my mind on books

Link to Science & Consciousness Review post on new book – ‘The Experimental Phenomena of Consciousness: A Brief Dictionary’

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I caught myself looking longingly at the fiction after a spate of nonfiction, so I picked up a copy of Glasshouse by Charles Stross, which turned out to be an entertaining “thought-experiment” dealing with issues of mind and identity, wrapped in a good story.

In Stross’s future, memories can be erased, personalities edited, people regularly make back-up copies of themselves, and their minds can be placed in different bodies. Problems and issues such as these arise:

p 2 – “It’s tough, not being able to tell the difference between your own thoughts and a postsurgical identity prosthesis.”

p 15 – “Not wearing a face in public is a deliberate snub.”

The action soon moves to an experimental simulation of a ‘Dark Ages’ society (c. 1950-2040), which affords a look back at the present-day world from the future perspective.

At Stross’s website, www.accelerando.org, his earlier book Accelerando is available as a free ebook.

Author’s blog: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/

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.