Aristotle's Laptop

The following sections are included:

• Contents

• Foreword

The following sections are included:

• All Things Informational

• What is Information?

• Shannon and Crackly Telephone Lines and Minds (Chapter 2. Shannon: The Reluctant Hero of the Information Age)

• Why Billions of Cells? (Chapter 3. Billions of Brain Cells: Guesses and Models)

• The Circles of the Mind (Chapter 4. Imagination in the Circles of a Network)

• Phenomenal States (Chapter 5. Phenomenal Information: The World and Neural States)

• Information Integration (Chapter 6. Information Integration: The Key to Consciousness?)

• The Joy of Seeing (Chapter 7. The Joy of Seeing: Gathering Visual Information)

• Some Don’t Like This (Chapter 8: The Informational Mind: Oxymoron or New Science?)

• The Dark Submerged Layers of the Mind (Chapter 9. The Unconscious Mind: Freud’s Influential Vision)

• And Now For Aristotle (Chapter 10. Aristotle’s Living Soul)

The following sections are included:

• Brief prologue:The exemplary engineer

• From Michigan to juggling machines
  • A quiet corner of Gaylord, Michigan
  • Impact at MIT
  • Dr Shannon — Mathematician?
  • The Bell Telephone Laboratories
  • The need for an information theory
  • Fun and games
  • The years that followed: life-like machines
  • Returning to academia and bowing out

• Communication according to Shannon
  • The Bit
  • What is entropy and why does it matter in communications?
  • Communication at a distance
  • How much information can a channel transmit?
  • Channel capacity and the digital age?

• Shannon and the internet

• Shannon and the informational mind

The following sections are included:

• Not neural networks 101

• Where is the mind?

• The fine grain of the brain

• Cajal (1852–1934)

• The electrochemical neuron

• A Logical Calculus of nervous activity
  • Warren McCulloch
  • Walter Pitts (1923–1969)

• The logical calculus

• The Consequences

• Learning and adaptation
  • Bernard Widrow
  • Frank Rosenblatt (1928–1971) and his detractors

• Closed paths and other escapes from objections

• Spiking neurons

• Weightless neurons

• Looking back in this chapter: Mind and the science of the day

The following sections are included:

• Neural thought: A target for this Chapter — State Structures, Not ‘Cat’ or ‘Dog’ Cells

• Lashley, the Iconoclast of ancient connectionism

• Donald Hebb: Nailing mind to brain
  • Neural (Hebbian) learning
  • Cell assemblies
  • The state of play after Hebb

• Automata studies
  • Finite automata

• More automata studies: The beginnings of major controversies

• Neural automata theory simplified
  • Lessons from Moore’s work

• Finding inner states
  • Meanwhile … outside the US: Eduardo Caianiello
  • Meanwhile … Outside the US: Teuvo Kohonen
  • Back in the US … Stephen Grossberg

• So how do neurons think?

The following sections are included:

• The Inner Eye

• Phenomenology
  • Franz Clemens Horatio Hermann Brentano (1838–1917)
  • Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (1859–1938)
  • Other Phenomenologists

• Phenomenology and the Mental-Automaton Designer

• Iconic Learning
  • Iconic Learning: The Beginnings Visual Experience in a Simple Network
  • A Note on Where the Mental Images Might Be
  • Experiments with Iconic Learning
  • Experiment 1: Memory and neuron size
  • Some analysis

• State Structures

• Zones of State Space

• Probabilistic State Structures
  • The usefulness of noise

• The Phenomenal Mental State: A Building Brick for Consciousness?

The following sections are included:

• Something brewing?

• Some intuitions

• Giulio Tononi

• Information integration theories² (Contributed by Mike Beaton)
  • The photodiode and the camera
  • Measures of Φ
  • Φ Measure 1 (Call it Φ₁)⁷
  • Φ Measure 2 (Call it Φ₂)

• Difficulty in assessments of Φ and how ‘liveliness’ might improve things
  • Liveliness: some history
  • Relevance to information integration
  • Commentary

• Qualia and information integration
  • From capacity to qualia

• Tononi’s example of a quale

• Criticism of this approach to qualia

• Appendix. A simplification of vectors

• Acknowledgments

The following sections are included:

• The divisive brain

• Division of labor in the visual cortex
  • The eyes and their probing retina
  • Between eye and V1
  • Stepping aside
  • V1 — The striate primary visual cortex
  • The extrastriate visual cortex

• Discovering integration in the visual cortex

• A Depictive theory
  • The Crick and Koch stimulus
  • A necessary world referent

• An experiment in artificial visual awareness
  • Experiment 1: iconic memory
  • Experiment 2: from memory to awareness

• The stream of experience
  • Perceptual experience: Iconic movement and time
  • Memory: How the state structure becomes useful
  • From the Foveal patch to a visual mind
  • The informational mind hypothesis

• Informational mind hypothesis (IMH)

Not all contemporary thinkers jump with joy at the announcement that a mind might be ‘informational’. For example Raymond Tallis, gerontologist and prolific author of philosophical texts, makes the following observation:

… ‘information’ is absolutely pivotal to establishing the conceptual confusions … of much modern thought about the mind and the brain.¹…

Having advocated that consciousness is a state structure of world-representing states, what do we make of the following?…

We agree. But in this chapter, by way of a conclusion to the arguments set out in this book, we look at Aristotle’s own writings in De Anima on the mental nature of a living being. Much of the perceived difficulty persists to the present day and this leads us to ask whether what Aristotle describes as ‘one of the most difficult things in the world’ might have been made easier had he been able to include informational structures in his analytical armory. Predictably, we would answer ‘yes’. Now we overview De Anima, commenting on where informational issues seem to be important.

The following sections are included:

• Appendix THE INFORMATIONAL MIND: A FORMAL PORTRAIT

• Author Index

• Subject Index