The Machines Of Evolution And The Scope Of Meaning

A groundbreaking account of the origin and place of meaning in the earthly biosphere What is meaning? How does it arise? Where is it found in the world? In recent years, philosophers and scientists have answered these questions in different ways. Some see meaning as a uniquely human achievement, others extend it to trees, microbes, and even to the bonding of DNA and RNA molecules. In this groundbreaking book, Gary Tomlinson defines a middle path. Combining emergent thinking about evolution, new research on animal behaviors, and theories of information and signs, he tracks meaning far out into the animal world. At the same time he discerns limits to its scope and identifies innumerable life forms, including many animals and all other organisms, that make no meanings at all. Tomlinson’s map of meaning starts from signs, the fundamental units of reference or aboutness. Where signs are at work they shape meaning-laden lifeways, offering possibilities for distinctive organism/niche interactions and sometimes leading to technology and culture. The emergence of meaning does not, however, monopolize complexity in the living world. Countless organisms generate awe-inspiring behavioral intricacies without meaning. The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning offers a revaluation of both meaning and meaninglessness, uncovering a foundational difference in animal solutions to the hard problem of life.

Interdisciplinary essays on music psychology that integrate scientific, humanistic, and artistic ways of knowing in transformative ways. Researchers using scientific methods and approaches to advance our understanding of music and musicality have not yet grappled with some of the perils that humanistic fields concentrating on music have long articulated. In this edited volume, established and emerging researchers—neuroscientists and cognitive scientists, musicians, historical musicologists, and ethnomusicologists—build bridges between humanistic and scientific approaches to music studies, particularly music psychology. Deftly edited by Elizabeth H. Margulis, Psyche Loui, and Deirdre Loughridge, The Science-Music Borderlands embodies how sustained interaction among disciplines can lead to a richer understanding of musical life. The essays in this volume provide the scientific study of music with its first major reckoning, exploring the intellectual history of the field and its central debates, while charting a path forward. The Science-Music Borderlands is essential reading for music scholars from any disciplinary background. It will also interest those working at the intersection of music and science, such as music teachers, performers, composers, and music therapists. Contributors: Manuel Anglada-Tort, Salwa El-Sawan Castelo-Branco, Hu Chuan-Peng, Laura K. Cirelli, Alexander W. Cowan, Jonathan De Souza, Diana Deutsch, Diandra Duengen, Sarah Faber, Steven Feld, Shinya Fujii, Assal Habibi, Erin. E. Hannon, Shantala Hegde, Beatriz Ilari, Jason Jabbour, Nori Jacoby, Haley E. Kragness, Grace Leslie, Casey Lew-Williams, Deirdre Loughridge, Psyche Loui, Diana Mangalagiu, Elizabeth H. Margulis, Randy McIntosh, Rita McNamara, Eduardo Reck Miranda, Daniel Müllensiefen, Rachel Mundy, Florence Ewomazino Nweke, Patricia Opondo, Aniruddh D. Patel, Andrea Ravignani, Carmel Raz, Matthew Sachs, Marianne Sarfati, Patrick E. Savage, Huib Schippers, Jim Sykes, Gary Tomlinson, Jamal Williams, Maria A. G. Witek, Pamela Z

An examination of the fundamental role cybernetics played in the birth of cognitive science and the light this sheds on current controversies. The conceptual history of cognitive science remains for the most part unwritten. In this groundbreaking book, Jean-Pierre Dupuy—one of the principal architects of cognitive science in France—provides an important chapter: the legacy of cybernetics. Contrary to popular belief, Dupuy argues, cybernetics represented not the anthropomorphization of the machine but the mechanization of the human. The founding fathers of cybernetics—some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, including John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and Walter Pitts—intended to construct a materialist and mechanistic science of mental behavior that would make it possible at last to resolve the ancient philosophical problem of mind and matter. The importance of cybernetics to cognitive science, Dupuy argues, lies not in its daring conception of the human mind in terms of the functioning of a machine but in the way the strengths and weaknesses of the cybernetics approach can illuminate controversies that rage today—between cognitivists and connectionists, eliminative materialists and Wittgensteinians, functionalists and anti-reductionists. Dupuy brings to life the intellectual excitement that attended the birth of cognitive science sixty years ago. He separates the promise of cybernetic ideas from the disappointment that followed as cybernetics was rejected and consigned to intellectual oblivion. The mechanization of the mind has reemerged today as an all-encompassing paradigm in the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. The tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and confusions Dupuy discerns in cybernetics offer a cautionary tale for future developments in cognitive science.

Original essays written by philosophers and scientists and dealing with philosophical questions arising from work in evolutionary biology and artificial intelligence.

Thomas Kuhn (1922-96) transformed the philosophy of science. His seminal 1962 work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" introduced the term 'paradigm shift' into the vernacular and remains a fundamental text in the study of the history and philosophy of science. This introduction to Kuhn's ideas covers the breadth of his philosophical work, situating "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" within Kuhn's wider thought and drawing attention to the development of his ideas over time. Kuhn's work is assessed within the context of other philosophies of science notably logical empiricism and recent developments in naturalized epistemology. The author argues that Kuhn's thinking betrays a residual commitment to many theses characteristic of the empiricists he set out to challenge. Kuhn's influence on the history and philosophy of science is assessed and where the field may be heading in the wake of Kuhn's ideas is explored.

Forgetting Machines. Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe investigates the evolution of scholarly practices and the transformation of cognitive habits in the early modern age, focussing on the development of note-taking systems and data storage devices.

Why the social character of scientific knowledge makes it trustworthy Are doctors right when they tell us vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust science when so many of our political leaders don't? Naomi Oreskes offers a bold and compelling defense of science, revealing why the social character of scientific knowledge is its greatest strength—and the greatest reason we can trust it. Tracing the history and philosophy of science from the late nineteenth century to today, this timely and provocative book features a new preface by Oreskes and critical responses by climate experts Ottmar Edenhofer and Martin Kowarsch, political scientist Jon Krosnick, philosopher of science Marc Lange, and science historian Susan Lindee, as well as a foreword by political theorist Stephen Macedo.

Pathways to the Origin and Evolition of Meanings in the Universe The book explains why meaning is a part of the universe populated by life, and how organisms generate meanings and then use them for creative transformation of the environment and themselves. This book focuses on interdisciplinary research at the intersection of biology, semiotics, philosophy, ethology, information theory, and the theory of evolution. Such a broad approach provides a rich context for the study of organisms and other semiotic agents in their environments. This methodology can be applied to robotics and artificial intelligence for developing robust, adaptable learning devices. In this book, leading interdisciplinary scholars reveal their vision on how to integrate natural sciences with semiotics, a theory of meaning-making and signification. Developments in biology indicate that the capacity to create and understand signs is not limited to humans or vertebrate animals, but exists in all living organisms - the fact that inspired the integration of biology and semiotics into biosemiotics. The authors discuss the nature of semiotic agents (organisms and other autonomous goal-directed units), meaning, signs, information, memory, evolution, and consciousness. Also discussed are issues including the origin of life, potential meaning and its actualization, top-down causality in physics and biology, capacity of organisms to encode their functions, the strategy of organisms to combine homeostasis with direct adaptation to new life-cycle phases or new environments, multi-level memory systems, increase of freedom via enabling constraints, creative modeling in evolution and learning, communication in animals and humans, the origin and function of language, and the distribution and transfer of life in space. This is the first book on biosemiotics in its global conceptual and spatial scope. Biosemiotics is presented using the language of natural sciences, which supports the scientific grounding of semiotic terms. Finally, the cosmic dimension of life and meaning-making leads to a reconsideration of ethical principles and ecological mentality here on earth and in space exploration. Audience Theoretical biologists, ethologists, astrobiologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, philosophers, phenomenologists, semioticians, biosemioticians, molecular biologists, linguists, system scientists and engineers.