Offers an original conceptual model of the functioning of the brain and mind to help explain and understand human behavioral patterns. Draws on Jugian psychology, miscellaneous theories of the mind, and principles of information theory and systems engineering. Written in the language of mathematics, computers, and psychology to construct a model of the organization underlying intelligence.
The touring band life of a full-time student is full of dichotomies. From 2011-2017, Alex Dontre performed 505 concerts with his band Psychostick while simultaneously pursuing a college education. It culminated with a master's degree in Business Psychology from Franklin University, at which time he gave the commencement speech at his graduation as valedictorian."A remarkable first-person odyssey of a young touring musician who artfully combines his comedy rock music performances with completing demanding, long distance, higher education studies. Dontre offers a living, often humorous, and sometimes bawdy, chronicle of memorable characters he meets on the road."Ray Forbes, Ph.D., Professor of Business Psychology, Franklin University"I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place and cannot decide if this book is funny or insightful. As inferred from its title, that's probably because it is both."-Mats E. Eriksson, Ph.D., author of Another Primordial Day,Professor of Paleontology, Lund University
Explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life.
"A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing" - Isaiah Berlin If we look back toward the beginning of the universe, we can see the fragile nature of existence. If events unfolded differently, life would not exist. Particles and anti-particles, or matter and anti-matter, were residues of the energy created by the heat of the Big Bang. As the universe cooled, the particles and antiparticles destroyed one another in pairs. If the amounts of matter and antimatter had been equal, everything would be annihilated, and there would be no life in the universe. There wouldn't be anything. There had to be an initial asymmetry, more matter than antimatter, so that after the universe cooled, there would be stars left over. Thus, the universe exists because of a basic dichotomy, between matter and antimatter. But what if everything had this dual character? What if brains, morality, nature, information, perception, and thought all exist due to a fundamental division or dichotomy? What if our grand theories about human nature are informed by the dichotomous nature of our brains? What if the grand theories themselves describe human psychology and behavior as the tension between opposites? In The Dichotomy of the Self, I explore what has been termed as "the coincidence of opposites" - the ways in which dualities manifest in nature and in our lives. For each discovery, there is a discoverer. Throughout the book, I will go through the ideas of all the great discovers of our time. You will learn how these ideas can explain the persistent existence of conflict, rigidity, blindness, narcissism, polarization, short-sightedness, stupidity, and naivety.
The book questions two key dichotomies: that of the apparent and real, and that of the internal and external. This leads to revised notions of the structure of experience and the object of knowledge. Our world is experienced as possibilities of action, and to know is to know what to do. A further consequence is that the mind is best considered as a property of organisms’ interactions with their environment. The unit of analysis is the loop of action and perception, and the central concept is the notion of habit of action, which provides the embodied basis of cognition as the anticipation of action. This holds for non-linguistic tacit meanings as well as for linguistic meanings. Habit of action is a teleological notion and thus opens a possibility for defining intentionality and normativity in terms of the soft naturalism adopted in the book. The mind is embodied, and this embodiment determines our physical perspective on the world. Our sensory organs and other instruments give us instrumental access to the world, and this access is epistemic in character. The distinction between the physical and conceptual viewpoint allows us to define truth as the correspondence with operational fit. This embodied epistemic truth is however not a sign of antirealism, as the instrumentally accessed theoretical objects are precisely those objects that experimental science deals with.
THE INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER From the #1 New York Times bestselling authors of Extreme Ownership comes a new and revolutionary approach to help leaders recognize and attain the leadership balance crucial to victory. With their first book, Extreme Ownership (published in October 2015), Jocko Willink and Leif Babin set a new standard for leadership, challenging readers to become better leaders, better followers, and better people, in both their professional and personal lives. Now, in THE DICHOTOMY OF LEADERSHIP, Jocko and Leif dive even deeper into the unchartered and complex waters of a concept first introduced in Extreme Ownership: finding balance between the opposing forces that pull every leader in different directions. Here, Willink and Babin get granular into the nuances that every successful leader must navigate. Mastering the Dichotomy of Leadership requires understanding when to lead and when to follow; when to aggressively maneuver and when to pause and let things develop; when to detach and let the team run and when to dive into the details and micromanage. In addition, every leader must: · Take Extreme Ownership of everything that impacts their mission, yet utilize Decentralize Command by giving ownership to their team. · Care deeply about their people and their individual success and livelihoods, yet look out for the good of the overall team and above all accomplish the strategic mission. · Exhibit the most important quality in a leader—humility, but also be willing to speak up and push back against questionable decisions that could hurt the team and the mission. With examples from the authors’ combat and training experiences in the SEAL teams, and then a demonstration of how each lesson applies to the business world, Willink and Babin clearly explain THE DICHOTOMY OF LEADERSHIP—skills that are mission-critical for any leader and any team to achieve their ultimate goal: VICTORY.
This book is a condensation of a large body of work concerning human learning carried out over a period of more than five years by Dr. Sun and his collaborators. In a nutshell, this work is concerned with a broad framework for studying human cognition based on a new approach that is characterized by its focus on the dichotomy of, and the interaction between, explicit and implicit cognition and a computational model that implements this framework. In this work, a broad, generic computational model was developed that instantiates Dr. Sun's framework and enables the testing of his theoretical approach in a variety of ways. With this model, simulation results were matched with data of human cognition in a variety of different domains. Formal (mathematical and computational) analyses were also carried out to further explore the model and its numerous implementational details. Furthermore, this book addresses some of the most significant theoretical issues, such as symbol grounding, intentionality, social cognition, consciousness, and other theoretical issues in relation to the framework. The general framework and the model developed generate interesting insights into these theoretical issues.
If philosophy has any business in the world, it is the clarification of our thinking and the clearing away of ideas that cloud the mind. In this book, one of the world's preeminent philosophers takes issue with an idea that has found an all-too-prominent place in popular culture and philosophical thought: the idea that while factual claims can be rationally established or refuted, claims about value are wholly subjective, not capable of being rationally argued for or against. Although it is on occasion important and useful to distinguish between factual claims and value judgments, the distinction becomes, Hilary Putnam argues, positively harmful when identified with a dichotomy between the objective and the purely "subjective." Putnam explores the arguments that led so much of the analytic philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology to become openly hostile to the idea that talk of value and human flourishing can be right or wrong, rational or irrational; and by which, following philosophy, social sciences such as economics have fallen victim to the bankrupt metaphysics of Logical Positivism. Tracing the problem back to Hume's conception of a "matter of fact" as well as to Kant's distinction between "analytic" and "synthetic" judgments, Putnam identifies a path forward in the work of Amartya Sen. Lively, concise, and wise, his book prepares the way for a renewed mutual fruition of philosophy and the social sciences.
A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind. Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine, but fully neither. In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian George Makari shows how writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing, but a natural one. From the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon, seminal thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, and Kant worked alongside often-forgotten brain specialists, physiologists, and alienists in the hopes of mapping the inner world. Conducted in a cauldron of political turmoil, these frequently shocking, always embattled efforts would give rise to psychiatry, mind sciences such as phrenology, and radically new visions of the self. Further, they would be crucial to the establishment of secular ethics and political liberalism. Boldly original, wide-ranging, and brilliantly synthetic, Soul Machine gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western mind.
