Nowożytna nauka nie dysponuje adekwatnymi narzędziami opisu i interpretacji geniuszu oraz szaleństwa. Metody obiektywne i statystyczne oraz racjonalistyczna analiza gubią specyfikę tych zjawisk. Geniusz i szaleństwo można badać i interpretować w oparciu o teorię archetypów Junga, według której są one elementami procesu jakościowej transformacji świadomości (inicjacji), ale ich znaczenie w kontekście procesu kształtowania osobowości (indywiduacja) jest odmienne. W kontekście procesu twórczego oraz kultury jako takiej zagadnienie nabiera dodatkowej rangi. Geniusz i szaleństwo można interpretować konstruktywnie (syntetycznie) w oparciu o metaforę drogi (...) okrężnej, która ujmuje złożoną naturę zarówno aktywności symbolicznej człowieka, procesu twórczego, jak i kultury. Podobnie pomocna jest tu koncepcja circumambulatio (okrążania) Junga. (shrink)

This systematic investigation of computation and mental phenomena by a noted psychologist and computer scientist argues that cognition is a form of computation, that the semantic contents of mental states are encoded in the same general way as computer representations are encoded. It is a rich and sustained investigation of the assumptions underlying the directions cognitive science research is taking. 1 The Explanatory Vocabulary of Cognition 2 The Explanatory Role of Representations 3 The Relevance of Computation 4 The Psychological Reality (...) of Programs: Strong Equivalence 5 Constraining Functional Architecture 6 The Bridge from Physical to Symbolic: Transduction 7 Functional Architecture and Analogue Processes 8 Mental Imagery and Functional Architecture 9 Epilogue: What is Cognitive Science the Science of? (shrink)

In "Things and Places," Zenon Pylyshyn argues that the process of incrementally constructing perceptual representations, solving the binding problem (determining which properties go together), and, more generally, grounding perceptual ...

How we see and how we visualize: why the scientific account differs from our experience.

Each of the chapters in this volume devotes considerable attention to defining and elaborating the notion of the frame problem-one of the hard problems of artificial intelligence. Not only do the chapters clarify the problems at hand, they shed light on the different approaches taken by those in artificial intelligence and by certain philosophers who have been concerned with related problems in their field. The book should therefore not be read merely as a discussion of the frame problem narrowly conceived, (...) but also as a general analysis of what could be a major challenge to the design of computer systems exhibiting general intelligence. (shrink)

Informatics and the Foundations of Legal Reasoning represents a close collaboration between a wide range of disciplines and countries. Fourteen papers, together with a long analytical introduction by the editors, were selected from the contributions of legal theorists, computer scientists, philosophers and logicians who were members of an International Working Group supported by the European Commission. The Group was mandated to work towards determining how far the law is amenable to formal modeling, and in what ways computers might assist legal (...) thinking and practice. The book is the result of discussions held by the Group over two and half years. It will help students and researchers from different backgrounds to focus on a common set of topics of increasing general interest. It embodies the results of work in progress and suggests many issues for further discussion. A stimulating text for undergraduate and graduate courses in law, philosophy and computer science departments, as well as for those interested in the place of computers in legal practice, especially at the international level. (shrink)

I examine passages from the Zhuangzi that proponents of interpreting Zhuangzian ethics as "patient moral relativism" (PMR) primarily draw on to support their view. I consider whether in these passages Zhuangzi morally evaluates agents or their actions, and if he does, whether his evaluations support ascribing to him PMR. My argument is that Zhuangzi either fails to make the required moral evaluations or he makes moral evaluations that do not accord with PMR. A PMR-friendly reading is possible only if we (...) accept contested interpretative claims about parts of the Zhuangzi that go beyond the primary textual evidence that is frequently cited in support of such a reading. (shrink)

6. Seeing With the Mind’s Eye 1: The Puzzle of Mental Imagery .................................................6-1 6.1 What is the puzzle about mental imagery?..............................................................................6-1 6.2 Content, form and substance of representations ......................................................................6-6 6.3 What is responsible for the pattern of results obtained in imagery studies?.................................6-8..

Few areas of study have led to such close and intense interactions among computer scientists, psychologists, and philosophers as the area now referred to as cognitive science. Within this discipline, few problems have inspired as much debate as the use of notions such as meaning, intentionality, or the semantic content of mental states in explaining human behavior. The set of problems surrounding these notions have been viewed by some observers as threatening the foundations of cognitive science as currently conceived, and (...) by others as providing a new and scientifically sound formulation of certain classical problems in the philosophy of mind. The chapters in this volume help bridge the gap among contributing disciplines-computer science, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience-and discuss the problems posed from various perspectives. (shrink)

Sleep-related experiences [Watson, D. . Dissociations of the night: Individual differences in sleep-related experiences and their relation to dissociation and schizotypy. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 110, 526–535] refer to a host of nocturnal altered-consciousness phenomena, including narcoleptic tendencies, nightmares, problem-solving dreams, waking dreams, and lucid dreams. In an attempt to clarify the meaning of this construct, we examined cross-sectional and longitudinal associations of sleep-related experiences , altered-consciousness tendencies , psychological distress, childhood maltreatment , and life stress in young adults. Both (...) types of SREs were found to be distinguishable from altered-consciousness tendencies. Transliminality emerged as a longitudinal predictor of both general SREs and lucid dreams. Psychological distress and an increase in life stress predicted an increase in general SREs over a 3-month interval. We conclude that transliminality is a general altered-consciousness trait that accounts for some of the individual differences in sleep-related experiences, and that general sleep experiences are an outcome of psychological distress and life stress. (shrink)

The notion of the common good has been one of the leading themes of Machiavelli scholarship, yet there is no systematic study devoted to it. The aim of this article is to explore Machiavelli's understanding of the common good and to demonstrate how problematic his approach is. First, even in its form as an ideal the notion has an ambiguous meaning that can easily become intrinsically discrepant. Second, political reality makes the ideal practically impossible to embody. Third, as a motivational (...) goal of political activity and patriotic inspiration the common good is blurred by partial and individual interests. Finally, it can be an instrument of deception and exploitation. It seems that these difficulties severely constrained Machiavelli's use of the notion of the common good which for him was probably too obscure to be a principal idea of political thinking. (shrink)

In Gregory, Richard. Oxford Companion to the Mind (Second Edition, 2006) Oxford University Press.

This book examines the importance of flat ontologies for law and sociolegal theory. Associated with the emergence of new materialism in the humanities and social sciences, the elaboration of flat ontologies challenges the binarism that has maintained the separation of culture from nature, and the human from the nonhuman. Although most work in legal theory and sociolegal studies continues to adopt a non-flat, anthropocentric and immaterial take on law, the critique of this perspective is becoming more and more influential. Engaging (...) the increasing legal interest in flat ontologies, this book offers an account of the main theoretical perspectives, and their importance for law. Covering the work of the five major theorists in the area - Gabriel Tarde, Bruno Latour, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad and Graham Harman - the book aims to encourage this interest, as well as to explicate the important problems of and differences between these perspectives. Flat ontologies, the book demonstrates, can offer a valuable new perspective for understanding and thinking about law. This book will appeal mainly to scholars and students in legal theory and sociolegal studies; as well as others with interests in the posthumanist turn in philosophy and social theory. (shrink)

In Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), an observer is able to track 4 – 5 objects in a group of otherwise indistinguishable objects that move independently and unpredictably about a display. According to the Visual Indexing Theory (Pylyshyn, 1989), successful tracking requires that target objects be indexed while they are distinct -- before tracking begins. In the typical MOT task, the target objects are briefly flashed resulting in the automatic assignment of indexes. The question arises whether indexes are only assigned automatically (...) or whether they can be assigned voluntarily in a top-down manner. This study compares several ways of specifying which of 8 items are the targets to be tracked. In the Flash condition the target items were flashed, in the Nonflash condition the targets were the items not flashed, and in the Number condition the targets were specified by number (e.g., items numbered 1-4). The results showed no difference between the three conditions, suggesting that tracking was possible with either voluntary or involuntary indexing. The second experiment tested the hypothesis that voluntary indexing is possible only if the target items are visited serially. The conditions were the same as experiment 1 except that the time available for index assignment was too short to allow targets to be visited serially. In this experiment, targets flashed only once (or, in the Numbers condition, remained visible for about 400 ms). The results showed a decrease in tracking performance for the Number condition, but the Flash and the Nonflash conditions did not differ, suggesting that as long as the designation of targets was done rapidly, the observer did not have to visit each target serially in order to index it. These results suggest that indexing can occur both automatically and voluntarily, and without serially visiting them, so long as the items are successfully specified. (shrink)

influence. One of the principal characteristics that distinguishes Cognitive Science from more traditional studies of cognition within Psychology, is the extent to which it has been influenced by both the ideas and the techniques of computing. It may come as a surprise to the outsider, then, to discover that there is no unanimity within the discipline on either (a) the nature (and in some cases the desireabilty) of the influence and (b) what computing is –- or at least on its.

For many of the authors in this volume, this is the second attempt to explore what McCarthy and Hayes (1969) first called the “Frame Problem”. Since the first compendium (Pylyshyn, 1987), nicely summarized here by Ronald Loui, there have been several conferences and books on the topic. Their goals range from providing a clarification of the problem by breaking it down into subproblems (and sometimes declaring the hard subproblems to not be the_ real_ Frame Problem), to providing formal “solutions” to (...) certain aspects of the problem. But more often the message has been that the problem is not solvable except in a piecemeal way in special circumstances by some sort of heuristic approximations. It has sometimes also been said that solving the Frame Problem is not only an unachievable goal, but it is also an unnecessary one since_ humans_ do not solve it either; we simply get along as best we can and deal with the problem of planning in ways that, to use Dennett’s phrase, is “good enough for government work”. (shrink)

The computational view of mind rests on certain intuitions regarding the fundamental similarity between computation and cognition. We examine some of these intuitions and suggest that they derive from the fact that computers and human organisms are both physical systems whose behavior is correctly described as being governed by rules acting on symbolic representations. Some of the implications of this view are discussed. It is suggested that a fundamental hypothesis of this approach is that there is a natural domain of (...) human functioning that can be addressed exclusively in terms of a formal symbolic or algorithmic vocabulary or level of analysis. Much of the paper elaborates various conditions that need to be met if a literal view of mental activity as computation is to serve as the basis for explanatory theories. The coherence of such a view depends on there being a principled distinction between functions whose explanation requires that we posit internal representations and those that we can appropriately describe as merely instantiating causal physical or biological laws. In this paper the distinction is empirically grounded in a methodological criterion called the " cognitive impenetrability condition." Functions are said to be cognitively impenetrable if they cannot be influenced by such purely cognitive factors as goals, beliefs, inferences, tacit knowledge, and so on. Such a criterion makes it possible to empirically separate the fixed capacities of mind from the particular representations and algorithms used on specific occasions. In order for computational theories to avoid being ad hoc, they must deal effectively with the "degrees of freedom" problem by constraining the extent to which they can be arbitrarily adjusted post hoc to fit some particular set of observations. This in turn requires that the fixed architectural function and the algorithms be independently validated. It is argued that the architectural assumptions implicit in many contemporary models run afoul of the cognitive impenetrability condition, since the required fixed functions are demonstrably sensitive to tacit knowledge and goals. The paper concludes with some tactical suggestions for the development of computational cognitive theories. (shrink)

This book examines Plato's most puzzling dialogue, Hippias Minor, in detail, treating Socrates' engagement with both Homer and the sophist Hippias over human excellence as at once playful and deadly serious.