The architecture of mind and brain

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul F. M. J. Verschure
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Layered Structure ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Cognitive Architectures ◽  
Detailed Understanding ◽  
Unified Theories ◽  
Important Challenge ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
Cognitive Revolution ◽  
The Brain

The components of a Living Machine must be integrated into a functioning whole, which requires a detailed understanding of the architecture of living machines. This chapter starts with a conceptual and historical analysis which from Plato brings us to nineteenth-century neuroscience and early concepts of the layered structure of nervous systems. These concepts were further captured in the cognitive behaviorism of Tolman and came to full fruition in the cognitive revolution of the second half of the twentieth century. Verschure subsequently describes the most relevant proposals of cognitive architectures followed by an overview of the few proposals stemming from modern neuroscience on the architecture of the brain. Subsequently, we will look at contemporary contenders that mediate between cognitive and brain architecture. An important challenge to any model of cognitive architectures is how to benchmark it. Verschure proposes the Unified Theories of Embodied Minds (UTEM) benchmark which advances from Newell’s classic Unified Theories of Cognition benchmark.

The Revival of Quantification: Reflections on Old New Histories

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Steven Ruggles
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second Wave

AbstractQuantitative historical analysis in the United States surged in three distinct waves. The first quantitative wave occurred as part of the “New History” that blossomed in the early twentieth century and disappeared in the 1940s and 1950s with the rise of consensus history. The second wave thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s during the ascendance of the New Economic History, the New Political History, and the New Social History, and died out during the “cultural turn” of the late twentieth century. The third wave of historical quantification—which I call the revival of quantification—emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century and is still underway. I describe characteristics of each wave and discuss the historiographical context of the ebb and flow of quantification in history.

scholarly journals Avicenna’s Ideas and Arguments about Mind and Brain Interaction

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Jamali ◽  
Mehdi Golshani ◽  
Yousef Jamali
Keyword(s):  
Causal Effect ◽  
Philosophical Analysis ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
Islamic Philosophy ◽  
Recent Advances ◽  
Matter Interaction ◽  
Modern Physics ◽  
Physics Literature ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
The Brain

Mind and brain/matter interaction is one of the important and controversial issues in Islamic philosophy. In fact, in the resources of Islamic philosophy, one of the basic parts of philosophical discussions is related to mind’s nature and its interaction with the brain. Especially, in Avicenna’s philosophy, there are many articles and books which have addressed the topic of mind and brain and the relation between them. Avicenna was a profound philosopher, an expert physicist and a proficient physician of his time. Because of his experimental proficiency in medicine and surgery and his deep philosophical analysis, his discussion about mind and brain is very interesting for our time, due to recent advances in neuroscience. In this article, we have explained one of Avicenna’s arguments (in his famous opus “al-Isharat”) about the incorporeity of mind (self), which is very close to modern neuroscience and physics literature. In addition, we explain his model of mind and brain interaction. Avicenna described the mechanism of the causal effect of mind on the brain via a third identity, which works as an interface between them (in his main book “al-Shifa”). We try to illustrate his model by the use of some examples, inspired from modern physics. Also, we explore the philosophical constraints which must be considered in any model of mind-matter interaction, within the Islamic philosophy framework. In fact, we propose a new understanding of Avicenna’s philosophy which is in agreement with modern physics and neuroscience.

scholarly journals Diseases of the Indigenous Peoples of Yakutia in Photo Projects of the Late XIX ‒ First Third of the XX Centuries

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 108-119
Author(s):  
Stepanova Lena B. ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Northeast Asia ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Socialist Republic ◽  
Foreign Population ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Medical Photography

Disease theme of indigenous population of the Northern national outskirts of Russia, as well as the study of special knowledge in the field of traditional medicine and healing practices, for a long time belonged to the taboo part of knowledge. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a turning point in the visual culture of region, when the picture of diseases was expressed through the camera and became public. There are works of photographers documenting the course of the most dangerous diseases, such as leprosy and external manifestations of mental disorders. The aim of this study is to study external factors that influenced the genesis of the “medical” series of visual images of the population of Northeast Asia. The research methodology is based on a cultural and historical analysis of the events that preceded its appearance and subsequent application in medical practice in order to document the course of diseases in the Soviet period. This article presents the results of a brief review of the prehistory of the “medical” direction in ethnographic photography of the Yakut region. The circle of photographers of the Yakut region is defined, where stories illustrating the diseases that the local population suffered from are reflected. At the beginning of the twentieth century, footage of medical practices and shamanistic rituals for healing were presented in the photo projects by I. V. Popov and A. P. Kurochkin. In the 1920s-1930s. the genre of “medical photography” is represented by the works of the doctor-epidemiologist T. A. Kolpakova, military surgeon E. A. Dubrovin, unknown with the initial “D”, who worked in the medical detachment of the Commission for the Study the Productive Forces of the Yakut Republic (CYR) The Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and the People’s Committee the Health of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The experience of studying this topic serves as a clear illustration of the specifics of the region and in some way confirms the conclusions made by the participants of numerous expeditions that studied the foreign population of the Yakut region and predicted the inevitable extinction in the future. Keywords: medical anthropology, anthropology of disease, visual research, indigenous people, visual text, visual sources

Why We Should Reject Transhumanists’ Entire Lens on the Mind and Brain

2021 ◽  
pp. 42-84
Author(s):  
Susan B. Levin
Keyword(s):  
Dual Process ◽  
Appraisal Theory ◽  
Basic Emotion ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
Mental Operations ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

“Basic-emotion” and “dual-process” theorists, joined by transhumanists, view the mind as a set of compartments whose functionality is explained by dedicated areas or systems in the brain. The two theoretical approaches reflect core misconceptions and have been supplanted by “appraisal theory.” Beyond capturing well the entwining of reason and emotion in our mental operations, Klaus Scherer’s version of appraisal theory is compatible with mounting evidence of the brain’s complexity. Having developed a scientific line of argument against transhumanists’ lens on the mind and brain, the author turns to Aristotle’s rational essentialism. Wrongly invoked to support transhumanists’ extreme version, Aristotle’s rational essentialism incorporates a necessary role for nonrational faculties and intrapsychic harmony. While transhumanists’ lens on the mind and brain is at odds with contemporary findings, Aristotle’s view of the mind shares important commitments with Scherer’s appraisal theory and is broadly compatible with an emerging picture of the brain’s complexity.

The history and scope of neuropsychiatry

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Michael Trimble
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Nervous System ◽  
Human Brain ◽  
Limbic System ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Brain

This chapter discusses the clinical necessity from which the intersection of neurology and psychiatry arose, exploring different eras and their associated intellectual milestones in order to understand the historical framework of contemporary neuropsychiatry. Identifying Hippocrates’ original acknowledgement of the relation of the human brain to epilepsy as a start point, the historical development of the field is traced. This encompasses Thomas Willis and his nascent descriptions of the limbic system, the philosophical and alchemical strides of the Enlightenment, and the motivations behind the Romantic era attempts to understand the brain. It then follows the growth of the field through the turn of the twentieth century, in spite of the prominence of psychoanalysis and the idea of the brainless mind, and finally the understanding of the ‘integrated action’ of the body and nervous system, which led to the integration of psychiatry and neurology, allowing for the first neuropsychiatric examinations of epilepsy.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
pp. 279-292
Author(s):  
Thomas Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
Body Problem ◽  
Short Circuit ◽  
Living Organism ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

The ‘Conclusion’ summarizes fundamental concepts and insights of the book. The brain is presented as an organ of mediation, transformation, and resonance. Its functions are integrated by the living organism as a whole, or by the embodied person, respectively: persons have brains, they are not brains. The deadlocks of the mind–body problem result from a short circuit between mind and brain which follows as a consequence from the systematic exclusion of life. A combination of phenomenological, embodied, and enactive approaches seems best suited to overcome this deficit. In contrast to naturalistic reductionism, this leads to a personalistic concept of the human being which has its basis in intercorporeality: it is in the concrete bodily encounter that we primarily recognize each other as embodied subjects or persons.

Trick Cyclists? Recontextualizing Rwandan Dynastic Chronology

1994 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 191-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Newbury
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
The Way

Chronology used to be an object of great interest among African historians because it was seen as essential to history, it provided exactitude where so much else was analytic, and it was such a difficult feature to handle in oral accounts. More recently, historical analysis has been concerned more with processes and periods than with defined events and dates. Although deemed to be useful when available, precise chronology is now seen as less essential to historical reconstruction; it is accepted that chronologies are subject to interpretation and debate, and that these debates themselves illuminate the way in which local communities reconstruct—and historians understand—history.This paper addresses such issues of debate, contestation, and negotiation—that is, it explores the nature of intellectual hegemony—but it does so across cultural boundaries. It thus illustrates a fundamental contradiction in the manner by which historians have treated cultural units defined as distinct: while as independent polities they have been assumed to be culturally autonomous, source material from one is often drawn on to fill in the gaps of others. This procedure was especially common where there were powerful kingdoms whose political boundaries were assumed to be rigid and inviolate. The states of the western Interlacustrine area, each believed to be ruled by an established dynastic line whose origins reached far back into antiquity, provide an exemplary illustration of this process.By the early twentieth century, at the time of European conquest, Rwanda was one of the most powerful of these states, having either conquered and absorbed, or at least dominated, many of the distinct kingdoms with which it formerly competed.

Is the Human Brain Unique?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack M. Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Human Brain ◽  
Brain Function ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Brain Diseases ◽  
Expression Of Genes ◽  
The Future ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
The Brain

Some scientists now argue that humans are really not superior to other species, including our nearest genetic neighbors, chimpanzees and bonobos. Indeed, those animals seem capable of many things previously thought to be uniquely human, including a sense of the future, empathy, depression, and theory of mind. However, it is clear that humans alone produce speech, dominate the globe, and have several brain diseases like schizophrenia. There are three possible sources within the brain for these differences in brain function: in the structure of the brain, in genes coding for proteins in the brain, and in the level of expression of genes in the brain. There is evidence that all three are the case, giving us a place to look for the intersection of the human mind and brain: the expression of genes within neurons of the prefrontal cortex.

scholarly journals Probiotics combined with rifaximin influence the neurometabolic changes in a rat model of type C HE

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuelle Flatt ◽  
Valérie A. McLin ◽  
Olivier Braissant ◽  
Katarzyna Pierzchala ◽  
Paola Mastromarino ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Molecular Mechanisms ◽  
Brain Metabolism ◽  
Treatment Options ◽  
Multimodal Approach ◽  
Ultra High Field ◽  
Neuropsychiatric Disease ◽  
Important Challenge ◽  
Type C ◽  
The Brain

AbstractType C hepatic encephalopathy (HE) is a neuropsychiatric disease caused by chronic liver disease. Management of type C HE remains an important challenge because treatment options are limited. Both the antibiotic rifaximin and probiotics have been reported to reduce the symptoms of HE, but longitudinal studies assessing their effects on brain metabolism are lacking and the molecular mechanisms underpinning their effects are not fully understood. Therefore, we evaluated in detail the effects of these different treatments on the neurometabolic changes associated with type C HE using a multimodal approach including ultra-high field in vivo 1H MRS. We analyzed longitudinally the effect of rifaximin alone or in combination with the probiotic Vivomixx on the brain metabolic profile in the hippocampus and cerebellum of bile duct ligated (BDL) rats, an established model of type C HE. Overall, while rifaximin alone appeared to induce no significant effect on the neurometabolic profile of BDL rats, its association with the probiotic resulted in more attenuated neurometabolic alterations in BDL rats followed longitudinally (i.e. a smaller increase in Gln and milder decrease in Glu and Cr levels). Given that both rifaximin and some probiotics are used in the treatment of HE, the implications of these findings may be clinically relevant.

scholarly journals Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA KRYLOVA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Master Narratives ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Collective Property ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way

‘Modernity’ has long been a working category of historical analysis in Russian and Soviet studies. Like any established category, it bears a history of its own characterised by founding assumptions, conceptual possibilities and lasting interpretive habits. Stephen Kotkin's work has played a special role in framing the kind of scholarship this category has enabled and the kind of modernity it has assigned to twentieth-century Russia. Kotkin's 1995Magnetic Mountainintroduced the concept of ‘socialist modernity’. His continued work with the concept in his 2001Kritikaarticle ‘Modern Times’ and his 2001Armageddon Avertedmarked crucial moments in the history of the discipline and have positioned the author as a pioneering and dominant voice on the subject for nearly two decades. Given the defining nature of Kotkin's work, a critical discussion of its impact on the way the discipline conceives of Soviet modernisation and presents it to non-Russian fields is perhaps overdue. Here, I approach Kotkin's work on modernity as the field's collective property in need of a critical, deconstructive reading for its underlying assumptions, prescribed master narratives, and resultant paradoxes.

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