What follows
is a brief summary of the chapters and their content.
0. On the origin
of Mind
Life's need to re-represent itself
Includes table of contents.
1. The start
of the journey
The stages of this book - preparing the reader for what is to come - caution
about words and their usage - introducing thought structures and patterns
- why the link to Darwin - comments on the sources and methodology.
Part I: The
Stated
2. The mind-body myth
Socrates - Plato - Aristotle
Differences between objects and people - subjectivity and objectivity - representations
and abstracts - personal characteristics and idealisations - leaving the grounds
of reality - the quintessential natures of things leading to presumption -
a simple version of the abstraction process.
3. The universe
as a fractal
Jainism
The foundations of the Jaina cosmological model - a careful use of abstracts
- from perception to representation - congruent and incongruent functionalities
- the pitfalls of qualities and how the Jains handled them - a more advanced
version of the abstraction process - the perception-abstraction-transference
(PAT) - how the atom is seen - Jaina logic and how it shapes their cosmos.
4. Building Europe's
mind: the foundations
Manichaeism - St Augustine
Before Christianity - 'up' is good and 'down' is bad - political savvy in
ancient Palestine - training the mind to hate its body - functional and object
abstracts - default abstracts - the ideals in the lap of the god - higher-level
PATs - the higher latency of Christianity compared to other religions - the
logic boundary and the proof of a god.
5. Rights and
wrongs
St Thomas Aquinas - Cathars - etc!
A quick revision - ideals again and other-worldliness - a gradual increase
of abstraction levels - grappling with existence and how the system of the
mind responds - the terror of ungrounded PATs - stereotypes are vital - the
joys of suffering - high-level abstractions and their dangers - incongruent
PAT loops - the inevitability of mass destruction - time travel to a town
in the Middle Ages (an exercise).
6. Into the light
René Descartes - Benedict de Spinoza
The age of reason is full of caution - denominative thought structures - congruent
PAT loops - first encounters with the subconscious and a definition of consciousness
- a schema of grounded and ungrounded associations - intuitive and cognitive
functional abstracts - becoming conscious of subjectivity - fixing cars and
oneself - back to God.
7. The mind as
government
John Locke
What it takes to understand - the first beginnings of the complexity concept
- dangers of incongruence - comparing lower with higher abstractions - sensing
time - the idea as object - resonant thought structures - the contributions
or otherwise of emotions - social horizon and free will - horizontal and vertical
PATs - how to solve puzzles systematically - the aesthetics of children's
rhymes - the Molyneux question.
8. God by any
other name
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Immanuel Kant
A longing for nature and other phantasies - logic boundaries disregarded -
analogies between the mind and society - the affinity of functional abstracts
and its traps - selective uses of ideals and associations - conceptual containers
- a precarious use of maths - abstracting to dizzying heights - a play with
essences - what happens when objects are discarded in favour of highest abstracts
- the functional circularity of Kant's thought processes - ...and the circuit-breaker.
9. The will for
independence
Georg W.F. Hegel - (Charles Darwin) - Friedrich Nietzsche
A new Europe - history in terms of the perceived and its abstractions - how
the logic boundary gets pushed ever outwards - Hegel's functional container
- is 'knowledge' really knowledge? - illusion trees and what drives them -
another free will - still no recognition of the subconscious - contextual
associations - the subjective use of 'freedom' - functional parallels in Darwin's
work - homology and synonymy - Nietzsche's mask - contextual twin structures
- a push-pull approach to Christianity.
10. Anatomy of
a universe
Karl Marx - Edmund Husserl - Carl G. Jung
About the interdependency between an object and its usage - the effectiveness
chart - how an ideology comes into being - tracing the role of incongruent
PAT chains, illusion trees, and reduced abstraction levels in one's perspective
of the world - the cognitive universe of communism - another version of
abstract manipulation, this time upwards - floating above the realm of
objects and how one can crash in Husserl's universe - putting together
the pieces of Jung's world - some down-to-earth nitpicking - God hiding
behind denominative thought structures - a universe of pain.
11. In search
of freedom?
Herbert Marcuse - Jean-Paul Sartre
More on the effectiveness chart with the addition of complexity - determinism
and progression locks - the hankering for original bliss - sexuality handled
with kid gloves - delving into the subconscious - more twin structures - Freud
and Dalí and all that - abstracts as high as ever - even 'nothing' is something
- abstracting one's perception of oneself - rationalisation complexes.
12. Back to earth
Ludwig J.J. Wittgenstein - Karl R. Popper - Homo Sapiens
Latency in high-complex systems - a quick discourse on probabilities - and
so to a definition of Life - trying to deconstruct language - a pseudo recursion
- affinity relationships and pattern recognition at different scales - the
problem with induction - foregoing statistical evidence in favour of functional
possibility - the pitfalls of patterns - a functional picture of the mind
of the boy Calvin as he fears monsters under his bed.
13. A change
of pace
Where we are now and where we are going - defining the conceptual space of
Otoom - some more words on words.
Part II: The
Unstated
14. From: Chaos (?)
Neurons - complexity - post-bio - a quick summary of neurons - what is complexity?
- iterating systems transposed into a live environment - the sheer magnitude
of complexity - the problems with describing a complex system - some misunderstanding
- functional scales - a generic description of intelligence - what it takes
to be intelligent - introducing a non-biological, intelligent system - parallels
to nature - what it takes to have distinct representations - stable, periodical,
and strange attractors and how they lead to affinity relationships - the significance
of depth-first traversal - content is not important but relationships are
- samples of output and what they mean - the importance of affinity potential
and self-organisation - teleology: humbug!
15. To: Order
(?)
Abstractions - clusters - consciousness
What abstractions really are - the kind of problems a robot has to deal with
- calculating latency in terms of fitness peaks and comparing it with the
output from the computer program - a homo-centric interpretation of the program's
output - what we can learn from apraxia patients - more about object and functional
abstracts - conceptual relativity - colour, what's a colour? - to some extent
we all are split-brain patients - the famous grain problem and what's wrong
with it - autocatalytic closure - Turing's halting problem and what it teaches
us - the nature of memory and how it can deceive - how emotions affect one's
affinity relationships - the underlying mechanics of consciousness - a simile
from a toy - how consciousness tricks us - an experiment with time - the context
of myth creation - abandoned children.
16. Setting the
scene
Society
A trivial question - the emergence of culture - the ultimate home of homo
sapiens - grounded and ungrounded affinity relationships - the latency of
a resource space - autocatalysis writ large - why religions came into being
and when - the benefits or otherwise of intelligence - the ramifications of
high and low abstracting minds - conceptual intersections - the drug issue
as an example of identity containers and what they do - how statistical facts
can be turned into illusion trees - abstraction complexes influencing such
things as violence, education, culture - the evangelism of the Christian West
- environmental concerns becoming a religion - a list of behaviour forms demonstrating
a balance of emotional influences.
17. Heralds of
doom
Religion - Woman - Sex
The Christian Bible from a functional perspective - religious rule sets in
terms of cognitive modules - the moral background of the West - the transference
of will in religious mind sets - the Iraq war as an example - debunking ideals
and perfection - delineating cognitive functions against the biological background
of gender - affinity relationships as they apply to 'mother' and 'carer' -
the ideological side of feminism - how perceptions are construed - education
again - what happens when language becomes amorphous - testing one's vocabulary
- the biological platform for sex and how an orgasm could be interpreted -
it's eros, not sex! - religious illusion trees and how we hate and fear eros
- the nature of humiliation - the travails of William James Chidley - religious
violence towards the self - homosexuality and how it got treated - the moral
double-bind - celebrating victimhood - Rodin vs nature - using memory to get
what one wants - the question of age - induction of trauma - a history of
eros in tabular form.
18. PAT^n±
Futures
Information transfer in dynamic, complex resource spaces - limits to the survival
of a system - Fukuyama's radius of trust - the decomposition of social structures
and the formation of conceptual islands - global migration - Islam in the
West - moralism, privacy and security issues - many futures - the EU in terms
of the dynamics of the effectiveness chart - street children, slums and the
definition of 'home' - gene research and biological latency - summarising:
ageing, environmentalism, feminism, immigration, the matron state, moral primitivism,
polarisation of demographics, religion, security and privacy, unemployment
- warnings.
19. Debrief
Some advice for my critics - acknowledgements.
Appendix
Parallels between the wetware and software - description of the setup - pseudo
code - linear vs distributed systems - depth-first vs breadth-first transmission
- the adjustment procedure - the appearance of stable, periodical, and strange
attractors - what the screen displays tell us - affinity values between nodes
- affinity relationships and their potential - fuzzy logic applied to in-
and outputs - test runs - the emergence of memory and abstractions - Einstein's
mystery(?) - some SI units - an example of fuzzy thinking - an 'Otoom-friendly'
version of a Bill of Rights.
Bibliography
Sources ordered chapter by chapter, plus a general list with the sources ordered
by date or name.
Glossary
Overview of chapters
What you are reading now.
Index
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