The Circle of Explanation in the Sciences

Ontological discontinuities have logical and computational consequences. Physics with constraints begets chemistry; naí¯ve nanotechnology chose to ignore the effects of numerical constraints in orbitals on the type of molecules that can be created. On entering the biological realm, these numerical constraints begin to transform into syntax and semantics. Such projects as the HGP and GWAS have plateaued after ignoring these constraints, best handled in new subjects like biosemiotics. In this paper, a new way of parsing nature, one that starts from the fact of ontological distinctions, is proposed. Two foci are later identified; the bridge subject of biosemiotics, which this author dealt with in a previous C+H paper, and the quantum mind hypothesis. The latter is seen as another bridge, this time from the academy to the real world in which we are objects as much as subjects

Review of "Collected Papers of Martin Kay: A Half-Century of Computational Linguistics"

Is computational a dead linguistics; review of "Collected Papers of Martin Kay: A Half-Century of Computational Linguistics"Martin Kay (2010) with the editorial assistance of Dan Flickinger & Stephan Oepen" 639 pp. CSLI Publications Stanford Universit

Remarks on the Foundations of Biology

This paper attempts, inevitably briefly, a re-categorization and partial resolution of some foundational issues in biology -clearing exercise extends the notion of causality in biology from merely the efficient cause to include also final and formal causality. The Human Genome Project (hpg) can be looked on as an attempt to ground explanation of the phenotype in terms of an efficient cause rooted in a gene. This notion gives rise to the first section discussing the computational metaphor and epigenesis and suggesting ways to extend this metaphor. The extended notion of causality alluded to above is necessary, but not sufficient, to demarcate a specific explanatory realm for the biological. While the universe can ultimately, perhaps, be explained by quantum fluctuations being computed through the laws of nature, the origin of life remains a mystery. The ground-clearing exercise refers to coincidences that motivate the cosmological anthropic principle, before raising an alert about the possibility of similar thermodynamic laws facilitating the emergence of life. "Life itself seems to involve symbolic operations that can be described by the grammatical rules within tightly-defined limits of complexity. The nascent field of biosemiotics has extended this argument, often in a Peircean direction. Yet, even here, the task involved needs to be specified. Is the organism creating proteins to launch an immune counter-attack ? Alternatively, is a pluripotent stem cell generating an entire organism? We consider what these separate tasks might look like computationally. The paper ends with further delimitation of the specifically biological. At what point in the infinitesimal does life refuse to reveal its secrets? Conversely, at what specific levels in increasing size and complexity do boundary conditions emerge with hierarchy becoming immanent

Introduction to the Special Issue: Foundations of Mind II: A Dialogue of World-Views

This is the introduction to the Special Issue: Foundations of Mind II: A Dialogue of World-Views

Review of "Reclaiming Enchantment: Humanity In A Creative Universe" by Stuart Kauffman

Review of  "Reclaiming Enchantment: Humanity In A Creative Universe" by Stuart Kauffman NY: OUP, 2016

Communicative rhythm in gesture and speech

Wachsmuth I. Communicative rhythm in gesture and speech. In: Mc Kevitt P, Ó Nualláin S, Mulvihill C, eds. Language, Vision and Music. Reprinted by permission of Springer Publishing. Amsterdam: Benjamins; 2002: 117-132.Led by the fundamental role that rhythms apparently play in speech and gestural communication among humans, this study was undertaken to substantiate a biologically motivated model for synchronizing speech and gesture input in human computer interaction. Our approach presents a novel method which conceptualizes a multimodal user interface on the basis of timed agent systems. We use multiple agents for the purpose of polling presemantic information from different sensory channels (speech and hand gestures) and integrating them to multimodal data structures that can be processed by an application system which is again based on agent systems. This article was previously published under the same title in: Annelies Braffort et al. (Eds.) (1999), Gesture-Based Communication in Human-Computer Interaction, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 1739, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, and is reprinted here by kind permission of Springer-Verlag

Visualising lexical prosodic representations for speech applications

Carson-Berndsen J, Gibbon D. Visualising lexical prosodic representations for speech applications. In: Mc Kevitt P, Ó Nualláin S, Mulvihill C, eds. Language, Vision and Music. Selected papers from the 8th International Workshop on the Cognitive Science of Natural Language Processing, Galway, 1999. Advances in Consciousness Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company; 2002: 29-38