Mindmelding

In this important and controversial new book, William Hirstein argues that it is possible for one person to directly experience the conscious states of another, by way of what he calls mindmelding. Drawing on a range of research from neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, he presents a highly original new account of consciousness.

Add Blender to your Unity game development projects to unlock new possibilities and decrease your dependency on third-party creators Key FeaturesDiscover how you can enhance your games with BlenderLearn how to implement Blender in real-world scenariosCreate new or modify existing assets in Blender and import them into your Unity gameBook Description Blender is an incredibly powerful, free computer graphics program that provides a world-class, open-source graphics toolset for creating amazing assets in 3D. With Mind-Melding Unity and Blender for 3D Game Development, you'll discover how adding Blender to Unity can help you unlock unlimited new possibilities and reduce your reliance on third parties for creating your game assets. This game development book will broaden your knowledge of Unity and help you to get to grips with Blender's core capabilities for enhancing your games. You'll become familiar with creating new assets and modifying existing assets in Blender as the book shows you how to use the Asset Store and Package Manager to download assets in Unity and then export them to Blender for modification. You'll also learn how to modify existing and create new sci-fi-themed assets for a minigame project. As you advance, the book will guide you through creating 3D model props, scenery, and characters and demonstrate UV mapping and texturing. Additionally, you'll get hands-on with rigging, animation, and C# scripting. By the end of this Unity book, you'll have developed a simple yet exciting mini game with audio and visual effects, and a GUI. More importantly, you'll be ready to apply everything you've learned to your Unity game projects. What you will learnTransform your imagination into 3D scenery, props, and characters using BlenderGet to grips with UV unwrapping and texture models in BlenderUnderstand how to rig and animate models in BlenderAnimate and script models in Unity for top-down, FPS, and other types of gamesFind out how you can roundtrip custom assets from Blender to Unity and backBecome familiar with the basics of ProBuilder, Timeline, and Cinemachine in UnityWho this book is for This book is for game developers looking to add more skills to their arsenal by learning Blender from the ground up. Beginner-level Unity scene and scripting skills are necessary to get started.

Can consciousness and the human mind be understood and explained in sheerly physical terms? Materialism is a philosophical/scientific theory, according to which the mind is completely physical. This theory has been around for literally thousands of years, but it was always stymied by its inability to explain how exactly mere matter could do the amazing things the mind can do. Beginning in the 1980s, however, a revolution began quietly boiling away in the neurosciences, yielding increasingly detailed theories about how the brain might accomplish consciousness. Nevertheless, a fundamental obstacle remains. Contemporary research techniques seem to still have the scientific observer of the conscious state locked out of the sort of experience the subjects themselves are having. Science can observe, stimulate, and record events in the brain, but can it ever enter the most sacred citadel, the mind? Can it ever observe the most crucial properties of conscious states, the ones we are aware of? If it can't, this creates a problem. If conscious mental states lack a basic feature possessed by all other known physical states, i.e., the capability to be observed or experienced by many people, this give us reason to believe that they are not entirely physical. In this intriguing book, William Hirstein argues that it is indeed possible for one person to directly experience the conscious states of another, by way of what he calls mindmelding. This would involve making just the right connections in two peoples' brains, which he describes in detail. He then follows up the many other consequences of the possibility that what appeared to be a wall of privacy can actually be breached. Drawing on a range of research from neuroscience and psychology, and looking at executive functioning, mirror neuron work, as well as perceptual phenomena such as blind-sight and filling-in, this book presents a highly original new account of consciousness.

Can consciousness and the human mind be understood and explained in sheerly physical terms? Materialism is a philosophical/scientific theory, according to which the mind is completely physical. This theory has been around for literally thousands of years, but it was always stymied by its inability to explain how exactly mere matter could do the amazing things the mind can do. Beginning in the 1980s, however, a revolution began quietly boiling away in the neurosciences, yielding increasingly detailed theories about how the brain might accomplish consciousness. Nevertheless, a fundamental obstacle remains. Contemporary research techniques seem to still have the scientific observer of the conscious state locked out of the sort of experience the subjects themselves are having. Science can observe, stimulate, and record events in the brain, but can it ever enter the most sacred citadel, the mind? Can it ever observe the most crucial properties of conscious states, the ones we are aware of? If it can't, this creates a problem. If conscious mental states lack a basic feature possessed by all other known physical states, i.e., the capability to be observed or experienced by many people, this give us reason to believe that they are not entirely physical. In this intriguing book, William Hirstein argues that it is indeed possible for one person to directly experience the conscious states of another, by way of what he calls mindmelding. This would involve making just the right connections in two peoples' brains, which he describes in detail. He then follows up the many other consequences of the possibility that what appeared to be a wall of privacy can actually be breached. Drawing on a range of research from neuroscience and psychology, and looking at executive functioning, mirror neuron work, as well as perceptual phenomena such as blind-sight and filling-in, this book presents a highly original new account of consciousness.

From 'audet IX to Zytchin III, this book covers it all. This is the ultimate reference book for all Star Trek fans! Added to this edition are 128 new pages. This addendum highlights the latest episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine®, Star Trek: Voyager® and the newest feature film, Star Trek: Insurrection™. The thousands of photos and hundreds of illustrations place the Star Trek universe at your fingertips. Planets and stars, weapons and ships, people and places are just part of the meticulous research and countless cross-reference that fill this book.

This volume of newly commissioned essays examines current theoretical and computational work on polysemy, the term used in semantic analysis to describe words with more than one meaning or function, sometimes perhaps related (as in plain) and sometimes perhaps not (as in bank). Such words present few difficulties in everyday language, but pose central problems for linguists and lexicographers, especially for those involved in lexical semantics and in computational modelling. The contributors to this book–leading researchers in theoretical and computational linguistics–consider the implications of these problems for grammatical theory and how they may be addressed by computational means. The theoretical essays in the book examine polysemy as an aspect of a broader theory of word meaning. Three theoretical approaches are presented: the Classical (or Aristotelian), the Prototypical, and the Relational. Their authors describe the nature of polysemy, the criteria for detecting it, and its manifestations across languages. They examine the issues arising from the regularity of polysemy and the theoretical principles proposed to account for the interaction of lexical meaning with the semantics and syntax of the context in which it occurs. Finally they consider the formal representations of meaning in the lexicon, and their implications for dictionary construction. The computational essays are concerned with the challenge of polysemy to automatic sense disambiguation–how intended meaning for a word occurrence can be identified. The approaches presented include the exploitation of lexical information in machine-readable dictionaries, machine learning based on patterns of word co-occurrence, and hybrid approaches that combine the two. As a whole, the volume shows how on the one hand theoretical work provides the motivation and may suggest the basis for computational algorithms, while on the other computational results may validate, or reveal problems in, the principles set forth by theories.

This anthology is vibrant in its nature including tales of comedy, horror, intrigue, fantasy and romance. It contains a host of wonderful characters and many quite ingenious. Stories. You will really enjoy reading them!

COMMANDMENT is an allegory on life, all life, in whatever form and wherever it exists on EARTH or in the vast UNIVERSE. Extrapolating from what we know about life on EARTH, all creatures large and small share similarities: the struggle to exist, propagate, find nourishment, and overcome its enemies, even enemies of its own kind. The biblical commandment, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ is a warning to us all. If obeyed, peace and prosperity follow; if disobeyed, we risk war, hardship, and annihilation. The novel came out of Weinberg’s interest in the incredible properties of microorganisms. Numerous scientific publications describing these ‘aliens’ among us capture the imagination and read themselves like science fiction.