Author: Andy Clark Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0190217014 Category : Medical Languages : en Pages : 425
Book Description
Exciting new theories in neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence are revealing minds like ours as predictive minds, forever trying to guess the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive. In this up-to-the-minute treatment, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores new ways of thinking about perception, action, and the embodied mind.
Author: Thomas Parr Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262362287 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
The first comprehensive treatment of active inference, an integrative perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior used across multiple disciplines. Active inference is a way of understanding sentient behavior—a theory that characterizes perception, planning, and action in terms of probabilistic inference. Developed by theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston over years of groundbreaking research, active inference provides an integrated perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior that is increasingly used across multiple disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. Active inference puts the action into perception. This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of active inference, covering theory, applications, and cognitive domains. Active inference is a “first principles” approach to understanding behavior and the brain, framed in terms of a single imperative to minimize free energy. The book emphasizes the implications of the free energy principle for understanding how the brain works. It first introduces active inference both conceptually and formally, contextualizing it within current theories of cognition. It then provides specific examples of computational models that use active inference to explain such cognitive phenomena as perception, attention, memory, and planning.
Author: Andy Clark Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199831041 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 317
Book Description
When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain-bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.
Author: Jakob Hohwy Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191022616 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
A new theory is taking hold in neuroscience. It is the theory that the brain is essentially a hypothesis-testing mechanism, one that attempts to minimise the error of its predictions about the sensory input it receives from the world. It is an attractive theory because powerful theoretical arguments support it, and yet it is at heart stunningly simple. Jakob Hohwy explains and explores this theory from the perspective of cognitive science and philosophy. The key argument throughout The Predictive Mind is that the mechanism explains the rich, deep, and multifaceted character of our conscious perception. It also gives a unified account of how perception is sculpted by attention, and how it depends on action. The mind is revealed as having a fragile and indirect relation to the world. Though we are deeply in tune with the world we are also strangely distanced from it. The first part of the book sets out how the theory enables rich, layered perception. The theory's probabilistic and statistical foundations are explained using examples from empirical research and analogies to different forms of inference. The second part uses the simple mechanism in an explanation of problematic cases of how we manage to represent, and sometimes misrepresent, the world in health as well as in mental illness. The third part looks into the mind, and shows how the theory accounts for attention, conscious unity, introspection, self and the privacy of our mental world.
Author: Janna Levin Publisher: Anchor ISBN: 0307958205 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
The authoritative story of the headline-making discovery of gravitational waves—by an eminent theoretical astrophysicist and award-winning writer. From the author of How the Universe Got Its Spots and A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, the epic story of the scientific campaign to record the soundtrack of our universe. Black holes are dark. That is their essence. When black holes collide, they will do so unilluminated. Yet the black hole collision is an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe. The profusion of energy will emanate as waves in the shape of spacetime: gravitational waves. No telescope will ever record the event; instead, the only evidence would be the sound of spacetime ringing. In 1916, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, his top priority after he proposed his theory of curved spacetime. One century later, we are recording the first sounds from space, the soundtrack to accompany astronomy’s silent movie. In Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, Janna Levin recounts the fascinating story of the obsessions, the aspirations, and the trials of the scientists who embarked on an arduous, fifty-year endeavor to capture these elusive waves. An experimental ambition that began as an amusing thought experiment, a mad idea, became the object of fixation for the original architects—Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Ron Drever. Striving to make the ambition a reality, the original three gradually accumulated an international team of hundreds. As this book was written, two massive instruments of remarkably delicate sensitivity were brought to advanced capability. As the book draws to a close, five decades after the experimental ambition began, the team races to intercept a wisp of a sound with two colossal machines, hoping to succeed in time for the centenary of Einstein’s most radical idea. Janna Levin’s absorbing account of the surprises, disappointments, achievements, and risks in this unfolding story offers a portrait of modern science that is unlike anything we’ve seen before.
Author: William Finnegan Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0143109391 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 466
Book Description
**Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography** Included in President Obama’s 2016 Summer Reading List “Without a doubt, the finest surf book I’ve ever read . . . ” —The New York Times Magazine Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships forged in challenging waves. Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he discovers the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissects the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, and navigates the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity. Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little-understood art.
Author: George Ainslie Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521596947 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 274
Book Description
Ainslie argues that our responses to the threat of our own inconsistency determine the basic fabric of human culture. He suggests that individuals are more like populations of bargaining agents than like the hierarchical command structures envisaged by cognitive psychologists. The forces that create and constrain these populations help us understand so much that is puzzling in human action and interaction: from addictions and other self-defeating behaviors to the experience of willfulness, from pathological over-control and self-deception to subtler forms of behavior such as altruism, sadism, gambling, and the 'social construction' of belief. This book integrates approaches from experimental psychology, philosophy of mind, microeconomics, and decision science to present one of the most profound and expert accounts of human irrationality available. It will be of great interest to philosophers and an important resource for professionals and students in psychology, economics and political science.
Author: Laird Hamilton Publisher: Rodale ISBN: 1594869421 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
A celebrity surfer shares his strategies for achieving optimal health and spiritual balance, counseling readers on a wide variety of topics, from nutrition and injury prevention to overcoming negativity and embracing one's passions. 100,000 first printing.
Author: Paul Loomans Publisher: Watkins Media Limited ISBN: 1786781085 Category : Self-Help Languages : en Pages : 349
Book Description
Zen monk and coach Paul Loomans is the creator of Time Surfing, a 7-step approach to help anyone create more time in their life. “This book is for anyone who feels trapped by over-full, over-scheduled days. It explains how to escape the raging storms of busyness and find your way back to a more enjoyable and natural relationship with the clock. Time Surfing is a beautiful idea, expressed brilliantly in this beautiful book.” Tony Crabbe, author of international bestseller Busy: How to Thrive in a World of Too Much Who has time these days? Any moments that haven’t already been accounted for are swallowed up by smartphones, social media and working into the evening hours. Stress can often seem to be caused solely by the outside world, but in fact it also comes from within. This book will inspire and guide you to choose peace as a basis for carrying out all your daily activities, whether at work or in the home. The approach is based on a step-by-step method called Time Surfing, which consists of seven simple and easy-to-learn instructions backed with targeted tips and techniques. Rooted in Zen Buddhism, the emphasis is very much on making the most of the time you have rather than trying to control time itself. The instructions – which include making time for “breathers” throughout the day and finishing a task before starting another – will feel instinctive, and will make it possible for you to surf over the waves of time. You will learn that you can trust your intuition when it comes to choosing what to do, and, as a result, your actions will be not only inspired but also very effective. The focus you experience will be relaxed and unforced. But, more than anything else, an inner sense of calm will arise.
Author: Bethany Hamilton Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 147110950X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 218
Book Description
They say Bethany Hamilton has saltwater in her veins. How else could one explain the tremendous passion that drives her to surf? How else could one explain that nothing - not even the loss of her arm in a horrific shark attack - could come between her and the waves? That Halloween morning in Kauai, Hawaii Bethany responded to the shark's stealth with a calmness beyond belief. Pushing pain and panic aside, she immediately thought: 'Get to the beach...' Rushed to the hospital, where her father, Ted Hamilton, was about to undergo knee surgery, Bethany found herself taking his spot in the operating theatre. When the first thing Bethany wanted to know after surgery was 'When can I surf again?' it became clear that her unfaltering spirit and determination were part of a greater story - a tale of courage and faith that this modest and soft-spoken girl would come to share with the world.
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Author: Andy Clark
Author: Thomas Parr
Author: Andy Clark
Author: Jakob Hohwy
Author: Janna Levin
Author: William Finnegan
Author: George Ainslie
Author: Laird Hamilton
Author: Paul Loomans
Author: Bethany Hamilton