What Is Thought? (Bradford Books)

In What Is Thought? Eric Baum proposes a computational explanation of thought. Just as Erwin Schrodinger in his classic 1944 work What Is Life? argued ten years before the discovery of DNA that life must be explainable at a fundamental level by physics and chemistry, Baum contends that the present-day inability of computer science to explain thought and meaning is no reason to doubt there can be such an explanation. Baum argues that the complexity of mind is the outcome of evolution, which has built thought processes that act unlike the standard algorithms of computer science and that to understand the mind we need to understand these thought processes and the evolutionary process that produced them in computational terms.

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Oprah's Book Club, Selection 61)
By Eckhart Tolle

The Cerebral Code: Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind

The Cerebral Code is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes could operate in the brain to shape mental images in only seconds, starting with shuffled memories no better than the jumble of our nighttime dreams, but evolving into something of quality, such as a sentence to speak aloud. Jung said that dreaming goes on continuously but you can't see it when you are awake, just as you can't see the stars in the daylight because it is too bright. Calvin's is a theory for what goes on, hidden from view by the glare of waking mental operations, that produces our peculiarly human type of consciousness with its versatile intelligence.
Surprisingly, the subtitle's mosaics of the mind is not a literary metaphor. For the first time, it is a description of a mechanism of what appears to be an appropriate level of explanation for many mental phenomena, that of hexagonal mosaics of electrical activity that compete for territory in the association cortex of the brain.

The Evolution of Communication

Bound to become a classic and to stimulate debate and research, The Evolution of Communication looks at species in their natural environments as a way to begin to understand what the real units of analysis of communicating systems are, using arguments about design and function to illuminate both the origin and subsequent evolution of each system. It lights the way for a research program that seriously addresses the problem of how communication systems, including language, have been designed over the course of evolution.

Critical Discursive Psychology

Critical Discursive Psychology addresses issues in critical discursive research in psychology, and outlines the historical context in the discipline for the emergence of qualitative debates. Key critical theoretical resources are described and assessed and a series of polemics is staged that brings together writers who have helped shape critical work in psychology. It also sets out methodological steps for critical readings of texts and arguments for the role of psychoanalytic theory in qualitative research.

Challenging Subjects: Critical Psychology for a New Millennium

How can we develop a politics and theory of subjectivity suitable for the twenty-first century? What place does an account of subjectivity have within the development of critical psychology today? Leading authors from a range of disciplines explore the themes of politics, migration, population movement, culture and spirituality, to examine how we might find new ways to think about the human subject in the new millennium. The chapters are diverse in terms of approach, theoretical orientation and subject matter. What joins them together is an engagement with pressing social, cultural and political issues and an innovative approach to the issues of subjectivity contained within them.

Desire: Its Role in Practical Reason and the Explanation of Action

Does action always arise out of desire? G. F. Schueler examines this hotly debated topic in philosophy of action and moral philosophy, arguing that once two senses of "desire" are distinguished - roughly, genuine desires and pro attitudes - apparently plausible explanations of action in terms of the agent's desires can be seen to be mistaken.
Desire probes a fundamental issue in philosophy of mind, the nature of desires and how, if at all, they motivate and justify our actions. At least since Hume argued that reason "is and of right ought to be the slave of the passions," many philosophers have held that desires play an essential role both in practical reason and in the explanation of intentional action. G. F. Schueler looks at contemporary accounts of both roles in various belief-desire models of reasons and explanation and argues that the usual belief-desire accounts need to be replaced.
Schueler contends that the plausibility of the standard belief-desire accounts rests largely on a failure to distinguish "desires proper," like a craving for sushi, from so-called "pro attitudes," which may take the form of beliefs and other cognitive states as well as desires proper. Schueler's "deliberative model" of practical reasoning suggests a different view of the place of desire in practical reason and the explanation of action. He holds that we can arrive at an intention to act by weighing the relevant considerations and that these may not include desires proper at all.

Zen-Brain Reflections

This sequel to the widely read Zen and the Brain continues James Austin’s explorations into the key interrelationships between Zen Buddhism and brain research. In Zen-Brain Reflections, Austin, a clinical neurologist, researcher, and Zen practitioner, examines the evolving psychological processes and brain changes associated with the path of long-range meditative training. Austin draws not only on the latest neuroscience research and new neuroimaging studies but also on Zen literature and his personal experience with alternate states of consciousness.

Wolfram Burgard, Oliver Brock, Cyrill Stachniss", Robotics: Science and Systems III

Robotics: Science and Systems III spans a wide spectrum of robotics, bringing together researchers working on the foundations of robotics, robotics applications, and analysis of robotics systems. This volume presents the proceedings of the third annual Robotics: Science and Systems conference, held in June 2007 at Georgia Tech. Papers report state-of-the-art research on topics as diverse as Legged Robotics, Reconfigurable Robots, Biomimetic Robots, Manipulation, Humanoid Robotics, Telerobotics, Haptics, Motion Planning, Collision Avoidance, Robot Vision and Perception, Bayesian Techniques, Machine Learning, Mobile Robots, and Multi-robot systems. This conference reflects not only the tremendous growth of robotics as a discipline but also the desire in the robotics community for a flagship event at which the best of the research in the field can be presented.