my mind on books

Via Mind Hacks, Brad Pasanek’s “Mind is a metaphor” website has a blog and a database of metaphors from British 18th-century literature. Pasanek’s site has a link to the Open University’s Metaphor Analysis Project, which has collected some papers on contemporary theories of metaphor, starting with Lakoff & Johnson.

Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (Oxford Cognitive Science Series) by Jerry Fodor (1998)
The Big Book of Concepts (Bradford Books) by Gregory L. Murphy (2002/2004) – Opening line: “Concepts are the glue that holds our mental world together.”

Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behaviour by Mark Wilson (2006)

Concepts: Core Readings edited by Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (1999)

“Concepts” at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

“Concept” at Wikipedia

“The classical theory of concepts” at Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Online papers on concepts, compiled by David Chalmers (part of “Online papers on consciousness”)

In A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, author Daniel H. Pink maintains that forces of “Asia, automation, and abundance” are leading to a change from the Information Age to what he terms the “Conceptual Age,” which calls for the development of “right-brained” abilities:

Design – not just function

Story – not just argument

Symphony – not just focus

Empathy – not just logic

Play – not just seriousness

Pink includes suggestions and resources for developing each of the six skills, and I’ve enjoyed exploring many of them. Some of the books he recommends –

Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting,

Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture,

How to See: A Guide to Reading Our Man-Made Environment,

The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present, and

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy….

Link to Dan Pink’s blog.

Howard Gardner recently published a book with a similar theme: Five Minds for the Future – his “five minds” are disciplined, synthesizing, creating, respectful and ethical.

In I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter doesn’t use the term tangled hierarchy but possibly it was in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid– at least Wikipedia associates the two terms by making tangled hierarchy refer to strange loop.

I had written down this quote a few years ago from Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe:

The self of our self-reference is due to a tangled hierarchy, but our consciousness is the consciousness of the Being that is beyond the subject-object split. There is no other source of consciousness in the universe. The self of self-reference and the consciousness of the original consciousness, together, make what we call self-consciousness. (p. 188)

So Goswami, unlike Hofstadter, distinguishes between consciousness and the self.

Via BrainEthics blog (via Mind Hacks) comes mention of a new book by Chris Frith –Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World.

More information on author Chris Frith here.