my mind on books

Computing the Mind: How the Mind Really Works by Shimon Edelman is due out from Oxford University Press on Aug. 20 (according to Oxford) or Sept. 8 (according to Amazon) in the US.

Here is the product description:

In a culmination of humanity’s millennia-long quest for self knowledge, the sciences of the mind are now in a position to offer concrete, empirically validated answers to the most fundamental questions about human nature. What does it mean to be a mind? How is the mind related to the brain? How are minds shaped by their embodiment and environment? What are the principles behind cognitive functions such as perception, memory, language, thought, and consciousness?

By analyzing the tasks facing any sentient being that is subject to stimulation and a pressure to act, Shimon Edelman identifies computation as the common denominator in the emerging answers to all these questions. Any system composed of elements that exchange signals with each other and occasionally with the rest of the world can be said to be engaged in computation. A brain composed of neurons is one example of a system that computes, and the computations that the neurons collectively carry out constitute the brain’s mind.

Edelman presents a computational account of the entire spectrum of cognitive phenomena that constitutes the mind. He begins with sentience, and uses examples from visual perception to demonstrate that it must, at its very core, be a type of computation. Throughout his account, Edelman acknowledges the human mind’s biological origins. Along the way, he also demystifies traits such as creativity, language, and individual and collective consciousness, and hints at how naturally evolved minds can transcend some of their limitations by moving to computational substrates other than brains. The account that Edelman gives in this book is accessible, yet unified and rigorous, and the big picture he presents is supported by evidence ranging from neurobiology to computer science. The book should be read by anyone seeking a comprehensive and current introduction to cognitive psychology.

The author’s website includes a link to a table of contents.

“Computer science helps psychiatrist Niall McLaren explain mental disorders”

excerpt:

Dr McLaren says, ‘Like computer processing, a substantial part of human mental life consists of the silent, rapid manipulation of information.

‘Normal mental function falls quite readily into two distinct realms, the phenomenal or experiential, and the psychological or knowledge-based.

‘The differences between what we know and what we experience is exclusive: knowledge is acquired gradually and can be conveyed to another person, whereas the phenomenal contents arrive immediately and are wholly private experiences.”
…
Dr McLaren says, ‘So my theory is that the mind has two irreducibly mental components, cognition and conscious experience, which together account for the whole of mental life.”

Dr. McLaren is the author of Humanizing Madness: Psychiatry and the Cognitive Neurosciences.

This is an 85-min discussion on moral realism & I have to admit my mind wandered a bit while listening…
The bloggingheads page has related links, including one to a book by Peter Railton.

“Toward the end of the Sakuntala, the most famous of the three surviving plays by Kalidasa–the poet usually considered the finest in ancient India–the hero Dushyanta offers this poignant self-analysis:

Like someone staring at an elephant
who says, “There is no elephant here,”
and who then, as it moves away,
feels a certain doubt
and later, seeing its footprints,
is certain: “An elephant
has been here”–
such are the subtle
workings of my mind.

Or of any mind–the rueful king speaks for all of us. We almost always miss the elephant in front of us. By the time we make our retrospective deduction from the footprints, it’s usually too late.”

From “The Arrow  and the Poem,” David Shulman on the Clay Sanskrit Library, The New Republic