Genes Vs Cultures Vs Consciousness

Author: Andres Campero
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781074626884
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 110

Book Description
This interdisciplinary scientific short book explores the mind at a conceptual level. It touches on its evolutionary development, its algorithmic nature and its scientific history by bridging ideas across Neuroscience, Computer Science, Biotechnology, Evolutionary History, Cognitive Science, Political Philosophy, and Artificial Intelligence. Never before had there been nearly as many scientists, resources or productive research focused on these topics, and humanity has achieved some understanding and some clarification. With the speed of progress it is timely to communicate an overreaching perspective, this book puts an emphasis on conveying the essential questions and what we know about their answers in a simple, clear and exciting way. Humans, along with the first RNA molecules, the first life forms, the first brains, the first conscious animals, the first societies and the first artificial agents constitute an amazing and crucial development in a path of increasingly complex computational intelligence. And yet, we occupy a minuscule time period in the history of Earth, a history that has been written by Genes, by Cultures and by Consciousnesses. If we abandon our anthropomorphic bias it becomes obvious that Humans are not so special after all. We are an important but short and transitory step among many others in a bigger story. The story of our computational minds, which is ours but not only ours. What is the relationship between computation, cognition and everything else? What is life and how did it originate? What is the role of culture in human minds? What do we know about the algorithmic nature of the mind, can we engineer it? What is the computational explanation of consciousness? What are some possible future steps in the evolution of minds? The underlying thread is the computational nature of the Mind which results from the mixture of Genes, Cultures and Consciousness. While these three interact in complex ways, they are ultimately computational systems on their own which appeared at different stages of history and which follow their own selective processes operating at different time scales. As technology progresses, the distinction between the three components materializes and will be a key determinant of the future. Among the many topics covered are the origin of life, the concept of computation and its relation to Turing Machines, cultural evolution and the notion of a Selfish Meme, free will and determinism, moral relativity, the hard problem of consciousness, the different theories of concepts from the perspective of cognitive science, the current status of AI and Machine Learning including the symbolic vs sub-symbolic dichotomy, the contrast between logical reasoning and neural networks, and the recent history of Deep Learning, Geoffrey Hinton, DeepMind and its algorithm AlphaGo. It also develops on the history of science and looks into the possible future building on the work of authors like Daniel Dennett, Yuval Harari, Richard Dawkins, Francis Crick, George Church, David Chalmers, Susan Carey, Stanislas Dehaene, Robert Boyd, Joseph Henrich, Daniel Kahneman, Moran Cerf, Josh Tenenbaum, David Deutsch, Steven Pinker, Ray Kurzweil, John von Neumann, Herbert Simon and many more. Andres Campero is a researcher and PhD student at the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department and at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).** **Note from the author I think this book is genuinely insightful and fun, and that its story is extremely important. My objective with self-publishing is not to make money, in case that is an issue I am happy to return you the earnings, just contact me at andrescampero.mit.edu. Your purchase would still be helpful for Amazon's search engine: )

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580

Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Mind Shift

Author: John Parrington
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192521640
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
John Parrington argues that social interaction and culture have deeply shaped the exceptional nature of human consciousness. The mental capacities of the human mind far outstrip those of other animals. Our imaginations and creativity have produced art, music, and literature; built bridges and cathedrals; enabled us to probe distant galaxies, and to ponder the meaning of our existence. When our minds become disordered, they can also take us to the depths of despair. What makes the human brain unique, and able to generate such a rich mental life? In this book, John Parrington draws on the latest research on the human brain to show how it differs strikingly from those of other animals in its structure and function at a molecular and cellular level. And he argues that this 'shift', enlarging the brain, giving it greater flexibility and enabling higher functions such as imagination, was driven by tool use, but especially by the development of one remarkable tool - language. The complex social interaction brought by language opened up the possibility of shared conceptual worlds, enriched with rhythmic sounds, and images that could be drawn on cave walls. This transformation enabled modern humans to leap rapidly beyond all other species, and generated an exceptional human consciousness, a sense of self that arises as a product of our brain biology and the social interactions we experience. Our minds, even those of identical twins, are unique because they are the result of this extraordinarily plastic brain, exquisitely shaped and tuned by the social and cultural environment in which we grew up and to which we continue to respond through life. Linking early work by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky to the findings of modern neuroscience, Parrington explores how language, culture, and society mediate brain function, and what this view of the human mind may bring to our understanding and treatment of mental illness.

Genes, Memes, Culture, and Mental Illness

Author: Hoyle Leigh
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1441956719
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
What produces mental illness: genes, environment, both,neither? The answer can be found in memes—replicable units of information linking genes and environment in the memory and in culture—whose effects on individual brain development can be benign or toxic. This book reconceptualizes mental disorders as products of stressful gene-meme interactions and introduces a biopsychosocial template for meme-based diagnosis and treatment. A range of therapeutic modalities, both broad-spectrum (meditation) and specific(cognitive-behavioral), for countering negative memes and their replication are considered, as are possibilities for memetic prevention strategies. In this book, the author outlines the roles of genes and memes in the evolution of the human brain; elucidates the creation, storage, and evolution of memes within individual brains; examines culture as a carrier and supplier of memes to the individual; provides examples of gene-meme interactions that can result in anxiety, depression, and other disorders; proposes a multiaxial gene-meme model for diagnosing mental illness; identifies areas of meme-based prevention for at-risk children; and defines specific syndromes in terms of memetic symptoms, genetic/ memetic development, and meme-based treatment.

Evolution, Culture, and Consciousness

Author: Thomas Edward McNamara
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780761827658
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
Thomas McNamara, in Evolution, Culture, and Consciousness, presents the first comprehensive theory of human perception and consciousness based on the generally accepted principles of evolutionary psychology. This theory, building on the best evolutionary research, explains that just a few simple neurological changes in the primate brain account for human speech, self-consciousness and the creation of meaning out of experience. All primates can learn, but our species evolved a new instinct for learning, which makes childhood learning just as powerful as the other biological instincts found in all other primates. McNamara shows that children are genetically programmed to learn not just what to think, but how to think, shaping the preconscious process for creating meaning out of experience. However, because our environment has changed radically since our origin, this archaic form of consciousness has become a major block to human development and success. After explaining how we have all been programmed to preconsciously create meaning out of experience, McNamara shows how we can create a new and more successful way of thinking and feeling, resulting in a happier, more productive, stress free life.

The Selfish Gene

Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192860927
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
Science need not be dull and bogged down by jargon, as Richard Dawkins proves in this entertaining look at evolution. The themes he takes up are the concepts of altruistic and selfish behaviour; the genetical definition of selfish interest; the evolution of aggressive behaviour; kinshiptheory; sex ratio theory; reciprocal altruism; deceit; and the natural selection of sex differences. 'Should be read, can be read by almost anyone. It describes with great skill a new face of the theory of evolution.' W.D. Hamilton, Science

The Devil Is in the Details

Author: Michael Fullan
Publisher: Corwin
ISBN: 1544317980
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
Develop equity, excellence, and well-being across the whole system! The world is troubled! We need to combine a moral imperative and a system transformation to survive for the better. Education is crucial to our future but needs to play a more direct role in shaping our future. The Devil is in the Details shows how we can re-think the education system and its three levels of leadership—local, middle, and top—so that each level can contribute to dramatic turnaround for education and society. The focus is on examining details to ensure effective actions are taken, rather than assuming large pronouncements and policies will drive change. Readers will find: • Details and analysis about successful systems in California, Ontario, and Australia • Ideas for how leaders at all levels can take steps to begin • Vignettes, actions and strategies that illustrate how to address equity, excellence and well-being With the goal of transforming the culture of learning to develop greater equity, excellence, and student wellbeing, this book will help you liberate the system and maintain focus.

Genes, Mind, And Culture - The Coevolutionary Process: 25th Anniversary Edition

Author: Charles J Lumsden
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 981448069X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 498

Book Description
Long considered one of the most provocative and demanding major works on human sociobiology, Genes, Mind, and Culture introduces the concept of gene-culture coevolution. It has been out of print for several years, and in this volume Lumsden and Wilson provide a much needed facsimile edition of their original work, together with a major review of progress in the discipline during the ensuing quarter century. They argue compellingly that human nature is neither arbitrary nor predetermined, and identify mechanisms that energize the upward translation from genes to culture. The authors also assess the properties of genetic evolution of mind within emergent cultural patterns. Lumsden and Wilson explore the rich and sophisticated data of developmental psychology and cognitive science in a fashion that, for the first time, aligns these disciplines with human sociobiology. The authors also draw on population genetics, cultural anthropology, and mathematical physics to set human sociobiology on a predictive base, and so trace the main steps that lead from the genes through human consciousness to culture.

Consciousness and Cognition

Author: Henri Cohen
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080471196
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
What were the circumstances that led to the development of our cognitive abilities from a primitive hominid to an essentially modern human? The answer to this question is of profound importance to understanding our present nature. Since the steep path of our cognitive development is the attribute that most distinguishes humans from other mammals, this is also a quest to determine human origins. This collection of outstanding scientific problems and the revelation of the many ways they can be addressed indicates the scope of the field to be explored and reveals some avenues along which research is advancing. Distinguished scientists and researchers who have advanced the discussion of the mind and brain contribute state-of-the-art presentations of their field of expertise. Chapters offer speculative and provocative views on topics such as body, culture, evolution, feelings, genetics, history, humor, knowledge, language, machines, neuroanatomy, pathology, and perception. This book will appeal to researchers and students in cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy. - Includes a contribution by Noam Chomsky, one of the most cited authors of our time

Universals Versus Particulars: The Ultimate Intellectual War

Author: David Sinclair
Publisher: Magus Books
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
There's a huge hole in how humanity thinks about reality. The problem is a very old one, but only a tiny group of philosophers ever took an interest in it. To the average person, it's an obscure and unfathomable issue. To the truly intelligent, it's the key to understanding existence. To clarify this issue is to get rid of so much junk in the way of humanity's ability to explain reality. If you consider yourself one of the smartest people in the world, you have to do what unintelligent people never do, and that's to become interested in the most rarefied topics, topics which seem absurd to the simple-minded, to the sort of people who aren't in the game of explaining reality and never could be. The topic of universals versus particulars is about as unlikely as it gets for understanding our existence, and yet that's exactly where we must look to find the ultimate answers. This debate allows us to makes sense of a foundational problem of science: why science is totally dependent on mathematics even though the mathematical method contradicts the scientific method in every way. Mathematics is for thinking types (rationalists), science for sensing types (empiricists). These are two totally different types of people. Never get them confused. You have to choose a side. The supreme question is whether reality is scientific (material; particular; sensible) or mathematical (mental; universal; intelligible). To put it another way, is reality dead or alive? Is it a mechanism or an organism? Is it stupid, with no purpose, as science says, or is it intelligent, and relentlessly calculating the answer to itself, and driving itself to perfect completion, as it must if it is mathematical? Are you smart enough to understand the answer? Most people aren't. According to Kurt Gödel, a global conspiracy has been in place for centuries to stop humanity from studying Leibniz, the supreme rationalist, and thus, through this neglect, to "make men stupid." There might as well be a global conspiracy given how far mathematical rationalism has fallen in order to create space for scientific empiricism, its philosophical opposite. Scientists, the people of the senses, even claim to be champions of reason and logic. As if! It's time for the greatest paradigm shift of all: from scientific empiricism to mathematical rationalism, from sensing to thinking, from observation to logic, from matter to mind.