How do brains make minds? This question is one of the most challenging in science and philosophy because of the difficulty of figuring out how billions of brain cells can add up to thoughts and feelings. Paul Thagard develops a brilliant account of mental operations using promising new ideas from theoretical neuroscience. Single neurons cannot do much by themselves, but groups of neurons work together to accomplish powerful kinds of mental representation, including concepts, images, and rules.
Minds enable people to perceive, imagine, solve problems, understand, learn, speak, reason, create, and be emotional and conscious. Competing explanations of how the mind works have identified it as soul, computer, brain, dynamical system, or social construction. This book explains minds in terms of interacting mechanisms operating at multiple levels, including the social, mental, neural, and molecular.
Brain-Mind presents a unified, brain-based theory of cognition and emotion with applications to the most complex kinds of thinking, right up to consciousness and creativity. Unification comes from systematic application of Chris Eliasmith's powerful new Semantic Pointer Architecture, a highly original synthesis of neural network and symbolic ideas about how the mind works. The book shows the relevance of semantic pointers to a full range of important kinds of mental representations, from sensations and imagery to concepts, rules, analogies, and emotions. Neural mechanisms are used to explain many phenomena concerning consciousness, action, intention, language, creativity, and the self.
This book belongs to a trio that includes Mind-Society: From Brains to Social Sciences and Professions and Natural Philosophy: From Social Brains to Knowledge, Reality, Morality, and Beauty. They can be read independently, but together they make up a Treatise on Mind and Society that provides a unified and comprehensive treatment of the cognitive sciences, social sciences, professions, and humanities.
Industry Reviews
"With his deep background in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, Thagard is able to sketch a bird's eye view of the mind-encompassing cognition, emotion, and consciousness-while staying grounded in a computational theory of neural organization."
-- Keith J. Holyoak, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles
"Paul Thagard's Brain-Mind is an extremely ambitious attempt (largely successful, I believe), to provide a unified, neurally-based, account of how the Brain creates the Mind. Using Chris Eliasmith's Semantic Pointer Architecture and related ideas, Thagard shows how all the various aspects of the mind from lower level phenomena, such as Perception, to the highest levels of cognition, such as Language and the Self, can be realized in terms of a set of
unifying principles based on the Semantic Pointer Architecture and its grounding in neural mechanisms. It provides a strong intellectual foundation for the even more ambitious other volumes (Mind-Society and
Natural Philosophy) of his three-volume Treatise on Mind and Society. Thagard takes us on a mind-expanding journey."
-- Stephen Read, Mendel B. Silberberg Professor of Social Psychology, University of Southern California
"A readable overview of the philosophy of cognitive science and its goal of establishing mechanistic or computational models of cognition and emotion."
-- Choice
