Ongoing bibliography

Anil Mitra, Copyright © 1997 – 2022

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Contents

Introduction

Reference

General

Philosophy

On Exploration

Brain, AI, Mind and Consciousness

Psychology

Computers and Networking

 

Introduction

Not systematically maintained (2022).

Reference

Tice, T. N. and T. P. Slavens, Research Guide to Philosophy,

De George, R. T., The Philosopher’s Guide to Sources, Research, Tools, Professional Life, and Related Fields

St. Elmo, Nauman, Jr., Dictionary of Asian Philosophies

International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences

Encyclopedia of Philosophy

McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Sciences and Technology

General

Russell, Bertrand, The Analysis of Matter: with a new Introduction, 1927. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd

Russell, Bertrand, The Analysis of Mind, 1921. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd

Safranski, Rüdiger, Martin Heidegger, 1998

Mehta, Ved, The Fly and the Bottle: Conversations with British Intellectuals, 1961

Luria, A. T., The Making of Mind, 1984

Jung, C. G., Analytical Psychology: It’s Theory and Practice, 1968

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 1999

Press, William H., Flannery, Brian P. and Vetterling, William T., Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN 77 and FORTRAN 90: The Art of Scientific and Parallel Computing, 1997, Cambridge University Press

Philosophy

Howey, Richard Lowell, Heidegger and Jaspers on Nietzsche: A Critical Examination of Heidegger’s and Jaspers’ Interpretations of Nietzsche, 1973, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff

Collins, Randall, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, 1998

On Exploration

Powell, G. W., The Exploration of he Colorado River and its Canyons, 1895. [Topic: Exploration]

Byrd, Richard E., Alone, 1938. [Topic: Exploration. Subject: Winter exploration of the Arctic.]

Lawrence, R. D., The Ghost Walker, 1983

The author develops a special relation of understanding and trust with a male puma over a winter spent in the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia - after having earlier developed a similar relation with a captive puma in the London zoo. Note: I report on the story without commenting on the validity. The account is an individual experience - not intended as a controlled scientific one. He failed to develop a similar with the female that partnered with the male

Believes markings have to do with mating, not territory. Reports a special state of awareness/communication that occurred spontaneously - that enabled him to understand and relate to animals in the wild and that he could not reproduce on command. Believes these states to be ESP. The ruggedness, courage, openness to nature, to times of day and shades of light…attunement of sight, smell, hearing and touch…light sensitivity of peripheral vision: after 20 to 60 minutes of dark night the eye becomes 1000 times more sensitive

Brain, AI, Mind and Consciousness

Kurzweil, Ray, The Age of Spiritual Machines, 1998

Moravec, Hans, Robot, 1998

Gershenfeld, Neil, When Things Start to Think, 1998

The three books were reviewed by Colin McGinn, professor of philosophy at Rutgers, in the January 3, 1999 New York Times Review of Books. “…the books cover much the same ground…” but McGinn seems to prefer Kurzweil’s book for its philosophic care and its comprehensive cover of present and future technology. As a group, the books overstate the potential of computers to duplicate the performance and experience of the human mind. Philosophically, and on artificial intelligence, they are “wobbly” especially Moravec’s book who “writes bizarre, confused, incomprehensible things about consciousness as an abstraction…” McGinn criticizes the Turing test measure of machine consciousness [a] as application of the long abandoned doctrine of behaviorism, [b] using “Searle’s Chinese Room argument that performance does not equate to consciousness, and [c] “to know whether we can construct a conscious machine we need to know what makes us conscious…and “but we simply don’t know what makes organic brains conscious…”

But, the books are strong on computer technology. Kurzweil’s “is a book for computer enthusiasts, science fiction writers in search of cutting-edge themes and anyone who wonders where human technology is going next” - there is a wide range of “juicy topics” from entropy to quantum computers to neural nets and genetic algorithms. Two technologies “that might well be over the horizon” are foglets and nanobots. Foglets at ease are a swarm of tiny cell sized robots which at the press of a button come together to form an object of hour choosing - a house, a TV, a friend, a vacation environment. Nanobots are self-replicating micro-robots “that could consume an entire planet including all the organic material…” The review ends with a caution that “self-replication is perhaps the biggest hazard presented by advanced computer technology.”

Blakemore, C. B., and S. A. Greenfield. Mindwaves: Thoughts on Intelligence, Identity and Consciousness, 1987

Churchland, P. S., and T. J. Sejnowski. The Computational Brain, 1992

Greenfield, Susan A., Journey to the Centers of the Mind: Toward a Science of Consciousness, 1995

Greenfield, Susan A., The Human Mind: A Guided Tour, 1997

Levitan, I. B., and L. K. Kazmarek. The Neuron: Cell and Molecular Biology, 1991

Oswald, S. Principles of Cellular, Molecular, and Developmental Neuroscience, 1989

Pinel, J. P. T. Biopsychology, 2nd ed., 1993

Rose, S. The Making of Memory: From Molecules to Mind, 1992

Shepherd, G. S. Neurobiology, 1983

 

Psychology

Sulloway, Frank, Born to Rebel, 1996

Despite the interest and the scientific foundation, the work is lacking in its evaluation and understanding of the following items:

What is creation?

What is growth?

What is knowledge?

What is a contribution?

What is genius?

What is revolution…is it growth

Rebellion, new world individualism, contribution

Computers and Networking

Abdelguerfi, Mahdi and Simon Lavington, The Application of Parallel Architectures to Smart Information Systems, 312 pages. 7” x 10” Hardcover. March 1995. ISBN 0-8186-6552-1. Catalog # BP06552 — $42.00 Members / $56.00 List

Contents: Introduction: Parallel Database and Knowledge-Base Systems • Database Machines • Using Massively-Parallel General Computing Platforms for DBMS • Knowledge-Base Machines • Artificial Intelligence Machines

Illustrates interesting ways in which new parallel hardware is being used to improve the speed and usefulness of a variety of information systems. The book, containing 13 original papers, surveys the latest trends in performance enhancing architectures for smart information systems

The machines featured in the text have been designed to support information systems ranging from relational databases to semantic networks and other artificial intelligence paradigms. In addition, many of the projects illustrated in the book contain generic architectural ideas that support higher-level requirements by using semantics-free hardware designs. The material presented throughout this book will help all those engaged in the design or use of high-performance architectures for nonnumeric applications

Fortran 95 handbook: complete ISO/ANSI reference, Jeanne C. Adams et al., 1997

HTML 4.0 sourcebook, Ian S. Graham, 1998