Workings Of Mind Research Articles

Ancient Indian Vedic Mathematics based 32-Bit Multiplier Design for High Speed and Low Power Processors

The use of Vedic mathematics lies in the fact that it reduces the typical calculation in the conventional mathematics to very simple once. This is so because the Vedic formulae have claimed to be building on the natural principles on which the human mind works. Vedic mathematics is a several effective algorithms, which has spread over to various branches of engineering such as computing. In computers, typical central processing unit devotes a considerable amount of processing time in implementing arithmetic operations, particularly multiplication operation. In this work, I have studied different multipliers, which give low power requirement and high speed, also give information of “urdhva-Tiryabhyam” algorithm of ancient Indian Vedic mathematics, which has utilized for multiplication to improve speed of multipliers. The proposed algorithm has modeled using VHDL, a hardware descriptive language. In a work I have simulated and synthesized 32-bit multiplier, the result shows that multiplier implemented using Vedic multiplication is efficient in terms of speed.

The Artificial Intelligence Development Axioms (A.I.D.A.)

Within this paper is a set of critical new developmental principles concerning the inevitable historical evolution of the faculties of artificial intelligence, as well as the humans manipulating their capabilities. The results may be referred to as axioms as they are contingent on irreducible mathematical models which map the capacities of said artificial intelligence, and the game theoretic considerations of the optimal decision-making of their sentient counterparts. The paper is divided into four primary sections, covering the four primary principles of A.I.D.A., with additional preliminary and concluding sections. It is to be stressed that these are inevitable principles of artificial intelligence development, not merely hypothetical considerations, and this fact emphasizes the importance of their acknowledgment and dissemination within the scope of current academia and scholastic discourse. This paper, and the development of artificial intelligence research, is indebted to the work of many great minds in the century past; however the most prominent figure in whose name this work is dedicated, is the great Hungarian-American mathematician and technologist, John Von Neumann, who first coined the term “technological singularity”, of which this work is the precise elaboration.

Roth's The Counterlife and the Negotiation of Reality and Fiction

In her article "Roth's The Counterlife and the Negotiation of Reality and Fiction" Pia Masiero analyzes some aspects of the readers' negotiations of Phillip Roth's 1986 novel. Masiero shows how Roth in the novel's first chapter "Basel" anatomizes what follows and provides the rules of pertinence which guide the text and the keys to interpret its meaning. Masiero argues that the effects of perspective created by the employment of third-person narration and contra-punctual simultaneous narratives prepare readers to the metafictional choices they encounter in the final chapters of the book. With her analysis, Masiero posits that the novel turns out to be a journey in Nathan Zuckerman's writerly mind and a window on how our own minds work.

Trystes Cosmologiques: When Lévi-Strauss Met the Astrologers

In October 1969 the famous anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss gave an interview to the well-known French astrologers André Barbault and Dr JeanPaul Nicola for the astrology magazine L’Astrologue. To the author’s knowledge this interview has never been discussed in academic journals, and is here published for the first time in English translation. It is considered in the context of its time, and of the issues discussed: the Surrealist movement, which had an important influence on Lévi-Strauss’s early work; the structure of the unconscious mind; and the question of causation in astrology. At the end of the interview Lévi-Strauss suggested a joint project with his interviewers to study the interpretations of serious astrologers as a way of understanding how their minds work. According to Dr Nicola, the suggestion was never developed because in his opinion there was no chance of getting astrologers to agree on how to go about it. In the last 20 years however, several theses have been devoted to similar projects.

Language, cognition, and human nature: selected articles

Introduction 1. Formal models of language learning 2. A computational theory of the mental imagery medium 3. Rules and connections in human language 4. When does human object recognition use a viewer-centered reference frame? 5. Natural language and natural selection 6. The acquisition of argument structure 7. The nature of human concepts: evidence from an unusual source 8. Why nature and nurture won't go away 9. The faculty of language: What's special about it? 10. So how does the mind work? 11. Deep commonalities between life and mind 12. Rationales for indirect speech: The theory of the strategic speaker 13. The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language Author Biography

A Buddhist Take on Gilbert Ryle’s Theory of Mind

Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949/2002. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press) is generally considered a landmark in the quest to refute Cartesian dualism. The work contains many inspirational ideas and mainly posits behavioral disposition as the referent of mind in order to refute mind–body dualism. In this article, I show that the Buddhist theory of ‘non-self’ is also at odds with the belief that a substantial soul exists distinct from the physical body and further point out similarities between the Buddhist outlook and Ryle’s ideas in three parts. First, I illustrate that Ryle’s ‘category mistake’ has certain points in common with the Buddhist refutation of ‘self’. Within the Buddhist framework, referents such as ‘mind’ and ‘self’ are merely imputed terms. The presumed existence of an independent substance such as a ‘soul’, when considered in isolation from the expedient usage of the term ‘mind’, can therefore also be viewed as a ‘category mistake’. Second, attempting to solve the questions of ‘what mind is’ and ‘how mind operates’ are two entirely different approaches to the study of mind. I argue that it is necessary to focus on ‘knowing-how’ rather than ‘knowing-that’, if we are to gain a more comprehensive understanding of mind and avoid any kind of category mistake such as those that follow from isolating the physical properties of brain or drawing inferences from a mystical soul. Third, I aim to show why investigating mind from the perspective of ‘dispositions’ of behavior is a valid approach. The Buddhist concept of karma-vāsanā elucidates the habitual tendency to act or not act in various situations. Based on this theory, I argue that the workings of the human mind bears strong links to the formation of karma and as such have important axiological implications that cannot be ignored. I conclude by pointing out that Ryle’s insightful ideas could in certain ways be complemented by the Buddhist theory of mind. In my view, his philosophy is not only a mediator between Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology, but could perhaps also be seen as a mediator between traditional Eastern systems of thought and contemporary philosophies of mind.

Arthur Miller: Self and Tragedy

Editor's Note: At the 2014 Modem Language Association Annual Convention in Chicago, the Miller Society organized a special round table session, Arthur Miller: Self and Tragedy, that discussed cognitive approaches to Miller's work. Presided by David Palmer, the session brought together the cognitive literary scholars, Patrick Colm Hogan and Bruce McConachie and the Miller scholars: Stephen A. Marino and Matthew C. Roudane. The following is an edited transcript of the session.Palmer: Welcome. This session is the beginning of events leading up to the Society's celebration of the centennial of Miller's birth in October 2015. The core idea for our round-table discussion this evening is quite simple: bring together two scholars who specialize in cognitive approaches to literature and two scholars who specialize in the works of Miller and let them discuss how cognitive approaches provide insights into Miller's vision of tragedy and how Miller's plays reveal the workings of the human mind, in particular how a person develops a sense of self.Miller's plays seem especially well-adapted to this discussion because of the way Miller structured his tragedies. As Ben Brantley, the theater critic of The New York Times, noted in a recent issue of The Miller Journal (Vol. VII, 1 & 2, Fall 2012, 2), Every one of Miller's plays is steeped in a sense of guilt that taints each of its characters; they all take place 'after the fall.' The crisis that prompts the collapse of the narrative that constitutes a person's self generally takes place in Miller's plays before the action begins. Miller approaches tragedy not as a depiction of the moment a character confronts his flawed self-narrative but as a depiction of his characters' floundering to find a new psychological equilibrium the confrontation has occurred, after the fall. This certainly is true of the Keller family in All My Sons (1947), of Willy Loman in Death of a (1949), of John Proctor in The Crucible (1953), and of Quentin in After the Fall (1964). The same pattern is seen in many others of Miller's plays and is what makes these plays such suitable subjects for a cognitive approach to literary interpretation, in particular our understanding of crises in a person's sense of self. This is the general theme our panelists will discuss.We'll begin the round table with brief opening statements from the two cognitive scholars and follow these with statements from the Miller scholars. There then will be a discussion among the panelists, and we hope to have 25 minutes at the end of the session for an open discussion with the audience.McConachie: I've entitled my opening remarks Salesman and Literary to indicate my general endorsement of this approach to literary criticism and my application of it to Miller's Death of a Salesman. I would modify literary Darwinism in a couple of ways, however, which I hope we can talk about during the discussion.In Graphing Jane Austin: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning (2012), authors Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall, plus their two co-authors, summarize the results of their web-based survey questioning hundreds of readers about their response to nineteenth-century British novels. The four literary Darwinists draw several conclusions, three of which are particularly relevant to our purposes today. First, following the work of others, they state that story-telling and listening helped small bands of our evolutionary predecessors to survive. Second, these stories endorsed egalitarian norms through an agonistic structure that favored such values over the norms that promoted individual success. Third, the literary Darwinists demonstrate that we are still telling these kinds of stories, which continue to communicate the biocultural norms we learned in our hunter-gatherer past.Let's look more closely at these conclusions before moving to Salesman. The authors make a strong case that our ancestors adopted altruistic norms around 100,000 years ago to ensure the social cohesion and survivability of their bands. …

Invention and Imagination in Sixteenth-Century English Literature

This article discusses the all-important concepts of invention and imagination within the literary terminology of sixteenth-century England, viewing the former as a concept in transition associated with the rhetorical notion of ‘finding’ within a topical system as well as with ideas on the imagination, and connecting the latter with theories on the workings of the human mind. The conceptual discussion revolves around a selection of extracts taken from early modern dictionaries, works on rhetoric, and poetics, poems, and plays.

Science of Shakespeare: The mental master

The appeal of the Bard lies in his intuitive understanding of how the human mind works

Complexities of Cognition in Poetic Art: Matthew Arnold's 'The Last Word'

As researchers in cognitive studies increasingly turn toward the fine arts and literature as a means of exploring the cognitive complexities of human thought, questions arise as to what exactly cognitive science can offer literary expertise, and how literary expertise might illuminate the workings of the human mind. Much theoretical and methodological work has already been accomplished in addressing these questions, and it is not my intention in this essay to cover the same ground. Rather, by looking at one example of poetry, Matthew Arnold's The Last Word, I aim to show the importance of understanding the cognitive complexities of poetic art for exploring both the nature of human minding and the nature of poetic expression.

‘Commonsense Psychology’ is a Barrier to the Implementation of Best Practice Child Interviewing Guidelines: A Qualitative Analysis of Police Officers’ Beliefs in Scotland

A number of studies have indicated that police officers trained in the use of the Scottish Executive guidelines for the interviewing of child witnesses do not always adhere to the evidence-based recommendations contained within them. This study explored possible reasons for non-adherence through the qualitative examination of interviewers’ free-text responses to questionnaire items designed to survey their impressions of the guidelines and child interviews in general. Respondents reported many instances of non-adherence or adaptations of recommended practice which they explained and justified in terms of a body of lay or commonsense psychological ‘knowledge’. We argue that such beliefs act as a barrier to guideline implementation and further that the unproblematic, taken-for-granted nature of such justifications reveals the poor standing in the public mind of expert, empirical Psychology. Improving future guideline adherence may therefore require, in addition to the established training in forensic issues, the active challenging of prior beliefs about how the mind works, and to this end possibly also the introduction into training of elements of a general science education.

Does Hell Still Have a Future?

In 1998 the Polish writer, Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), observed: ''In my lifetime Heaven and Hell disappeared...After two thousand years in which a huge edifice of creeds and dogmas had been erected, from Origen and St Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and Cardinal Newman, when every work of the human mind and of human hands was created within a system of reference, the age of homelessness has dawned.'' The new circumstances in which Christianity now exists are acknowledged by most commentators nowadays. And it must be admitted that, as regards belief in hell, specifically, the future doesn't look too bright, even in the judgement of mainstream theologians.

The Significance of the Buddhist 10-Membered Formula of Dependent Origination

The dynamic process of karmic activity is one of the key philosophical concepts of the Buddhist doctrine, and is traditionally explained as the operation of a chain of 12 mutually interlinked members of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda). Textual research, however, reveals that a series of alternative chains of members of dependent origination coexisted prior to the systematization of this earlier textual material into the standardized list of 12 members. Such an alternative list consists of 10 members. This article examines the importance of this particular list of 10 members in the development of Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy. This philosophy, the basic interpretation of the mundane world of which is that the world around us only xists as the working of the human mind, i.e. the domain of perceptual consciousness (vijñāna), matured in the late fourth–early fifth century CE. This examination of the 10-fold formula of dependent origination also adds to our knowledge of the region of origin of Yogācāra philosophy, and thus on the geographical diversities within the development of Buddhist philosophy.

The Dethroning of Ideocracy

Robert Musil was not a professional philosopher. He was a novelist-and according to the widely accepted canon, his contribution to the twentieth-century novel is only matched by very few.Why then should there be a special issue on him in The Monist? The reason is that Musil was a philosopher-just a different kind of philosopher. He was trained in philosophy (he wrote his Ph.D. on Ernst Mach) and gave up a promising career in academia, turning down a job offer in Meinong's department because he thought it better to express his philosophical ideas by means of writing novels.While Musil is often considered to be the 'philosophical novelist'par excellence, his attitude towards the 'philosophical novel', that is, a novel expressing philosophical views, is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, he did believe that philosophy, science, and literature all do the same thing, just by different means (Notebook 5, 1911, October 14 [Musil 1976]). And his explicit reason for giving up academic philosophy was that philosophizing by means of writing novels was more efficient. At the same time, he warned against the obvious pitfalls of philosophical novels. As he said, usually it is not a pleasant experience when writers philosophize and formulate their thoughts directly (Musil 1999, 409). This is very similar to Proust's famous dictum in Time Regained, according to which work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left. Is this a contradiction then? Was Musil for or against the philosophical novels he later became so closely associated with? I don't think there is a contradiction here. Musil was committed to philosophizing by writing novels, but he didn't do it directly. He did so, to use a distinction from Philip Kitcher's framework of talking about the philosophical content of novels, by showing and not by saying (Kitcher 2013, Chapter 1 as well as Kitcher's paper here; see also Nanay [2013b]).Musil does not give us explicit philosophical theories. He simply shows us characters in various situations. But if we manage to put together these situations in the right way, we encounter philosophical ideas as clearly as if they were explicitly explained. A quick example. The protagonist of The Man Without Qualities is Ulrich and one of the least likable characters in the book is Amheim. But their general outlook is very similar in many respects. Most importantly, they are both against taking the human mind to be fully and entirely rational and they both emphasize the nonrational elements in human behavior and life. But the similarity of their views highlights the very few but nonetheless even more important differences-that the denial of rationality can lead to a pan-romantic attitude and also to a cheerfully skeptical antiromantic attitude. Musil doesn't explain this as if he were writing a carefully argued philosophy paper about the way the mind works, but by showing us two examples that have so much overlap that we immediately focus on the differences and the reasons for these differences.In this introduction, I would like to focus on what I take to be the main focus of Musil's philosophy, his account of the way the human mind works. I will largely ignore his extremely complex and sophisticated accounts of free will, moral responsibility, emotions, aesthetics, ethics, nominalism and naturalism. Many of these ideas foreshadow some important debates in contemporary analytic and continental philosophy. To mention just a few, he gives early formulations of the idea of moral luck, the narrative conception of the self, a neoformalist account of aesthetic experience, a fairly strong version of the embodiment of the mind, a similarly strong version of philosophical naturalism, and an outright radical account of human freedom (see Wilson's paper on some of these). But what I take to be the underlying theme of most of these ideas is Musil's insistence on, or maybe we should say obsession with, thinking of the human mind in a way that does not consider the functioning of the mind to be fully and completely rational. …

The Contemporary Novel and the City: Re-Conceiving National and Narrative Form by Stuti Khanna

Reviewed by: The Contemporary Novel and the City: Re-Conceiving National and Narrative Form by Stuti Khanna David Spurr (bio) The Contemporary Novel and the City: Re-Conceiving National and Narrative Form, by Stuti Khanna. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. viii + 229 pp. $95.00. The title of this monograph is slightly misleading, as it consists primarily of a comparative study of James Joyce and Salman Rushdie. The comparison is instructive, however, insofar as the works of these two writers represent fictional interpretations of the city in its modern and postmodern forms, respectively. According to Stuti Khanna, “[m]odernist” cities like “Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and London” were the cosmopolitan “metropolises” at the beginning of the twentieth century that favored the development of modernist art (3). Dublin figures among them at least marginally, because of the modern elements of its infrastructure and the presence of the Irish Revival. “Postmodern” cities include those beyond Europe and North America, like Bombay, Shanghai, and São Paulo, which are marked by the effects of late capitalism, globalization, migration, and postmodern culture (3). Khanna’s contention is that the radical literary forms adopted by Joyce and Rushdie are the direct effects of urban experience in the cities about which they write. Her study also has the implicit purpose of evaluating both writers according to the degree in which they accurately represent the “multiple, many-layered” aspects of the city, its variety of classes and ethnicities, its “crowded realities,” and its status as a place for “the articulation of untotalizable differences that open up new ways of thinking and being” (69, 144, 66). With respect to Joyce, this argument is hardly new, but in support of it Khanna offers some interesting readings of certain episodes in Ulysses. What takes places in “Cyclops,” for example, is not the simple confrontation of tolerance and intolerance or of reason and passion conventionally seen there. If we take into account everything [End Page 535] said by all those present in Barney Kiernan’s pub, there is, in fact, a spirited debate about the categories of nation and race that is more than two-sided. Not everything the Citizen says is unreasonable, such as his environmentalist plea against deforestation: “Save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O” (U 12.1263–64). The episode explores a variety of ways of being Irish, making it difficult to reach definite conclusions about the nature of Irish nationalism. As a further example of the “heterogeneities and contradictions” found in a “postcolonial metropolis” (83), Khanna points to ways in which the official status of such civic institutions as the museum and public library is transformed in Joyce’s narrative. Bloom’s curiosity concerning the nether parts of the Venus Callipyge at the National Museum is offered as an alternate but legitimate form of aesthetic appreciation resulting from Joyce’s refusal to “hierarchize different kinds of knowledges” (108). In the library, the traditional “injunction to silence” is “flouted with impunity as even the librarians [themselves] participate with gusto” in the literary discussion (110). Since this is presented as an example of lively disregard for institutional decorum, it should perhaps be pointed out that the discussion in question takes place in Thomas Lyster’s office, sealed by closed doors from the reading room and adjacent hallway. Khanna’s most interesting chapter explores the way both Joyce and Rushdie put forward figures of the artist as a means of exploring the city. This is a key question insofar as both modernism and postmodernism are commonly held to be artistic movements for which the urban environment has been essential both as a space of collaboration and as a source of new material for artists. In these two writers, however, the figure of the artist is far from being a triumphant product of the city. Khanna points out that, for Stephen Dedalus, the city is not “confronted head on but sublimated and epiphanized into timeless essences” (125). Stephen, in other words, will not serve as a reliable interpreter of the city. That task falls, rather, on Leopold Bloom, whose “mind works by association, opening up unending series of observations” and reflections on...

Narrative Reciprocity

AbstractI have become curious about reciprocity within clinical practice. A vast topic that mobilizes considerations of money, knowledge, kinship, power, culture, and uses of the body, reciprocity is a strong means by which to achieve the egality required of just health care. Within health care, reciprocity might enable not only so‐called shared decision‐making and patient autonomy. It might open the door to mutual acknowledgement of the value of each participant's beliefs and habits. It might appear as a humble realization that no one understands what health is and a concurrent welcoming curiosity about one another's conception of how the body and speech and mind work. From the intimate to the international levels of care, such forms of reciprocity may culminate in the radical and powerful state of reciprocal recognition.In this short essay, I will focus on one aspect of reciprocity in health care: the narrative and potentially reciprocal nature of attention in health care. A critical element in the development of therapeutic alliance, clinical accuracy, and effective practice, attention requires a donation of the self as a vessel into which can enter that which is perceived or, from the other side, a penetrating of that which is perceived so that one sees it from within its own vessel.

Blending Dao: An Analysis of Images in the Daode jing

The well-known ambiguity surrounding the concept of Dao, especially in the Daode jing, has led some scholars to argue for “religious” interpretations. They find the difficultly in defining Dao intentional and argue that Dao cannot be appreciated through language, but requires some personal change. In this essay I will argue that these types of interpretations, generally speaking, reduces the text to a mainly religious (i.e. faith based) thought by ignoring important philosophical elements of Daode jing. The inability to put Dao into words does not negate any or all comprehension of Dao; it merely informs readers that Dao cannot be exhausted in words. Accordingly, elucidating this idea seems to be one of the major focuses of the text, which is done mainly through the wide use of a variety of images. In order to tackle this issue I propose a “cross-cultural image analysis.” I will use metaphor interpretation of Western cognitive science to examine images in the Daode jing and show how they are related to aid in an understanding of Dao. I employ the “multiple blend” metaphor analysis purposed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2003), a template that explains how a series of metaphors can work together to produce new dimensions of comprehension. When Fauconnier and Turner describe multiple blends they do so in order to explain how the mind works (2003, 17–18). This “multiple blend analysis” is slightly different: it explains how one could think of the images in Daode jing.

Devotion and Intellectual Labor

This special issue is a response to three remarkable developments in the humanities: religion's return to the center of scholarly attention, an outpouring of work on the changing nature and historical conditions of intellectual labor, and the widespread revival of interest in affect. While narrowly epistemological approaches to the study of religion have long been criticized for failing to capture aspects of mental activity that can't be described in rational-propositional terms, perhaps only a small portion of anyone's intellectual life can be adequately rendered in these terms. Simone Weil's famous assertion that every school exercise is like a sacrament challenges us to reconsider the limited vocabulary we employ to describe the nature of the mind's work in both “religious” and “secular” contexts. To this end, essays explore intersections between devotional practice and intellectual pursuits like textual production and scientific investigation.

Love Is the Cause of Human Evolution

Ever since the publication of “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” by Charles Darwin in 1859, many theories have been put forward regarding the reasons as to why animals and humans are different. Whilst there was an initial tendency to focus on the differences apparent in the main anatomic characteristics of the human body, in more recent time research has concentrated on differences that are evident both in the anatomy and in that of the workings of the human brain. While in the past, the essence of the human being was placed on the pelvic structure, the creation of tools or even the intermaxillary bone, the introduction of new technology and cerebral imaging is enabling us to glean previously unthinkable information regarding the evolution of specific structures and parts of the brain. All these discoveries can be associated with new theories based on a better understanding of the workings of the human mind. Hence, as a result of an enormous joint effort, a comprehensible description of the cause of the origin of mankind is emerging. This allows “love”, once considered as merely a simple emotion, to be at the very core of explaining the evolutionary characteristics of the human being.

Resonant matter: pattern correlates of process-in-formation

Through the aid of ever advancing technology, the analysis of complex phenomena offers us more comprehensive insights regarding the intricate inner workings of Nature’s dynamic processes. Through such digital simulations (i.e., of fluid, aero, neuro and vibratory dynamics), the operations and flow of energy are revealed as highly patterned process-structures of activity. These vivid configurations often resemble and correlate with the patterns and motifs found at different scales throughout Nature and in a myriad of cultural artifacts. As intricately braided cellular relationships, these fertile processes evolve into highly integrative systems with re-generative, shape-shifting and re-structuring capabilities. Moreover, they are robust coalitions of event-filled-processes, highly responsive and fluently encoded with information. This embodied potential of generative kinetic in-formation and related patterns have been explored and offer more comprehensive insights regarding the resonances between self-organization, pattern generation and emergent complex morphology. At the heart of this lies the nature of process-structures and their elaborations into multi-dimensionally entrained kinetic patterns of patterns-in-formation. We are experientially embodied with and inextricably embedded within this interplay of ubiquitous metapatterns with reciprocally related cultural artifacts and motifs offering insightful resonances as analytical tools advance and probe further into the inner workings of the human mind and the nature of embodied consciousness.