Book Reviews

Additions to the Bibliography on Mind and Consciousness)

compiled by Piero Scaruffi

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Haken Hermann: SYNERGETICS (Springer-Verlag, 1977) Click here for the full review Halpern Diane: THOUGHT AND KNOWLEDGE (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995) Third edition of a popular text, written in a conversational style, on the development of critical thinking and learning skills. Halpern Mark: BINDING TIME (Ablex, 1990) A collection of essays criticizing popular assumptions by computer scientists, starting with Turing's test itself. Hamblin Charles: IMPERATIVES (Basil Blackwell, 1987) The book describes Hamblin's action-state semantics for dealing with imperatives. The theory provides for a time scale, distinction between actions and states, physical and mental causation, agency and action-reduction, and intensionality. Hameroff Stuart: ULTIMATE COMPUTING: BIOMOLECULAR CONSCIOUSNESS AND NANOTECHNOLOGY (Elsevier Science, 1987) Click here for the full review Stuart Hameroff QUANTUM COMPUTING IN MICROTUBULES - AN INTRA-NEURAL CORRELATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS? Hamilton Ternell: PROCESS AND PATTERN IN EVOLUTION (MacMillan, 1967) Mutation, recombination, selection and isolation are the driving forces of evolution. Natural selection results in differential reproduction, i.e. in adaptation of populations, i.e. in evolutionary change. The phenotype of an organism is the result of the conflict between different selection forces. The individual is the unit of natural selection, gene substitution is the unit process in adaptation, and the species is the major unit of evolution. Hamilton thinks that evolution is accelerated by parasites. Organisms adopted sexual reproduction in order to cope with invasions of parasites. Life is a symbiotic process which necessitates of competitors. Hamilton William Donald: NARROW ROADS OF GENE LAND (W.H. Freeman, 1996) Click here for the full review Hampson Peter & Morris Peter: UNDERSTANDING COGNITION (Blackwell, 1995) An introduction to the main topics of cognitive psychology: memory, vision, language, attention. Three paradigms for studying cognition are discussed: artificial intelligence, cognitive science and connectionism. Hanson Norwood: PATTERNS OF DISCOVERY (Cambridge Univ Press, 1958) We see what we know. In order to see what another person sees we first need to learn what he knows. As we learn new knowledge, the world as we perceive it changes. Hardcastle Valerie: LOCATING CONSCIOUSNESS (John Benjamins, 1995) Click here for the full review Hardin Larry: COLOR FOR PHILOSOPHERS (Hackett, 1988) This was the Bible of "color eliminativism" (the theory that objects do not have colors, that colors are only in our minds) Philosophers engaged into lengthy discussions on this theory, that simply states the obvious: brains are slightly different, thus they see slightly different colors. It would be surprising if all brains saw the exact same colors. Harris MaryDee: INTRODUCTION TO NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING (Prentice Hall, 1985) An excellent textbook on how to process natural language with a computer. It starts with a historic review, from Chomsky to Fillmore's case grammar and generative semantics. The main chapters address transformational generative grammar (phrase marker, transformational rules, etc); transition networks (recursive and augmented); case grammar; semantic networks; Schank's conceptual dependency; knowledge representation (scripts, frames). Harth Erich: CREATIVE LOOP (Addison-Wesley, 1993) Click here for the full review Hassoun Mohamad: FUNDAMENTALS OF ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS (MIT Press, 1995) A textbook on neural networks that begins with linear threshold gates, expands computational properties into the most popular supervised and unsupervised learning rules. A neural network is defined as a parallel computational model comprised of densely interconnected adaptive processing units in which learning by example replaces programming.. Neural learning is viewed mathematically as a search/approximation method. Extensive treatment is provided of adaptive multilayer networks. The book makes an effort to provide a unified and logical summary of the field. Hassoun Mohamad: ASSOCIATIVE NEURAL MEMORIES (Oxford, 1993) Articles by James Anderson, Pentti Kanerva, Amir Dembo and lots of japanese contributions. Haugeland John: MIND DESIGN II (MIT Press, 1997) The revised edition of the original collection of papers on Artificial Intelligence (which came out in 1981), focusing on the debate around Turing's test. Haugeland John: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (MIT Press, 1985) An introduction to the field, that begins with an overview of modern science and explains the basic concepts for a broad audience. Hauser Marc: THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNICATION (MIT Press, 1996) A general overview of animal communication. Jeff Hawkins: ON INTELLIGENCE (Henry Holt, 2004) Click here for the full review Hayes-Roth Frederick: BUILDING EXPERT SYSTEMS (Addison Wesley, 1983) Haykin Simon: NEURAL NETWORKS (Macmillan, 1994) One of the most comprehensive and updated surveys of neural network algorithms. Hebb Donald: ESSAY ON MIND (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1980) Hebb's cell-assemblies theory holds that repeated exposure to a sensory stimulation will result in an assembly. Thought processes consist of an activity of such cell-assemblies. There is an intimate relationship between learning and perception: perception in the early stages is consequence of a primitive learning process, but later learning becomes a function of perception and of cognitive structure that originate from perception. Hebb also makes a few philosophical comments. The word "conscious" is used both for denoting the state of a human being and for denoting a type of mental activity. The idea of the self and the idea of the other overlap, and this explains the existence of empathy. Hebb Donald: THE ORGANIZATION OF BEHAVIOR (John Wiley, 1949) Hebb's hypothesis is that the basis for neural development lay in a selective strengthening or inibition of synapses between neurons. Synapses that get used are reinforced, while synapses that are not used are inhibited. This dual process molds the structure of the brain in a darwinian fashion. Metabolic change therefore occurs in the brain all the time. These synaptic changes are the basis for all learning and memory. Besides advancing the learning rule for synaptic modification, the books defines the notion of the brain as a connectionist device and the notion that within the brain regions of interconnected self-reinforcing subnets of neurons (or "cell assemblies") form for long periods of time. The brain is an evolutionary system: genes determine only its initial configuration, experience molds the brain according to darwinian principles of selection. The selective strenghtening of the synapses causes the brain to organize itself into cell assemblies, each assembly representing a fragment of a concept, each assembly overlapping others so that concepts are naturally linked into larger concepts. Each resonating cell assembly behaves like a rule: triggered by an event, will fire for a while at a higher rate. Psychological conditioning is ubiquitous in animals because it is a property of individual neurons. Hecht-Nielsen Robert: NEUROCOMPUTING (Addison-Wesley, 1989) A textbook on neural networks (parallel, distributed, adaptive information processing systems), from a pragmatic, industrial viewpoint. All the most popular learning laws are examined extensively. Hecht-Nielsen uses Kolmogorov's theorem to demonstrate that for every function there exists a three-layer neural net which can compute its values. Heidegger Martin: BEING AND TIME (1962) Click here for the full review Heil John: PHILOSOPHY OF MIND (Routledge, 1998) An up-to-date, technical but not too much, introduction to dualism, materialism, functionalism. Davidson and Dennett. Heil John: PERCEPTION AND COGNITION (Univ of California Press, 1983) Heil attempts to reconcile Gibson's theory of perception, that perception is largely a process of gathering of information from the environment, with a cognitive account of cognition. Perception is a link between beliefs and events or objects. In the end perception is the acquisition of beliefs by way of the senses. Concepts are simply skills that enable the perceiving agent to acquire beliefs. Having beliefs does not necessarily require language. Having beliefs does not necessarily require internal representations or computational capabilities. The class of perceptual objects for a perceiving agent is determined by 1. the agent's sensory system (which is sensitive to some environmental stimuli and not others, and even for those stimuli it is tuned to detect only some high-order features) and 2. the agent's set of concepts, or perceptual beliefs. Heil has modified Dretske's theory by assuming, with Kant, that the transition from analogic to digital is made possible by concepts that are innate in the agent. Herbert Nick: ELEMENTAL MIND (Dutton, 1993) Click here for the full review Herbert Nick: FASTER THAN LIGHT: SUPERLUMINAL LOOPHOLES IN PHYSICS (Dutton, 1988) Click here for the full review Herbert Nick: QUANTUM REALITY: BEYOND THE NEW PHYSICS (Doubleday, 1985) Click here for the full review Hertz John, Krogh Anders & Palmer Richard: INTRODUCTION TO THE THEORY OF NEURAL COMPUTATION (Addison-Wesley, 1990) A textbook on neural networks that starts with the Hopfield model and then covers perceptrons, multi-layer networks, Boltzmann machines, unsupervised learning (adaptive resonance, Kohonen). It provides a very modern expositions of the computational concepts. Hewitt Carl: TOWARDS OPEN INFORMATION SCIENCE (MIT Press, 1990) Hewitt has developed a semantics of intelligent communities. A system is "open" when the outcome of its actions can be predicted and at any time it can absorb new information from the outside world. Distributed intelligent systems are a particular type of open systems that can interact. The dynamics of such systems depends on the balance between two factors: self-reliance, i.e. the ability to act based only on local resources, and interdependency, the need to find resources elsewhere. That translates into the dualism of "committment" (the action that a system is determined to perform) and "cooperation" (the set of mutually dependent roles among systems). The main property of such systems is their "deductive indecisiveness": since many agents compete for the same resources in parallel, the state of the world at any time is indeterminate. The distributed system can only exhibit "global coherence". Heyting Arend: INTUITIONISM (North Holland, 1956) A classic textbook for intuitionism. Intuitionism prescribes that all proofs of theorems must be constructive. Only constructable objects are legitimate. The meaning of a statement resides not in its truth conditions but in the means of proof or verification. Hintikka Jaakko: KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF (Cornell Univ Press, 1962) A very technical epistemic and doxastic theory. Hintikka sets up a formal system and shows its applications to the use of the verbs "know" and "believe". Hintikka Jaakko THE INTENTIONS OF INTENTIONALITY (Reidel, 1975) A collection of articles, including "Objects of knowledge", which defines the principles of his logic of attitudes. Propositional attitudes can be interpreted using possible worlds and an "alternativeness" relation. Alternatives are relative to an attitude, an agent and the world in which the agent has that attitude. The sentence "a believes that p" can be therefore interpreted as "a believes that p is true in a world if and only if p is true in all the alternatives to that world". Following Gibson's biological theory, Hintikka argues that perception is intentional because it is informational. Possible-world semantics is advanced as a promising candidate for a general theory of intentionality. Hintikka Jaakko: THE GAME OF LANGUAGE (Reidel, 1983) Hintikka proposed his "game-theoretical semantics" as an alternative to compositional semantics. The semantic interpretation of a sentence is conceived of as a game between two agents. The semantics searches truth through a process of falsification and verification. The truth of an expression is determined through a set of domain-dependent rules which define a "game" between two agents: one agent is trying to validate the expression, the other one is trying to refute it. The expression is true if the truth agent wins. Unlike Dummett's verificationist semantics, Hintikka's is still a "truth-conditional" semantics. The existence of a winning strategy for either player can be expressed in the form of a higher-order sentence. This sentence asserts the existence of the relevant Skolem functions. Game-theoretical semantics is therefore a translation of first-order languages into higher-order languages. Game-theoretical semantics can be easily extended to intensional logic as a successive step to possible-world semantics. The transition to natural languages is performed by substituting proper names for entire quantifier phrases. In natural languages the application of game rules is governed by second-order principles. Hintikka Jaakko: LOGIC OF EPISTEMOLOGY (Kluwer Academics, 1989) A collection of articles on the (limitations of) semantics of possible worlds and epistemic logic (logic of knowledge). Hintikka Jaakko & Sandu Gabriel: ON THE METHODOLOGY OF LINGUISTICS (Blackwell, 1990) Hintikka presents a case study for his "game-theoretic semantics" by applying it to the treatment of coreference. Hintikka Jaakko: ASPECTS OF METAPHOR (Kluwer Academics, 1994) A collection of papers on metaphor, including Bipin Indurkhya's argument for an interaction theory of cognition and metaphor, Noel Carroll's presentation of visual metaphors and Eric Steinhart's model for generating metaphors in the context of semantic fields. Hinton Geoffrey & Anderson James: PARALLEL MODELS OF ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989) A selection of readings on parallel associative memory. D. Willshaw's "Holography, associative memory and inductive generalization" notes similarities between neural networks and holograms (such as information is not localized but spread over the entire system). Hirst William: MAKING OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE (Cambridge, 1988) A collection of essays in honor of George Miller. Hobbs Jerry & Moore Robert: FORMAL THEORIES OF THE COMMONSENSE WORLD (Ablex Publishing, 1985) A collection of seminal papers on commonsense reasoning, including the official version of Pat Hayes' "The naive physics manifesto". Pat Hayes' "The naive physics manifesto" defines "measure space" for each quantity (length, weight, date, temperature) as a space in which an ordering relationship holds. Measurement spaces are usually conceived as discrete spaces, even if the quantities they measure are in theory continous. In common use things like birth dates, temperatures, distances, heights and weights are always rounded. Unlike McCarthy's situations, Hayes' "histories" (connected pieces of space-time) have a restricted spatial extent, thereby avoiding some of the inconveniences of situations. Hayes' logistic approach was very influential in formalizing and axiomatizing common sense knowledge. The elementary unit of measure for common sense is not the point, but the interval. Which interval makes sense depends on the domain: history is satisfied with years (and sometimes centuries), but birth dates require the day and track and fields races need tenths of seconds. The relationships between intervals differ from relationships between points. Two intervals can partially overlap. An interval can be open or closed. Points require Physics' differential equations, but intervals can be handled with a logic of time that deals with their ordering relationship. The book includes DeKleer's "A qualitative physics based on confluences", Robert Moore's "A formal theory of knowledge and action" and James Allen's "A model of naive temporal reasoning". Allen's representation of time is based on intervals, not instants. Intervals may be related in several ways: one being before, after or equal to another. Hobson Allan: THE CHEMISTRY OF CONSCIOUS STATES (Little & Brown, 1994) Click here for the full review Hobson, Allan: DREAMING AS DELIRIUM (MIT Press, 1999) Click here for the full review Hobson J. Allan: THE DREAMING BRAIN (Basic, 1989) Click here for the full review Hoffmeyer Jesper: SIGNS OF MEANING IN THE UNIVERSE (Indiana Univ. Press, 1996) Click here for the full review Hogan James-Patrick: Mind Matters; Exploring the World of Artificial Intelligence (Del Rey, 1998) The science fiction writer provides a very superficial reading of the history of Artificial Intelligence. Hofstadter Douglas: FLUID CONCEPTS AND CREATIVE ANALOGIES (Basic, 1995) With this book Hofstadter goes as far as to propose a cognitive model, or at least refuse existing cognitive models, for the mind. The book comes with the software that was built to implement these analogical strategies, Copycat. Hofstadter Douglas & Dennett Daniel: THE MIND'S I (Bantam, 1982) A collection of articles from philosophers, mathematicians and novelists, surrounded by HJofstadter's own reflections on the themes of mind and consciousness. Hofstadter Douglas: GODEL ESCHER BACH (Vintage, 1980) A bold synthesis of mathematics, art and music, and a collection of intriguing thought experiments with recursion, self-reference, decision theory, artificial intelligence and genetics presented in a very elegant and creative manner. Hofstadter Douglas: I AM A STRANGE LOOP (Basic, 2007) Click here for the full review Holland John et al: INDUCTION (MIT Press, 1986) A study of induction (perceived as "how knowledge is modified through its use") built around a rule-based framework. Induction is directed by problem-solving activity and based on feedback about the value of its predictions. Learned categories are identified by clusters of rules. Induction involves two fundamental processes: a process to revise parameters of existing rules and a process to generate new rules. Both processes are guided by knowledge about the domain. Classifier systems are message-passing variants of production systems. A classifier system learns syntactically rules (or "classifiers") to guide its performance in the environment. A classifier system consists of three main components: a production system, a credit system (such as the "bucket brigade") and a genetic algorithm to generate new rules. Analogical reasoning is considered as a special case of induction. Holland John Henry: ADAPTATION IN NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL SYSTEMS (MIT Press, 1992) Revised edition of the seminal 1975 book that generated the momentum for the study of complex adaptive systems and genetic algorithms. Holland had the intuition that the best way to solve a problem is to mimick what biological organisms do to solve their problem of survival: to evolve (through natural selection) and to reproduce (through genetic recombination). Genetic algorithms apply recursively a series of biologically-inspired operators to a population of potential solutions of a given problem. Each application of operators generates new populations of solutions which should better and better approximate the best solution. What evolves is not the single individual but the population as a whole. Genetic algorithms are actually a further refinement of search methods within problem spaces. Genetic algorithms improve the search by incorporating the criterion of "competition". A measure function computes how "fit" an individual is. The selection process starts from a random population of individual. For each individual of the population the fitness function provides a numeric value for how much the solution is far from the ideal solution. The probability of selection for that individual is made proportional to its "fitness". On the basis of such fitness values a subset of the population is selected. This subset is allowed to reproduce itself through biologically-inspired operators of crossover, mutation and inversion. Each individual (each point in the space of solutions) is represented as a string of symbols. Each genetic operators perform an operation on the sequence or content of the symbols. Holland's classifier (which learns new rules to optimize its performance) was the first practical application of genetic algorithms. Its emphasis on competition and coopertation, on feedback and reinforcement, rather than on pre-programmed rules, set it apart from knowledge-based models of intelligence. Holland John: HIDDEN ORDER (Addison Wesley, 1995) Holland focuses on "complex adaptive systems". Such systems are governed by principles of anticipation and feedback. Based on a model of the world, an adaptive system anticipates what is going to happen. Models are improved based on feedback from the environment. Complex adaptive system are ubiquitous in nature. They include brains, ecosystems and even economies. They share a number of features: each of these systems is a network of agents acting in parallel and interacting; behavior of the system arises from cooperation and competitiong among its agents; each of these systems has many levels of organization, with agents at each level serving as building blocks for agents at a higher level; such systems are capable of rearranging their structure based on their experience; they are capable of anticipating the future by means of innate models of the world; new opportunities for new types of agents are continously beeing created within the system. All complex adaptive systems share four properties (aggregation, nonlinearity, flowing, diversity) and three mechanisms (categorization by tagging, anticipation through internal models, decomposition in building blocks). Holland also reviews his own framework for representing adaptive agents, consisting of a performance system (to describe the system's skills), a credit-assignment algorithm (to reward the fittest rules) and a rule-discovery algorithm (to generate plausible hypotheses). His new visual model is called ECHO, and it "echoes" the creation of complex structures by natural selection. ECHO operates on a network of sites, each containing resources and agents. Each agent's structure is defined in terms of strings of resources, each string being a chromosome. Each chromosome contains three tags (offense, defense and adhesion), three conditions (exchange, mating and replication), and a list of resource transformations. Tags and conditions determine what happens when two agents interact. Horgan John: THE END OF SCIENCE (Broadway, 1996) A comprehensive survey of Physics, Philosophy, Biology, Neuroscience, etc. at the end of our century. Unfortunately, littered with autobiographical distractions and interviews of distinguished philosophers and scientists. The topic is the idea that Science may have reached a dead end, may be slowing down and fading out. The book is a collection of interviews with the most distinguished scientists of our time, with a brief introduction to their theories and then their (bleak) vision of the future of science. Hughes, Howard: SENSORY EXOTICA (MIT Press, 1999) Click here for the full review Humphrey Nicholas: CONSCIOUSNESS REGAINED (Oxford Univ Press, 1983) Humphrey thinks that the function of consciousness is that of social interaction with other consciousnesses. Consciousness gives every human a priviliged picture of her own self as a model for what it is like to be another human. Consciousness provides humans with an explanatory model of their own behavior. Psychological skills are a biologically adaptive trait in human beings: the best psychologists are the best survivors. The best psychologists are those who have the widest range of personal experience. Humphrey Nicholas: A HISTORY OF THE MIND (Simon & Schuster, 1993) A study of the evolution of consciousness from simple matter to thought, emotions and self-consciousness. Humphrey claims that to be conscious is to feel sensations, as opposed to perceptions. Sensations are to be found at the boundary between the organism and the world and at the boundary of past and future. One "senses" a circle of light hitting the retina; one "perceives" the sun in the sky. One can have sensations about perceptions and perceptions about sensations. Animals have developed two ways of representing the interaction between the body and the world: affect-laden sensations and affect-neutral perceptions. Sensation and perception are separate and parallel forms of representation. Consciousness is about sensation. Humphrey develops a theory of sensations, feelings and actions. The last stage of the evolutionary journey is a "sensory reverberating feedback loop" within the brain. Then consciousness arises. Humphreys Glyn: UNDERSTANDING VISION (Blackwell, 1992) A collection of articles on the subject. Hutchinson George Evelyn: AN INTRODUCTION TO POPULATION ECOLOGY (Yale University Press, 1978) Hutchinson reviews the field of population dynamics, introduces formal definitions for quantities such as "ecological niche" ("an N-dimensional hypervolume within which environmental conditions at every point permit an organism to live") and derives nonlinear analyses of populations. The whole theory is based on two postulates: the principle of abiogenesis (every living organism has originated from at least one parent of like kind to itself, "omne vivum ex vivo"); and the postulate of upper limit (there is an upper limit to the number of beings that can utilize a given finite space). They are both reflected in Verhulst's "logistic", a mathematical model for a continously growing population with an upper limit. There exist a number of variants of the original logistic, mainly to take into account factors such as competition and coexistence. Any sulf-sustaining biological community must include on population of photosynthetic plants at its lower level. Herbivores feed on this level and form a new level, on which primary carnivores feed and form a new level, on which secondary carnivores feed, etc. Each level is smaller (not only in number but also in biomass) than the lower one, thereby originating a pyramidal structure.

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