Building Minds With Patterns

This book is about building a mind, from a very practical computational perspective. There may be many philosophical debates about what constitutes a mind and whether specific attempts at building a mind have biological or psychological verisimilitude. The position taken here is quite simply that a mind is a process that receives stimuli and produces actions. This is a very simple definition indeed, and along with that definition, some interesting theories, architectures, design patterns, and data structures will be explored.

Thinking to stay ahead of change In a complex business climate, people need to make informed decisions and learn how to think flexibly. A leader's most important asset is the ability to sense changes in the environment and adapt to them quickly. The Prepared Mind of a Leader presents an original and effective way to think more flexibly about innovation, strategy, change, and problem solving. It helps leaders anticipate challenges and prepare for both the intended and unintended consequences of change by laying out a program for developing, maintaining, and mobilizing eight key skills: Observing, Challenging, Reflecting, Reasoning, Imagining, Deciding, Learning, and Teaching. These skills provide a framework that the thoughtful leader or manager can use to approach issues of strategy, innovation, and more. Chapters feature interactive tools that will help readers develop each of the key skills. Bill Welter (Bartlett, IL) is President of Adaptive Strategies, a consulting firm focused on helping clients in a wide range of industries to deal with change. Jean Egmon (Wilmette, IL) is Director of the Complexity in Action Network and on the faculty at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2021, held as a hybrid event in San Francisco, CA, USA, in October 2021. The 36 full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 submissions. The papers cover topics from foundations of AGI, to AGI approaches and AGI ethics, to the roles of systems biology, goal generation, and learning systems, and so much more.

Is it possible to rewire your own negative emotions? Can you reprogram your self-limiting beliefs or behavioral patterns? This book will argue that it is possible for you to unplug from your own mind, identify its patterns, and become the architect of your own enlightenment. A bold and fascinating dive into the nuts and bolts of psychological evolution, Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture is part inspiring manifesto, part practical self-development guide, all based on the teachings of thinkers like Marcus Aurelius, Lao Tzu, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Abraham Maslow. The ideas and techniques it offers are all woven together into a much-needed mindset to help people lead better, happier lives. "A fascinating framework" - Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD, author of Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization If you have ever tried to enhance your mind, only to find that the changes didn't stick, the problem isn't you. It is that you lack an understanding of the patterns that make up your mind and the methods for reprogramming them. Whether fear prevents you from pursuing your ambitions, jealousy ruins your relationships, distractions rule your life, or you have an inner critic whose expectations you are never able to meet, this handbook will teach you how to reprogram your own psychological software, one algorithm at a time. "It has already changed my life, and I know it will change others as well" - Aaron T. Perkins, Executive Leadership Coach Psychitecture, the process of designing your mind, is a brand new framework for understanding and rewiring the hidden patterns behind your biases, habits, and emotional reactions. The core principles will enable you to unplug from your own mind, examine it from above, and modify the very psychological software on which you operate, sculpting your mind into a truly delightful place to reside. Award-winning systems designer and leading expert on psychitecture, Ryan A Bush, has compiled ancient insights from Stoicism, Buddhism, and Taoism, combined it with modern cognitive science, and integrated it all into a comprehensive, philosophical guide to cognitive, emotional, and behavioral self-mastery. "Super intriguing" - Jason Silva, global keynote speaker and Emmy-nominated host of Brain Games This life-changing self-mastery manual will help you: - Learn to think with razor-sharp clarity, overcome your own distortions of judgment, and cultivate wisdom so you can make the right decisions in your life. - Silence your inner critic, hack your negative thoughts and feelings to program them out, and restructure bad emotional habits - Learn how the Buddha mastered his desires, how the Stoics cultivated inner calm, how Nietzsche sculpted himself, and how the principles of cognitive therapy can change your life - Program unshakable peace and levity into your operating system, and embrace whatever life throws at you while responding with effective action - Build strong habits and break self-defeating ones, achieve big goals with minimal effort, and cultivate strong character using your identity Regardless of your self-development goals for 2021, psychitecture is the mindset you need to unlock your potential and scale the heights of self-mastery.

A crowd-mind emerges when formation of a crowd causes fusion of individual minds into one collective mind. Members of the crowd lose their individuality. The deindividuation leads to derationalization: emotional, impulsive and irrational behavior, self-catalytic activities, memory impairment, perceptual distortion, hyper-responsiveness, and distortion of traditional forms and structures. This book presents unique results of computational studies on cognitive and affective space-time processes in large-scale collectives of abstract agents being far from mental equilibrium. Computational experiments demonstrate that the irrational and nonsensical behavior of individual entities of crowd-mind results in complex, rich and non-trivial spatio-temporal dynamics of the agent collectives. Mathematical methods employ theory and techniques of cellular-automata and lattice swarms, applied algebra, theory of finite automata and Markov chains, and elementary differential equations.

Finalist for Foreword Magazine's 2011 Book of the YearWith his knack for making science intelligible for the layman, and his ability to illuminate scientific concepts through analogy and reference to personal experience, James Zull offers the reader an engrossing and coherent introduction to what neuroscience can tell us about cognitive development through experience, and its implications for education.Stating that educational change is underway and that the time is ripe to recognize that “the primary objective of education is to understand human learning” and that “all other objectives depend on achieving this understanding”, James Zull challenges the reader to focus on this purpose, first for her or himself, and then for those for whose learning they are responsible. The book is addressed to all learners and educators – to the reader as self-educator embarked on the journey of lifelong learning, to the reader as parent, and to readers who are educators in schools or university settings, as well as mentors and trainers in the workplace.In this work, James Zull presents cognitive development as a journey taken by the brain, from an organ of organized cells, blood vessels, and chemicals at birth, through its shaping by experience and environment into potentially to the most powerful and exquisite force in the universe, the human mind.Zull begins his journey with sensory-motor learning, and how that leads to discovery, and discovery to emotion. He then describes how deeper learning develops, how symbolic systems such as language and numbers emerge as tools for thought, how memory builds a knowledge base, and how memory is then used to create ideas and solve problems. Along the way he prompts us to think of new ways to shape educational experiences from early in life through adulthood, informed by the insight that metacognition lies at the root of all learning.At a time when we can expect to change jobs and careers frequently during our lifetime, when technology is changing society at break-neck speed, and we have instant access to almost infinite information and opinion, he argues that self-knowledge, awareness of how and why we think as we do, and the ability to adapt and learn, are critical to our survival as individuals; and that the transformation of education, in the light of all this and what neuroscience can tell us, is a key element in future development of healthy and productive societies.

An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.