83,891 research outputs found
A model of the emergence and evolution of integrated worldviews
It \ud
is proposed that the ability of humans to flourish in diverse \ud
environments and evolve complex cultures reflects the following two \ud
underlying cognitive transitions. The transition from the \ud
coarse-grained associative memory of Homo habilis to the \ud
fine-grained memory of Homo erectus enabled limited \ud
representational redescription of perceptually similar episodes, \ud
abstraction, and analytic thought, the last of which is modeled as \ud
the formation of states and of lattices of properties and contexts \ud
for concepts. The transition to the modern mind of Homo \ud
sapiens is proposed to have resulted from onset of the capacity to \ud
spontaneously and temporarily shift to an associative mode of thought \ud
conducive to interaction amongst seemingly disparate concepts, \ud
modeled as the forging of conjunctions resulting in states of \ud
entanglement. The fruits of associative thought became ingredients \ud
for analytic thought, and vice versa. The ratio of \ud
associative pathways to concepts surpassed a percolation threshold \ud
resulting in the emergence of a self-modifying, integrated internal \ud
model of the world, or worldview
Organization of Multi-Agent Systems: An Overview
In complex, open, and heterogeneous environments, agents must be able to
reorganize towards the most appropriate organizations to adapt unpredictable
environment changes within Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Types of reorganization
can be seen from two different levels. The individual agents level
(micro-level) in which an agent changes its behaviors and interactions with
other agents to adapt its local environment. And the organizational level
(macro-level) in which the whole system changes it structure by adding or
removing agents. This chapter is dedicated to overview different aspects of
what is called MAS Organization including its motivations, paradigms, models,
and techniques adopted for statically or dynamically organizing agents in MAS.Comment: 12 page
Ruminations: Sundry Notes and Essays on Logic
Ruminations is a collection of sundry notes and essays on Logic. These complement and enrich the author’s past writings, further analyzing or reviewing certain issues.
Among the many topics covered are: the importance of the laws of thought, and how they are applied using the logic of paradox; details of formal logic, including some important new insights on the nesting, merger and splitting up of hypothetical propositions; details of causal logic, including analogical reasoning from cause to cause; a cutting-edge phenomenological analysis of negation.
Additionally, this volume is used to publish a number of notes and essays previously only posted in his Internet site, including a history of Jewish logic and an analysis of Islamic logic
Kant's philosophy of the aesthetic and the philosophy of praxis
This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2012 Association for Economic and Social Analysis.This essay seeks to reconstruct the terms for a more productive engagement with Kant than is typical within contemporary academic cultural Marxism, which sees him as the cornerstone of a bourgeois model of the aesthetic. The essay argues that, in the Critique of Judgment, the aesthetic stands in as a substitute for the missing realm of human praxis. This argument is developed in relation to Kant's concept of reflective judgment that is in turn related to a methodological shift toward inductive and analogical procedures that help Kant overcome the dualisms of the first two Critiques. This reassessment of Kant's aesthetic is further clarified by comparing it with and offering a critique of Terry Eagleton's assessment of the Kantian aesthetic as synonymous with ideology
Visualization in cyber-geography: reconsidering cartography's concept of visualization in current usercentric cybergeographic cosmologies
This article discusses some epistemological problems of a semiotic and cybernetic
character in two current scientific cosmologies in the study of geographic
information systems (GIS) with special reference to the concept of visualization in
modern cartography.
Setting off from Michael Batty’s prolegomena for a virtual geography and Michael
Goodchild’s “Human-Computer-Reality-Interaction” as the field of a new media
convergence and networking of GIS-computation of geo-data, the paper outlines
preliminarily a common field of study, namely that of cybernetic geography, or just
“cyber-geography) owing to the principal similarities with second order cybernetics.
Relating these geographical cosmologies to some of Science’s dominant, historical
perceptions of the exploring and appropriating of Nature as an “inventory of
knowledge”, the article seeks to identify some basic ontological and epistemological
dimensions of cybernetic geography and visualization in modern cartography.
The points made is that a generalized notion of visualization understood as the use of
maps, or more precisely as cybergeographic GIS-thinking seems necessary as an
epistemological as well as a methodological prerequisite to scientific knowledge in
cybergeography. Moreover do these generalized concept seem to lead to a
displacement of the positions traditionally held by the scientist and lay-man citizen,
that is not only in respect of the perception of the matter studied, i.e. the field of
geography, but also of the manner in which the scientist informs the lay-man citizen
in the course of action in the public participation in decision making; a displacement
that seems to lead to a more critical, or perhaps even quasi-scientific approach as
concerns the lay-man user
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