, l Philosophy of Mind, l Artificial Intelligence, l Neurobiology, l Theoretical Physics

Essays

Independent Workshops

A History of Philosophy

Annotated Bibliography on the Mind (with links to publishers, libraries, bibliographies, etc.) (TM, , Copyright 1998 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.)

Thinking about Thought (my book on formal theories of Cognition, Mind, Consciousness) (TM, , Copyright 1998 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.)

Seminar on Formal Theories of Consciousness (TM, , Copyright 1998 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.)

Seminar on History of Knowledge (TM, , Copyright 2002 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.)

Register to my mailing list. Every two months or so, I send out news and updates on cognitive science and the likes, reviews of books, announcement of conferences, and the status of my book.

News from the scientific world

A simple theory of consciousness

Statement of work (2000)

Research statement (1995) Abstract Papers Academic Biography Publications

Education Academic Resume Industrial Resume Theses Supervised Lectures

Recent reviews: SEEING REASON MEMORY FROM A TO Z LOOKING FOR SPINOZA FROM COMPLEXITY TO LIFE CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE WORLD

Recent essays: l Language as a neural process l Consciousness as multi-track evolution l A reductionist explanation of the self l The experimental study of consciousness l Free Will and Identity l Truth l Emotions l Quantum Consciousness l Dreaming l Endosymbiosis l Artificial Creativity l The multi-track evolution of Mind

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l The History of Art: a biological and cognitive perspective

Conferences | Publishers | Webliography on the Mind | U.S.A. Libraries

Personal Research Statement:

l The very fundamental idea of my research is that the mental cannot be reduced to the physical and that somehow the property that, under special circumstances, enables a particular configuration of matter (e.g., the brain) to exhibit "consciousness" must be present in all matter, starting from the most fundamental constituents.

l I think that cognition is a property of all living organisms that comes in (continous) degrees. Memory and learning can be said to be ubiquitous in nature, as long as we assume that they come in degrees.

l There are striking similarities between the behavior of cognitive (living) matter and the behavior of non-cognitive (dead) matter (a piece of paper that is repeatedly bent will tend to "remember" of having been bent by "staying" bent).

l The "degrees of cognition" that we find ubiquitous in nature can be expressed in the formalism of Fuzzy Logic, but modern physics is built on Quantum Mechanics, which is built on the Theory of Probabilities. A possible

Education/Other Relevant Experience:

Piero received a degree in Mathematics (summa cum laude) in 1982 from University of Turin, where he did work in General Theory of Relativity (mainly applied to black holes) and Theoretical Physics (a unification model for quantum chromodynamics).

For a number of years he was the head of the Artificial Intelligence Center at Olivetti, based in Cupertino, CA.

He has written a number of books (all of them in his native Italy) and has published hundreds of articles on publications both in Italy and the U.S.

He has been a visiting scholar in Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University in 1984 and at the Knowledge System Laboratory of Stanford University in 1995/1996.

He has lectured at several Universities around the world, and recently taught classes on Formal Theories of the Mind at U.C. Berkeley and at the California Institute for Integral Studies.



starting point for reconciling biological and physical sciences, i.e. for unifying Cognitive Science and Physics, would thus be to replace probabilities with Fuzzy Logic in Quantum Mechanics.

Year 2000 statement of work

Inquire about New Media internships in

Cognitive Science Italian Cinema Web Design E-business Marketing

Main technical papers:

Butera, Scaruffi: "Computer-aided tuning in an expert system for software configuration" (Vienna, Third SPIE Symposium, 1986)

Logiudice, Scaruffi: "Knowledge Modules: a structure for representing the granularity of real-world knowledge" (Montreal, Sixth Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1986)

Donalisio, Petrone, Scaruffi: "A framework to build expert systems for decision support" (Boston, Second Conference on Applications of A.I., 1987)

Scaruffi: "Expert Systems for Management" (Osaka, Japanese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1987)

Butera, Iacono, Scaruffi: "A model-based heuristic approach to board troubleshooting" (Detroit, Expert Systems in Manufacturing, 1988)

Scaruffi, Steccanella, Barbetti: (Madrid, Knowledge Engineering Workshop, 1988) "A model of knowledge communication for building intelligent tutoring systems"

Ronchi, Butera, Frascari, Scaruffi: "A dual-blackboard architecture for tele-diagnosis" (Artificial Intelligence in Design and Manufacturing [vol.1/2, Academic Press], 1988)

Scaruffi: "The new wave of personal distributed intelligence" (ACM Computational Intelligence, 1988)

Scaruffi, Barbetti: "A domain-independent framework for tutoring systems" (ACM/AIE IEA, 1989)

Chiantore, Perotto, Resta, Scaruffi "An expert system for product configuration" (World Congress on Expert Systems, 1991)



Qian, Russi, Scaruffi: "Generation of production rules from neural networks" (Intl Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems, 1991)

Scaruffi: "Towards unification of cognitive and physical sciences: cognition as a property of matter" (Cognitive Society Conference:, 1996)

Scaruffi: "The Factory of Illusions: artificial and natural creativity" (Berliner Festspiele 2000, 1999)

Scaruffi: Consciousness as multi-track evolution (Conference on Consciousness, 2001)

Scaruffi: A reductionist explanation of the self (Conference on Consciousness, 2001)

Scaruffi: The experimental study of consciousness (Conference on Consciousness, 2001)

List of main lectures and seminars on Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science and Theories of the Mind:

October 1999: U.C. Berkeley, Extensions, USA

September 1998: U.C. Berkeley, Extensions, USA

April 1998: California Institute for Integral Studies, USA

April 1997: U.C. Berkeley, Extensions, USA

l Talk #1 - Practical Applications of A.I. This talk will provide a survey of real-world applications of A.I.: so called "expert systems", neural networks, natural language processing systems. It will also bridge the history of artificial intelligence with the history of its applications, the history of A.I. in the academia with the history of A.I. in the industry. It will identify the areas of our society that have been affected and will be affected by artificial intelligence technique, briefly dealing with the economic and social impacts.

l Talk #2 - Theories of the Mind. This talk will provide an interdisciplinary survey of theories of the mind, consciousness and life that are emerging from a broad range of fields: neurophysiology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of the mind, non-standard logic, biology, artificial life and non-linear dynamics. The student will gain a basic understanding of the various research programs that deal with the mind, consciousness and life: how the brain works, how its structure relates to the mind, how conscious phenomena relate to the mind, how mind relates to life, how science can explain all of this. Included in this talk will be topics such as self-organizing systems (Kauffman), memes (Dawkins), the multimind (Ornstein), concepts (Rosch), mental models (Johnson-Laird), situated cognition (Gibson, Neisser, Barwise), autopoietics (Maturana), neural darwinism (Edelman), emotions



(Aggleton), convergence zones (Damasio), time binding (Llinas), language (Chomsky, Austin, Searle, Grice), etc.

October 1990: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Department of Systems, Colombia

May 1989: University of Cagliari, Department of Philosophy, Italy

August 1988: Monterey Institute for International Studies, USA

May 1987: University of Bari, Department of Mathematics, Italy

List of theses supervised:

Supervised about 20 graduate theses jointly with faculty members of Italian Universities:

1982) Turin: "A keyed file system for optimized relational access"

1982) Turin: "A syntax-driven editor for a data management system"

1984) Turin: "A semantic network based architecture for document retrieval"

1985) Pisa: "Partitioning a knowledge base into knowledge modules"

1985) Pisa: "An expert system for quality assurance"

1986) Pisa: "An integrated parser for text understanding"

1987) Pisa: "An expert system for board troubleshooting"

1987) Pisa: "A dual-frame architecture for text understanding"

1987) Pisa: "A framework for building intelligent decision support systems"

1988-90) etc etc



Greek thought evolved an intriguing division of mental life into two souls, the Thymos (pron: "theemos") and the Psyche.

l The Thymos pertains to the active soul, what we today refer to thought, consciousness, awareness, etc.

It was associated with breath, heart and liver. Breath was identified with soul, as in most ancient systems of philosophy (the Hindu "atman" comes from the word for "breathing") and with language (breath is what you need to utter sounds). Liver was reputed to be the origin of emotions (there must have been painful liver diseases at the time :-). The heart was considered the seat of desires and intentions.

l The Psyche is the immanent soul, independent from the body, a precursor of the eternal soul of Christianity that survives the body in the other world.

It appears that this was a very ancient belief, predating civilizations, as the same distinction can be found in most ancient cultures: in Egypt there were the ba and ka, in China the p'o and hun, in Judaism the nephesh and the ruach, in Buddhism the kama-manas and the buddhi-manas, in Zoroastrianism the daena and the urvan. Countless esoteric beliefs, all derived from ancient theosophies, distinguish between an active entity (alaya-vijnana, karana-sarira) and a passive entity (manas, suksma-sarira). Interestingly, the concept was abolished by Christianity but resurfaced in Islam (the ruh and the nafs).

In ancient Greece the Thymos became the active, rational and mortal part of the person (the part that has control over the body), while the Psyche became the quiescent and immortal part of the person.

The Thymos became a core concept of Socrates' philosophy. In Socrates' theology the doctrine of Thymos is a meditation on the history of philosophy from Homer to Socrates himself, by which Socrates hails the passage from unconscious philosophizing to rational self-consciousness. Interestingly, Socrates warned against the dangers of self-awareness. He warned that consciousness would cost us greatly, both in terms of desire to live and in terms of our harmony with nature. In Plato's late dialogues this contradiction has a happy ending, as Socrates finds in conscious thought the meaning of life itself.

Platonic philosophy elevated the Thymos above the Psyche. The Psyche is viewed as a sort of lower mind that can connect with either a higher mind (nous), that a Christian may perhaps interpret as God, or with the Thymos, that a Christian cannot interpret because it has no correspondent. Thymos is the cause of anger and passion. In a sense, it is opposite of meditation.




ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MIND-RELATED TOPICS

Annotated Bibliography of Mind-related Topics

Compiled by Piero Scaruffi

This month's reviews | E-mail suggestions to: [email protected] Select the first letter of the last name of the author:

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | Y | Z Introduction | Index by Topic | Milestone books

My seminar on Theories of Mind | My book on Mind & Consciousness | My workshops Conferences | Publishers | Webliography on the Mind | U.S.A. Libraries

Thanks to Bob Engelmore for inviting me at Stanford University, where this bibliography was first drafted.

TM, , Copyright 1998 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.



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Piero Scaruffi



Mind and Matter

(Popper, Eccles, Searle, Rucker, Penrose, Broad, Kim, Chalmers, Feigl, Davidson, Russell, Brentano, Meinong, Fodor, Stich, Block, Lycan, Putnam, Tye, Armstrong, Lewis, Ryle, Wittgenstein, Churchland, Dennett, Bateson, Dretske, Strawson, Heidegger)

These are excerpts from my book "Thinking About Thought". Click here for information on how to purchase the book.

The Takeover of the Mind

No doubt most people feel that their mind is more important than their body. People may be afraid of losing a limb in an accident, but would still prefer that to losing consciousness. A person who is lying in an irreversible coma is considered "technically dead" even if her body is still alive. We don't mind the transplant of an organ, even of the heart; but we would oppose a transplant of the brain: most people would interpret a heart transplant on them as "somebody is giving me her heart"; but they would interpret a brain transplant on them as "I am giving my body to someone else". The mind seems to be so much more important than the body. We can envision a future in which minds will exist without bodies, but not a future in which we would be happy to be bodies without minds. Ultimately, we are our minds, not our bodies.

It is likely that this was not always the case. There was probably a time when survival of the body was more important than survival of the mind. The preeminence of the mind is a recent phenomenon. The main goal of our ancestors was probably to protect their bodies from predators and from natural catastrophes. If the body dies, the individual (whatever an individual is made of) simply dies. Nature grants the body an obvious preeminence over the mind, a preeminence that we have forgotten but that was probably there for a long time during the evolution of the human species. For a long time, the mind may have been simply a means to achieve the goal of protecting the body. Nothing more than an evolutionary advantage over other species in protecting the body. Just like some animals have a fur to protect them from cold weather. Then, somehow, that evolutionary advantage became the predominant part of the individual. To the point that we declare "dead" somebody whose body is alive but whose mind is not. There has been steady progress towards turning the tables: the mind has slowly taken over the body, and now we think of an individual as her mind (whereas we still think of a dog as its body, regardless of whether it has a mind or not).

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Historically, ancient civilizations don't seem to have appreciated how awesome the human mind is and don't seem to have realized how "low" non-human things are. For example, ancient Greeks believed that the rivers were children of a god. Today, it may sound strange to think of a river as a "living being", because we know that most of its water changes all the time and we know that its water comes from melting snow and rain, and so forth. But isn't that true of humans too? Don't we change cells all the time? Don't we take in energy and matter from outside (as food)? Doesn't a river have a personality? Other than the fact that rivers live far longer than us, it is not so obvious that having a mind makes humans all that different from rivers, as we today believe.

The first part of the mystery we face is why this happened and how. The second part is, in a sense, proof that the mind is a recent accident: we ask what is the mind. When we ask what is the mind, we implicitly assume that the body is a given. The body is a given and we wonder what the mind is. We dont take the mind for granted and wonder what the body is and why we have bodies. We are bodies that wonder about our minds, not minds that wonder about our bodies. At some point, minds happened to bodies. And now bodies use their minds to wonder "how did that happen" and "what is my mind".

The quest for a rational explanation of the human mind has always started with the task of defining the relationship between mind and matter: is our mind made of matter? (Note that we dont ask: is our body made of spirit?) Is it made of a different substance? What differentiates the mental from the non-mental? How do our mind and body relate? Is our mind inside our body? Is our mind born with the body? Will it die with the body? Does it grow with the body? These days, having learned quite a bit about the brain and being reassured by countless psychological experiments that our brain is the main entity responsible for our thinking, we are mostly interested in the specific relationship between brain and mind: what is the relationship between the neural and the mental? How does the mental originate from the neural?

And, finally, what is in the mind?

Dualism and the mind-body debate

Historically, two main schools of thought have antagonized each other: "dualism" and "monism".

According to dualism, mind and body are made of two different substances. The first and most famous of dualists was the French philosopher Rene` Descartes (17th century), who is credited as starting the whole "mind-body debate". He observed that reality is divided into matter and spirit. These are two different worlds, made of two different substances. He defined what matter is and what mind is: matter is whatever exhibits the property of "extension" (geometric properties such as "size", "shape", etc.) and mind is "cogito", i.e. thought (a more scientific definition of mind will came later from Brentano). "Res extensa" (things that have an extension) and "res cogitans" (things that think) belong to two separate realms, and cannot be studied with the same tools. This dualism had an enormous influence on future generations. Newton's Physics, for example, is a direct consequence of that approach: Physics studies the realm of matter, and only deals with matter. And such it will remain until the end of the 20th century.

Descartes' dualism was a departure from Aristotle's dualism that had rules for centuries. Aristotle divided



things into living and nonliving. Living beings behaved differently and therefore required a different treatment. Descartes realized that living and nonliving matter are, ultimately, the same matter, that obeys the same physical laws. There is "one" physical world for everything. Living matter appears to "behave" because it is more complex. In reality, animals are mechanical automata. The real distinction is at the level of thought. Some beings (and, for Descartes, it was only humans) can think. The difference is not between living and nonliving matter, which are ultimately the same substance, but between matter and mind, which are two different substances. In a sense, Aristotle's philosophy was centered on life, whereas Descartes' philosophy was centered on man. (It will take three centuries to resurrect the idea that animals, too, may have a mind, and therefore return to Aristotle). Descartes also clearly understood that the brain was the seat of the body-mind interaction, although he couldn't explain it.

Dualists

The 18th century British philosopher David Hume was also a dualist, but he pointed out that "mind" is really a set of "perceptions" (that probably include "sensations"). The self is an illusion. The mind is simply a theater where perceptions play their part in rapid succession, often intersect and combine. The self is like a republic, whose members have an independent life but are united by a common constitution: the republic is one, even if the members (and maybe even their individual constitutions) are continuously changing. The identity of the republic is provided not by its contents, that are continuously fluctuating, but by the causal relationship that holds its members together.

Epiphenomenalism

The mystery remained of how mind and body interact, since they are different substances with different properties. The Swiss biologist Charles Bonnet attempted to solve the dilemma by introducing "Epiphenomenalism", the idea that the mind cannot influence the body (an idea later borrowed by the British philosopher Thomas Huxley). Bonnet expanded on Descartes' intuition that mind-body interaction must occur in the brain. He then analyzed the brain and realized that mental activity reflects brain actitivy. Bonnet also expanded on Descartes' intuition that a body is a mechanical device. He simply added that the automaton is controlled by the brain. Different animals have different functioning (an idea that Huxley married to Darwin's theory) but ultimately they are all bodies run by brains in an optimal way to survive and reproduce. Humans, and possibly other animals as well, are also conscious, but consciousness has no role in directing the automaton. Mind cannot influence the body. The mind merely observes the behavior of the body, although it believes that it actually causes it.

"Epiphenomenalism" therefore accepts that mind and body are made of different substances, but mind has no influence on body. The brain causes the mind, but the mind has no saying on the brain's work. Mental events have no material effects, whereas material events may have mental effects. Mental events are simply by-products of material events (like smoke is a by-product of a fire but has no impact on the fire).

The world of ideas

The problem with dualism is how mind and brain influence each other while being made of two different substances. There is no doubt that the mind and the brain communicate somehow both ways. How can that



happen if they are made of different stuff? One way out of this problem is to assume the existence of an intermediary between the two.

For example, the influential Austrian philosopher Karl Popper and the Bristih neurophysiologist John Eccles, a Nobel-prize winner, posit the existence of a first world (the world of physical bodies), a second world (the world of mental states) and a third world (the world of products of the mind). The second world communicates with both the others. Abstract objects of mathematics, scientific theories and art products are examples of activities that belong to neither the mental world nor the physical world. Mind plays the role of intermediary between the imaginary world (World 3) and the real world (World 1). "Downward causation" operates from World 3 to World 1. The mind is basically an operator that relates abstract objects and physical ones.

Interesting things happen in this third world. First of all, objective knowledge belongs to it: the third world evolves through the growth of objective knowledge. Objective knowledge confers a degree of autonomy to the third world. For example, numbers are created by the mind, but then mathematical laws determine what happens to them, regardless of what our minds think and feel. The growth and evolution of objective knowledge obey the same law that drives biological phenomena of survival and evolution (basically, trial and error).

Eccles argues that the interaction between the mind and the brain of an individual is analogous to a probability field of Quantum Mechanics. Mental "energy" can cause neural events by a process analogous to the way a probability field causes action. He calls "psychon" the mental unit that transmit mental intentions to the neural units.

The British physicist Roger Penrose, one of the leaders in General Relavitiy, also subscribes to the notion that there exists a separate world of conscious states and that the mind can access that world. But Penrose's "world of ideas" is still a physicist's world: "protoconscious" information is encoded in space-time geometry at the fundamental Planck scale, and our mind has access to them (i.e., is conscious) when a particular quantum process occurs in our brain.

The American philosopher John Searle does not go that far, but he too rejects the idea that the universe can be partitioned into physical and mental properties: things such as "ungrammatical sentences, my ability to ski, the government and points scored in football games" cannot be easily categorized as mental or physical. The traditional "mental versus physical" dichotomy appears to be pointless.

A more humble formulation is due to the American mathematician Rudy Rucker, who believes in the existence of a separate "mindscape". Rucker asks: "Is what you thought yesterday still part of your mind?" The question is not easy to answer if you assume that ideas are part of minds. Rucker's conclusion is that there exists a world of ideas separate from the mental and the physical. Our minds can travel the mindscape that contains all possible thoughts just like our bodies can travel the physical space that contains all possible locations. Minds share the same mindscape the way bodies share the same physical space. We all share the same mindscape, just like we all share the same universe. In particular, the mindscape contains all mathematical objects and mathematicians explore mindscape the same way astronauts explore physical space. Ditto for natural laws and physicists. Mathematical formula and laws of nature have an independent



existence of their own.

This is, of course, but a new spin on Plato's old world of ideas.

.....................................

Mind or Matter

It used to be a simple question: what is the soul? "Mind" complicated the question because it related the soul to a specific place, the brain, without being as specific. Is mind the soul? Is mind more than the soul? Is mind less than the soul?

The author of this book thinks that the problem is simply formulated in a nonscientific way. "Mind" is a generic term that refers to the set of cognitive faculties we humans have and sometimes it also encompasses consciousness.

It would be more appropriate to focus on cognition itself. While some may be reluctant to credit animals with a mind, most will have no problem crediting them with some degree of cognitive faculties, such as memory, learning and even reasoning. Cognition can safely be assumed as a property of at least all living organisms, but a property that comes in (continuous) degrees: humans have more of it than, say, snails.

Furthermore, there are striking similarities between the behavior of cognitive (living) matter and the behavior of non-cognitive (dead) matter. Even a piece of paper exhibits a form of memory that resembles the way our memory works: if you bend it many times in the same direction, it will progressively "learn" to bend in that direction; if you stop bending it, it will slowly resume its flat position. Any piece of matter "remembers" what has happened to it in its shape, and sometimes in its chemical composition (that laboratory scientists can sometimes trace back in time). Far from being unique to the mind, cognitive faculties appear to be ubiquitous in nature.

Memory and learning can therefore be said to be ubiquitous in nature, as long as we assume that they come in degrees. Cognition may not necessarily be an exclusive property of living matter. Cognition may be a general property of matter, that the human brain simply amplifies to perform very interesting actions. At least that part of the mind, the one that has to do with cognitive faculties, may be "reduced" to material processes after all. The other part, consciousness, is a vastly more difficult topic.

The Darwinian Mind

"Thought" is an entirely different game. "Mind" defined as the totality of thoughts is a far more elusive mystery. But it is my belief that this mind, just like the brain, obeys laws that are Darwinian in nature. Both the mind (the system of thoughts) and the brain (the system of neural connections) obey the same laws of selection and evolution that apply to species and to antibodies. Both neural structures and thoughts are selected by the environment and vary in a fundamentally random way. The same process that accounts for the origin of species is probably responsible for the origin of thoughts. Just like species spawn more species and generate a branch of the tree of life, so thoughts generate threads of thoughts. Threads of



thoughts may get weaker and weaker until they disappear, or they may get stronger and stronger. It all depends on experience. But at any time, the mind is full of competing threads.

In this respect, "personality" may just be the result of natural selection of thought threads. Whatever threads are reinforced by the experience of an individual constitute the personality of the individual.

The Factory of Illusions

The mind is a factory of illusions. It creates an inner reality, as opposed to the outer reality of the world. We see colors and shapes, smell odors and perfumes, hear voices and sounds. We perceive the flowing of time. But the universe is made of particles and waves. The mind translates the world into sensations. Then it elaborates sensations to produce thoughts, memories, concepts, ideas. None of this is real. It is all one gigantic illusion. We will never even be sure whether anything exists at all.

Then the mind creates consciousness, i.e. the awareness of feeling those sensations and, among them, the subjective sensation of existing. May consciousness be the direct consequence of the existence of those illusions? Is any being endowed with sensory perception also endowed with consciousness?

Science needs crisp, reliable definitions, especially definitions of the objects it studies. Unfortunately, the mind is one of those things that we intuitively, "obviously" know, but, when we try to formalize, we realize we dont know at all. The most common way to define what the mind is, is to list cognitive faculties: the mind is something that is capable of learning, remembering, reasoning, etc. The truth is that, by doing so, we have only shifted level: we now have to define learning, remembering, reasoning, etc. The more scientific we try to be, the more we end up with definitions that are broader than we would want them to be. As we saw, many things (and certainly many biological systems) can be said to be capable of some form of learning, remembering, reasoning, etc. Crystals exhibit powerful processes of self-organization.

What is so special about the mind? It is not the cognitive faculties. It is the inner life. The mind is a factory of illusions, that translates this world of particles and waves into a world of colors, sounds and smells. And it is the illusion of all illusions: consciousness. Therein lies the secret of the mind.


Further Reading

Armstrong David Malet: A MATERIALIST THEORY OF THE MIND (Humanities Press, 1968)

Armstrong David Malet: THE NATURE OF MIND (Cornell Univ Press, 1981)

Armstrong, David Malet: THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM (Westview, 1999)



Bechtel William: PHILOSOPHY OF MIND (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988)

Block Ned: READINGS IN PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY (Harvard Univ Press, 1980)

Bonnet, Charles: ESSAI DE PSYCHOLOGIE (1754)

Brentano Franz: PSYCHOLOGY FROM AN EMPIRICAL STANDPOINT (1874)

Broad Charlie Dunbar: MIND AND ITS PLACE IN NATURE (1929)

Chalmers David: THE CONSCIOUS MIND (Oxford University Press, 1996)

Chomsky Noam: LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT (Moyer Bell, 1991)

Churchland Paul: MATTER AND CONSCIOUSNESS (MIT Press, 1984)

Crane, Tim: THE MECHANICAL MIND (Penguin, 1995)

Davidson Donald: INQUIRIES INTO TRUTH AND INTERPRETATION (Clarendon Press, 1984)

Dennett Daniel: CONTENT AND CONSCIOUSNESS (Routledge, 1969)

Dennett Daniel: KINDS OF MINDS (Basic, 1998)

Descartes Rene`: PRINCIPIA PHILOSOPHIAE (1644)

Dretske Fred: KNOWLEDGE AND THE FLOW OF INFORMATION (MIT Press, 1981)

Dretske Fred: EXPLAINING BEHAVIOR (MIT Press, 1988)

Eccles John: EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN (Routledge, 1991)

Eccles John: THE SELF AND ITS BRAIN (Springer, 1994)

Feigl Herbert: THE MENTAL AND THE PHYSICAL (Univ of Minnesota Press, 1967)

Fodor Jerry: LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT (Crowell, 1975)

Fodor Jerry: REPRESENTATIONS (MIT Press, 1981)

Fodor Jerry: MODULARITY OF THE MIND (MIT Press, 1983)



Fodor Jerry: THE ELM AND THE EXPERT (MIT Press, 1994)

Gardner Howard: MIND'S NEW SCIENCE (Basic, 1985)

Gregory Richard: OXFORD COMPANION TO THE MIND (Oxford, 1987)

Heidegger Martin: BEING AND TIME (1962)

Hume, David: A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE (1739)

Husserl Edmund: LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS (1900)

Kim Jaegwon: SUPERVENIENCE AND MIND (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Kim Jaegwon: MIND IN A PHYSICAL WORLD (MIT Press, 1998)

Leibniz: THE MONADOLOGY (1714)

Lewis David K.: PHILOSOPHICAL PAPERS (Oxford Press, 1983)

Lewis David K.: ON THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS (Basil Blackwell, 1986)

Lycan William: CONSCIOUSNESS (MIT Press, 1987)

Lycan William: MIND AND COGNITION (MIT Press, 1990)

McGinn Colin: CHARACTER OF MIND (Oxford Univ Press, 1997)

Popper Karl & Eccles John: THE SELF AND ITS BRAIN (Springer-Verlag, 1977)

Popper Karl: KNOWLEDGE AND THE BODY-MIND PROBLEM (Routledge, 1994)

Priest, Stephen: THEORIES OF THE MIND (Houghton Mifflin, 1991)

Putnam Hilary: MIND, LANGUAGE AND REALITY (Cambridge Univ Press, 1975)

Rosenthal David: NATURE OF MIND (Oxford University Press, 1991)

Rucker Rudy: INFINITY AND THE MIND (Birkhauser, 1982) Russell Bertrand: ANALYSIS OF MIND (1921)

Russell Bertrand: ANALYSIS OF MATTER (Allen and Unwin, 1927)



Russell Bertrand: AN INQUIRY INTO MEANING AND TRUTH (Penguin, 1962)

Ryle Gilbert: THE CONCEPT OF MIND (Hutchinson, 1949)

Searle John: THE REDISCOVERY OF THE MIND (MIT Press, 1992)

Sterelny, Kim: THE REPRESENTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND (Blackwell, 1990)

Stich Stephen: FROM FOLK PSYCHOLOGY TO COGNITIVE SCIENCE (MIT Press, 1983)

Stich Stephen: DECONSTRUCTING THE MIND (Oxford Univ Press, 1996)

Tye Michael: TEN PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS (MIT Press, 1995)

Whitehead Alfred: THE CONCEPT OF NATURE (Cambridge Univ Press, 1920)

Wittgenstein Ludwig: PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS (Macmillan, 1953)




Piero Scaruffi



Inside the Brain

(James, Thorndike, Pavlov, Skinner, Koehler, Lashley, Hebb, Jerne, Young, Edelman, Changeux, Purves, Damasio, Harth, Freeman, Gazzaniga, MacLean, Brown, Mora, Muller, Goertzel, Zeki, Valiant, Thelen)


Understanding how the brain works is not a minor task. The structure of our mental organs (the brain) determines what we are capable of thinking, just like the structure of our arms or legs determines which movements we are capable of.

Connectionism

Human memory may be deficient in many ways (it forgets, it does not remember "photographically"), but somehow it is extremely good at recognizing.

I recognize a friend even if he grew a beard, even if he's wearing different clothes every day, even if I see him sideways, and at any possible angle. How can I recognize all those images as the same image if they are all different? It is almost impossible to take the identical shot of a person twice: some details will always be different: how can I recognize that it is the same person, if the image is always different? I can show you two pictures of a street, taken at different times: you will recognize them as pictures of the same street. But there are probably countless differences: cars that were parked moved away and new cars took their places, pedestrians that were walking are gone, dogs and birds have changed positions, smoke has blown away, all the leaves of all the trees have moved because of the breeze, etc. How do you recognize that it is the same street, if the image of that street is never the same?

The key to understanding the mind may lie in the peculiar structure of our brain. Unlike most of our artifacts, which are designed to be modular, hierarchical and linear, a brain is an amazingly complicated piece of work. Several theories were proposed over the centuries to make sense of its structure, until finally

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"Connectionism" came around.

Connectionism is one of the most important ideas of our century. Its implications extend beyond the field of neurophysiology, where it received its main impulse. Connectionist models have surfaced well beyond the borders of brain anatomy, notably in Cybernetics.

At the turn of the century, the influential American philosopher and psychologist William James had a number of powerful intuitions: that the brain is built to ensure survival in the world; that cognitive faculties cannot be abstracted from the environment that they deal with; that the brain is organized as an associative network; that associations are governed by a rule of reinforcement. The latter two laid the foundations for Connectionism; the former two laid the foundations for a cognition grounded in a Darwinian scenario of survival of the fittest, and, in a sense, provided a justification for the preeminence of Connectionism.

Selective behavior

Other psychologists contributed, directly or indirectly, to the connectionist model of the brain. The scientists that subscribed to the school of Behaviorism, such as the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov and the American psychologist Burrhus Skinner, were influential in emphasizing the simple but pervasive law of learning through conditioning: if an unconditioned stimulus (e.g., a bowl of meat) that normally causes an unconditioned response (e.g., the dog salivates) is repeatedly associated with a conditioned stimulus (e.g., a bell), the conditioned stimulus (the bell) will eventually cause the unconditioned response (the dog salivates) without any need for the unconditioned stimulus (the bowl of meet). Behaviorists came to believe that all forms of learning could be reduced to conditioning phenomena.

To Skinner, all learned behavior is the result of selective reinforcement of random responses. Mental states (what goes on in our minds) have no effect on our actions. Skinner did not deny the existence of mental states, he simply denied that they explain behavior. A person does what she does because she has been "reinforced" for doing that, not because her mind decided so. Skinner noticed a similarity between reinforcement and natural selection: random mutations are "selected" by the environment, random behavior is also selected by the environment. A random action can bring reward (from the environment) that will cause a reinforcement and therefore will increase the chances that the action is repeated in the future. An action that does not bring reward will not be repeated.

The environment determines which behavior is learned, just like the environment determines which species are evolved.

Cognition

Fiercely opposed to Behaviorism was the school of Gestalt, which strongly believed in higher cognitive processes and opposed the idea that the individual stimulus could cause an individual response. For example, the German psychologist Max Wertheimer claimed in 1938 that perception ought to be more than the sum of the things perceived, that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. He showed, for example, how one can alter the parts of a melody but the listener would still recognize the melody. Perception of the whole does not depend on perception of all of its parts; we recognize the shape of a landscape way before



we recognize each tree and rock in the landscape, and we recognize that a tree is a tree before we recognize what kind of tree it is, because regnognizing the species requires an analysis of its parts.

Already in the 1920s, the German psychologist Wolfgang Koehler had claimed that most problem-solving is not due to a decomposition of the problem but to sudden insight. One may not recognize a familiar face for a few seconds, and then suddenly recognize it. This is not due to a myriad calculations, but to a sudden insight that cannot be broken down into atomic processes. It is just a sudden insight.

The German neurologist Kurt Goldstein's classical work still stands as a fundamental challenge to the dogmas of neurology and psycholody. Kurt Goldstein viewed of the organism as a system that has to struggle to cope with the challenges of the environment and of its own body. The organism cannot be divided into "organs" and far less into "mind" and "body", because it is the whole that reacts to the environment. Nothing is independent within the organism. The organism is a whole.

"Disease" is a manifestation of a change of state between the organism and its environment. Healing does not come through "repair" but through adaptation. The organism cannot simply return to the state preceding the event that changed it, but has to adapt to the conditions that caused the new state. In particular, a local sympton is not meaningful to understand a "disease", and the organism's behavior during a disease is hardly explained as a response to that specific symptom. A patient's body will often undergo mass-scale adjustments. Goldstein emphasizes the ability of organisms to adjust to catastrophic breakdowns of their most vital (mental or physical) functions. The organism's reaction is often a redistribution of its (mental or physical) faculties.

Coherently, gestalt psychologists claimed that form is the elementary unit of perception. We do not construct a perception by analyzing a myriad data. We perceive the form as a whole.

Around 1950 experiments by the American neurologist Karl Lashley confirmed that intuition: a lesion in the brain does not necessarily cause a change in the response. Lashley concluded that functions are not localized but distributed around the brain, that there are no specialized areas, that all cortical areas are equally potent in carrying out mental functions (this was his "principle of equipontentiality"). Lashley realized that this architecture yields a tremendous advantage: the brain as a whole is "fault tolerant", because no single part is essential to the functioning of the whole. While today we know that regions of the brain are specialized, the structure of each region does comply with Lashley's principle.

Lashley also enunciated a principle which can be viewed as dual, the principle of "mass action": every brain region partakes (to some extent) in all brain processes. Lashley even imagined that memory behaved like an electromagnetic field and that a specific memory was a wave within that field. While he never came to appreciate the importance of the "connections" (over mass), Lashley's ideas were sort of complementary to the ideas of connectionism.

Today, we know that functions are indeed localized in the brain, but Lashley was right that the processing of information inside the brain involves "mass action". The function is analyzing data from the retina is localized in a specific region of the brain, but the function of "seeing" is not localized, because it requires processes that are spread around the brain.



There are maps of the retina in the brain (even more than one), and there are maps of the entire body in the brain, and they are orderly maps. The brain keeps a map of what is going on in every part of the body.

The primacy of the connections

Another behaviorist, the American psychologist Edward Thorndike, a student of William James, is the man credited with outlining the essence of the connectionist model of the mind. In a sense, he explained how Skinner's reinforcement occurs. Thorndike had been the first psychologist to propose that animals learn based on the outcome of their actions (the "law of effect") and Skinner had simply generalized his ideas.

Thorndike modeled the mind as a network of connections among its components. Learning occurs when elements are connected. Behavior is due to the association of stimuli with responses that is generated through those connections. Thorndike went also very close to formulating Hebbs law when he discovered the law of effect: the probability that a stimulus will cause a given response is proportional to the satisfaction that the response has produced in the past. This principle sort of reconciled natural selection and Behaviorism. At the same time, Connectionism also reconciled Behaviorism and Gestalt, because it could account for Lashleys findings: in a network of connections, the relative importance of a connection could be negligible.

Connectionism can be viewed at various levels of the organization of the mind. At the lowest level, it deals with the neural structure of the brain. The brain is reduced to a network of interacting neurons. Each neuron is a fairly simple structure, whose main function is simply to transmit impulses to other neurons. When anything happens to a neuron, it is likely to affect thousands of other neurons because its effects can propagate very quickly from one neuron to the other.

From the outside, the only thing that matters is the response of the brain to a certain stimulus. But that response is the result of thousands of messages transmitted from neuron to neuron according to the available connections. A given response to a given stimulus occurs because the connections propagate that stimulus from the first layer of neurons to the rest of the connected neurons until eventually the response is generated by the last layers of neurons. As long as the connections are stable, a given stimulus will always generate the same response. When a connection changes, a different response may be produced. Connections change, in particular, when the brain "learns" something new. The brain "learns" what response is more appropriate to a given stimulus by adjusting the connections so that next time the stimulus will produce the desired response.

As a matter of fact, the functioning of the brain can be summarized as a continuous refining of the connections between neurons. Each connection can be strengthened or weakened by the messages that travel through it. In 1949 the Canadian physiologist Donald Hebb had a very simple, but very powerful, intuition: that strengthening and weakening of connections depend on how often they are used. If a connection is never used, it is likely to decay, just like any muscle that is not exercised. If it is used very often, it is likely to get reinforced. One more time, a Darwinian concept came to play a key role: competitive behavior. Connections "compete" to survive.

At a higher level, a connectionist organization can be found in the way our mind organizes concepts.



Concepts are not independent of each other: a concept is very much defined by the other concepts it relates to. The best definition of a concept is probably in terms of other concepts and the way it relates to them. Concepts also rely on an associative network. Therefore, the four maxims by James also apply to concepts.

The Neural Structure of the Brain

The human brain is probably the single most complex structure that we have found in the universe. Even the human genome is simpler.

First of all, the brain is really just the upper extremity of the spinal cord. Nerves departing from the spinal cord communicate with the rest of the body. The spinal cord contains the same grey matter of the brain.

Most of the human brain is made of two hemispheres, linked by the "corpus callosum", and covered by the cortex.

Under the corpus callosum is located one of the main areas of control of behavior, containing the "thalamus", the "hypothalamus" and the "amygdala". The thalamus is a mini-mirror of the cortex: it seems to replicate the same information, but on a smaller scale. The two amygdalas are widely believed to be in charge of emotions: affection, fear and attention originate or are amplified here. The function of the two thalami seems to be to convey signals from the senses to the cortex and from the cortex to the muscles. The amygdala has the power to take over this strategic highway.

The hypothalamus, located below the thalamus, is involved in many functions, but in particular seems to be responsible for controlling body temperature (pretty much like a thermostat).

Behind the hemispheres is the "cerebellum", one of the main areas of integration of stimuli and coordination of action. The cerebellum contains areas like the "pons" that communicate with the rest of the body. The cerebellum is a bit like a miniature brain: it is divided into hemispheres and has a cortex that surrounds these hemispheres.

The cortex is one of the main areas of sensory-motor control. The cortex is by far the largest structure in the brain: in humans, it accounts for about two thirds of the total brain mass. The terms "cortex" and "neocortex" are often used interchangeably because the neocortex constitutes most of the cerebral cortex in humans, but this is not true in general.

The Portoguese neurologist Antonio Damasio Damasio has hypothesized that regions of the cortex form "convergence zones" for associative memories. Here different aspects of an experience are united.

Located at the base of each hemisphere are the hippocampi. The hippocampus is one of the main areas of recalling long-term memory. It takes about three years to consolidate short term memory into long term memory. For three years the hippocampus is directly responsible for retrieving a memory. After that period, the memory slows into long term memory. Lesions to the hippocampus result in forgetting everything that happened over the last three years and



not being able to remember anything ever again for longer than a few seconds.

Alternatively, one can view a brain hemisphere as two concentric spheres: the inner one is the limbic system, comprising amygdala, thalamus, hypothalamus and hippocampus; the outer one is the neocortex. The neocortex processes sensory information and channels it to the hippocampus, which then communicates with the other organs of the limbic system. The limbic system appears to be a central processing unit that mediates between sensory input and motor output, between bodily sensations and body movements. In other words, the limbic system appears to be the main connection between mind and body. The limbic system is (evolutionarily speaking) the oldest part of the brain, the part that humans share with all mammals and that is well developed also in other vertebrates.

Finally, the brainstem is the general term for the area of the brain between the thalamus and spinal cord. This is at the bottom of the brain, next to the cerebellum, and represents the brain's connection with the "autonomic" nervous system, the part of the nervous system that regulates functions such as heartbeat, breathing, etc. These are mechanic functions, but no less vital.

Dominance

Since Roger Sperrys "split-brain" studies of the 1960s, it has been held that the two hemispheres control different aspects of mental life: the left hemisphere is dominant for language and speech, the right brain excels at visual and motor tasks and may also be the prevalent source of emotions. This is due to the fact that two hemispheres are not identical. For example, the speech area of the cortex is much larger in the left hemisphere. The roles of two hemispheres are not so rigid, though: a child whose left hemisphere is damaged will still learn to speak and will simply use the right hemisphere for language functions.

Just like it dominates in language, the left hemisphere also dominates in movement. Both hemispheres organize movement of limbs (each hemisphere takes care of the limbs at the opposite side of the body), but the left hemisphere is the one that directs the movement and that stores the feedback (the one that learns skills). If the two hemispheres are separated, the right limbs keep working normally, but the left limbs become clumsy and are often unable to carry out even simple learned skills like grabbing a glass.

Brain asymmetry is not uncommon in other species, but handedness (that individuals always prefer one hand over the other) is uniquely human, and handedness appears to depend on the asymmetry of the hemispheres.

The main "bridge" between the two hemispheres is the corpus callosum, but a number of other "commissures" (communication channels) exist, and their



purpose is not known.

The life of neurons


Further Reading

Brown Jason: THE LIFE OF THE MIND (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988)

Changeux JeanPierre: NEURONAL MAN (Pantheon, 1985)

Changeux JeanPierre: ORIGINS OF THE HUMAN BRAIN (Oxford University Press, 1995)

Churchland Paul: ENGINE OF REASON (MIT Press, 1995)

Damasio Antonio: DESCARTES' ERROR (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1995)

Edelman Gerald: NEURAL DARWINISM (Basic, 1987)

Festinger Leon: THEORY OF COGNITIVE DISSONANCE (1957)

Freeman Walter: SOCIETIES OF BRAINS (Erlbaum, 1995)

Gazzaniga Michael & LeDoux Joseph: INTEGRATED MIND (Plenum Press, 1978)

Gisolfi Carl & Mora Francisco: THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press, 2000)

Goertzel Ben: THE EVOLVING MIND (Gordon & Breach, 1993)

Goldstein Kurt: THE ORGANISM: A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO BIOLOGY (American Book, 1939)

Hebb Donald: ESSAY ON MIND (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1980)

Ivry, Richard & Robertson, Lynn: THE TWO SIDES OF PERCEPTION (MIT Press, 1998)



Hebb Donald: THE ORGANIZATION OF BEHAVIOR (John Wiley, 1949)

Hull Clark: PRINCIPLES OF BEHAVIOR (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1943)

James William: THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY (1890)

Koehler Wolfgang: INTELLIGENSPRUEFUNGEN AM MENSCHENAFFEN (1925)

Lashley Karl Spencer: BRAIN MECHANISMS AND INTELLIGENCE (Dover, 1963)

Lavine Robert: NEUROPHYSIOLOGY (Collamore, 1983)

MacLean Paul: THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press, 1990)

Purves Dale: NEURAL ACTIVITY AND THE GROWTH OF THE BRAIN (Cambridge Univ Press, 1994)

Skinner Burrhus: BEHAVIOR OF ORGANISMS (1938)

Thelen Esther & Smith Linda: A DYNAMIC SYSTEMS APPROACH TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION AND ACTION (MIT Press, 1994)

Thorndike Edward: ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE (1898)

Underwood Geoffrey: OXFORD GUIDE TO THE MIND (Oxford Univ Press, 2000)

Valiant Leslie: CIRCUITS OF THE MIND (Oxford University Press, 1994)

Young John: A MODEL OF BRAIN (Clarendon Press, 1964)

Zeki Semir: A VISION OF THE BRAIN (Blackwell, 1993)




Piero Scaruffi



Cognition: A General Property of Matter

(Helmholtz, Craik, Simon, Newell, Johnson-Laird, Fauconnier, Lakoff, Marr, Paivio, Kosslyn, Pylyshyn, Finke, Tye, Selz, Minsky, Schank, Arbib, Leyton, Sowa)


Cognition

Cognition is the set of faculties that allow the mind to process inputs from the external world and to determine action in the external world. They comprise perception, learning, memory, reasoning and so forth. Basically, we perceive something, we store it in memory, we retrieve related information, we process the whole, we learn something, we store it in memory, we use it to decide what to do next. All of these are part of cognition.

Is all of cognition conscious? Is there something that we remember, learn or process without being aware of it? Probably. At least, the level of awareness may vary wildly. Sometimes we study a poem until we can remember all the words in the exact order: that requires a lot of awareness. Sometimes we simply store an accident without paying too much attention to it. Consciousness is like another dimension. One can be engaged in this or that cognitive task (first dimension) and then it can be aware of it with different levels of intensity (second dimension). It is, therefore, likely that cognitive faculties and consciousness are independent processes.

Since it processes inputs and yields outputs, cognition has the invaluable advantage that it lends itself to modeling and testing endeavours, in a more scientific fashion than studies on consciousness.

Language too is a cognitive process. Its function and nature require a separate treatment, but it is likely that language's fundamental mechanisms are closely related to the mechanisms that support the other faculties.

Mediation

http://www.thymos.com/tat/cognitio.html (1 of 13)25/07/2003 14:23:02


Over the last few decades, psychologists have been deeply influenced by the architecture of the computer. When it appeared, it was immediately apparent that the computer was capable of performing sophisticated tasks that went beyond mere arithmetics, although they were performed by a complex layering of arithmetic sub-tasks. The fact that the computer architecture was able to achieve so much with so little led to the belief that the human mind could also be reduced to a rational architecture of interacting modules and sequential processes of computation.

scaruffi p thinking about thought- towards a unified theory of life, mind and matter 2001

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