my mind on books

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.

With the recent addition of ‘analog’ records to Google Book Search (discussed in my last post), the Advanced Book Search can be used as a rough way to find new books on your favorite topic, although the lack of any subject search limits its functionality.

Searching by publication date between 2007 and 2008 for books with ‘consciousness’ in the title, for example, returned 99 titles (results will vary). If the title search doesn’t give the right focus, a broader search can be performed for words or phrases in the title plus description, as in this example.

Google recently announced that Google Book Search has added “records for millions of other books that still just exist in the analog world,” a development that makes it a much more comprehensive book search site. Alongside the scanned books and those with limited previews there are now records for books that have not yet been digitized.

Here is an example of the kind of information Google has made available for ‘Metaphors We Live By,’ an influential 1980 cognitive science book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. A search on the exact title phrase brings up over 700 book results, showing other books that discuss or cite ‘Metaphors We Live By.’ The book page has reviews, references from web pages, references from books, references from scholarly work, description from the book cover, other editions, links to buy the book or to find it in a library.

For comparison, here is the Amazon page for the same book; among the features are the ability to “look inside the book” at about 10 pages, including the table of contents. Amazon also displays 1599 books that cite “Metaphors We Live By” (with some duplicates); and, in the section “Customers who bought this item also bought” there is a link to “Explore similar items,” which seems to do a good job of pulling out related works.

LibraryThing is another good source of book information; its page for Lakoff & Johnson includes a tag cloud, recommendations (another good source of related items), reviews, member ratings, links to Wikipedia, plus a separate “book information” page that has the traditional card catalog data – LC and Dewey call numbers, subject headings, isbns.

Until the ultimate mashup appears, I’ll want to look at all three sites.

A “diavlog” between David Chalmers and John Horgan – on consciousness, the ‘hard problem,’ limits of physical theory, the concept of information, the Matrix, and the possibility of pure consciousness. Chalmers is the author of The Conscious Mind and Horgan, a science journalist, is the author of Rational Mysticism.