Aristotle's Laptop: The Discovery of Our Informational Mind

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World Scientific, 2012 - Computers - 232 pages
Aristotle's convincing philosophy is likely to have shaped (even indirectly) many of our current beliefs, prejudices and attitudes to life. This includes the way in which our mind (that is, our capacity to have private thoughts) appears to elude a scientific description. This book is about a scientific ingredient that was not available to Aristotle: the science of information. Would the course of the philosophy of the mind have been different had Aristotle pronounced that the matter of mind was information? This "mind is information" assertion is often heard in contemporary debates, and this book explores the verities and falsehoods of this proposition.
 

Contents

From Aristotle to the Bits of an Informational Mind
1
The Reluctant Hero of the Information Age
19
Guesses and Models
39
Chapter 4 Imagination in the Circles of a Network
63
The World and Neural States
87
The Key to Consciousness?
109
Gathering Visual Information
131
Oxymoron or New Science?
155
Freuds Influential Vision
173
Chapter 10 Aristotles Living Soul
195
Appendix
211
Author Index
221
Subject Index
225
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