I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/201/4359/899.2.full.pdf

Phenomenology of perception.

Erik Eriksen is a remarkable individual. He has no college degrees yet is Professor of Human Development at Harvard University. He came to psychology via art, which explains why the reader will find him painting contexts and backgrounds rather than stating dull facts and concepts. He has been a training psychoanalyst for many years as well as a perceptive observer of cultural and social settings and their effect on growing up. This is not just a book on childhood. It is a panorama of our society. Anxiety in young children, apathy in American Indians, confusion in veterans of war, and arrogance in young Nazis are scrutinized under the psychoanalytic magnifying glass. The material is well written and devoid of technical jargon. The theme of the volume is that it is human to have a long childhood which will leave a lifelong residue of emotional immaturity in man. Primitive groups and

Childhood and Society.

To say that this is the best book on the quantum theory of fields is no praise, since to my knowledge it is the only book on this subject But it is a very good and most useful book The original was written in German and appeared in 1942 This is a translation with some minor changes A few remarks have been added, concerning meson theory and nuclear forces, also footnotes referring to modern work in this field, and finally an appendix on the symmetrization of the energy momentum tensor according to Belinfante Quantum Theory of Fields Prof Gregor Wentzel Translated from the German by Charlotte Houtermans and J M Jauch Pp ix + 224, (New York and London: Interscience Publishers, Inc, 1949) 36s

Quantum Theory of Fields

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Pp. viii, 282. £3·50, paperback £1. 1970. (Cambridge University Press.)

This article focuses on the problem of representational content. Accounting for representational content is the central issue in contemporary naturalism: it is the major remaining task facing a naturalistic conception of the world. Representational content is also the central barrier to contemporary cognitive science and artificial intelligence: it is not possible to understand representation in animals nor to construct machines with genuine representation given current (lack of) understanding of what representation is. An elaborated critique is offered to current approaches to representation, arguing that the basic underlying approach is, at root, logically incoherent, and, thus, that standard approaches are doomed to failure. An alternative model of representation— interactivism is presented that avoids or solves the problems facing standard approaches. Interactivism is framed by a version of functionalism, and a naturalization of that functionalism completes an outline of a naturalization of r...

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Representational content in humans and machines

Knowing Levels and Developmental Stages

I GENERAL CRITIQUE 1 Programmatic Arguments 2 The Problem of Representation 3 Consequences of Encodingism 4 Responses to the Problems of Encodings 5 Current Criticisms of AI and Cognitive Science 6 General Consequences of the Encodingism Impasse II INTERACTIVISM: AN ALTERNATIVE TO ENCODINGISM 7 The Interactive Model 8 Implications for Foundational Mathematics III ENCODINGISM: ASSUMPTIONS AND CONSEQUENCES 9 Representation: Issues within Encodingism 10 Representation: Issues about Encodingism 11 Language 12 Learning 13 Connectionism IV SOME NOVEL ARCHITECTURES 14 Interactivism and Connectionism 15 Foundations of an Interactivist Architecture V CONCLUSIONS 16 Transcending the Impasse References Index

Foundational Issues in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science: Impasse and Solution

The central plank of our account is a theory of autonomous (or "self governed") systems that are composed of webs of interdependent processes whose collective activity is self-generating. In other words, au tonomous systems possess a process organization that, in interaction with the environment, performs work to guide energy into the processes of the system itself. A paradigm autonomous system is a living cell, which trans forms energy and materials from the environment through metabolic pathways into the forms of chemical energy and organic molecules required by the processes that sustain the cell. Examples of the processes by which cells help generate the conditions under which they survive include enzymatic catalysis, membrane regulation of energy and material flows in and out of the cell, and chemotaxic amoebic motion to find a food

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Mark H. Bickhard

Papers

Representational content in humans and machines

Knowing Levels and Developmental Stages

Foundational Issues in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science: Impasse and Solution

The Process Dynamics of Normative Function

Cognition, Convention, and Communication.