THYMOS
Thymos: Studies on Consciousness, Cognition and Life
piero scaruffi
What does Thymos mean | My personal website
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Research Interests:
- Cognitive Science,
- Philosophy of Mind,
- Artificial Intelligence,
- Neurobiology,
- Theoretical Physics
Essays
Independent Workshops
A History of Knowledge
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The Nature of Consciousness - The Structure of Life and the Meaning of Matter. New book available in winter 2006.
Annotated Bibliography on the Mind
(with links to publishers, libraries, bibliographies, etc.)
(TM, ®, Copyright © 1998 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.)
News from the scientific world
Current Lectures
(TM, ®, Copyright © 2006 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.)
Seminar on The Nature of Mind
(TM, ®, Copyright © 1998 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.)
Seminar on History of Knowledge
(TM, ®, Copyright © 2002 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.)
The Interdisciplinary Cultural Events that i organize in the Bay Area.
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.
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Personal Research Statement:
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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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.
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Year 2000 statement of work
Inquire about (unpaid) Cognitive Science, New Media and eBusiness internships
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)
Scaruffi: Hostility and Identity (Mutamorphosis, 2007)
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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