Author: Philip Mirowski File Type: pdf This collection of interdisciplinary essays is the first to investigate how images in the history of the natural and physical sciences have been used to shape the history of economic thought. It documents the extent to which scholars have drawn on physical and natural science to ground economic ideas and evaluate the role and importance of metaphors in the structure and content of economic thought. These range from Aristotles discussion of the division of labor, to Marshalls evocation of population biology, to Hayeks dependence upon evolutionary concepts, and more recently to neoclassical economists invocation of chaos theory.

Author: Lisa Vox File Type: pdf Americans have long been enthralled by visions of the apocalypse. Will the world end through nuclear war, environmental degradation, and declining biodiversity? Or, perhaps, through the second coming of Christ, rapture of the faithful, and arrival of the Antichrista set of beliefs known as dispensationalist premillennialism? These seemingly competing apocalyptic fantasies are not as dissimilar as we might think. In fact, Lisa Vox argues, although these secular and religious visions of the end of the world developed independently, they have converged to create the landscape of our current apocalyptic imagination. In Existential Threats, Vox assembles a wide range of mediascience fiction movies, biblical tractates, rapture fictionto develop a critical history of the apocalyptic imagination from the late 1800s to the present. Apocalypticism was once solely a religious ideology, Vox contends, which has secularized in response to increasing technological and political threats to American safety. Vox reads texts ranging from Christianity Today articles on ecology and the atomic bomb to Dr. Strangelove, and from Mary Shelleys The Last Man to the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, demonstrating along the way that conservative evangelicals have not been as resistant to science as popularly believed and that scientists and science writers have unwittingly reproduced evangelical eschatological themes and scenarios in their own works. Existential Threats argues that American apocalypticism reflects and propagates our ongoing debates over the authority of science, the place of religion, uses of technology, and Americas evolving role in global politics. **

Author: Viktor Shklovsky File Type: pdf

Author: Rodrick Wallace File Type: pdf This book makes formal, detailed, application of what Adams has described as the informational turn in philosophy to the global neuronal workspace (GNW) model of consciousness. It uses an extended statistical model of cognitive process, based on the Shannon-McMillan Theorem and its corollaries, to incorporate the effects of embedding physiological, social, and cultural contextual constraints which operate more slowly than the workspace itself, but severely limit the possible realms available to that workspace, and hence to consciousness itself. The resulting biopsychosociocultural treatment directly addresses criticisms of brain-only models of consciousness which have been raised in cultural psychology and philosophy, while remaining true to the current neuroscience perspective. This is the first formal, comprehensive, and reasonably rigorous, mathematical treatment of the GNW and is the only one to include the effects of embedding contexts in a natural manner.ReviewFrom the reviews To formulate a serious, clear-cut and transparent formal framework for cognitive neuroscience is a challenge . I think that Wallaces book presents an appreciable step in the right direction. Beyond references that are necessary for basic elements of his work, the author has put together additional interesting reading material . It is a book that can unfold its potential to well-educated readers with genuinely interdisciplinary ambitions . (Harald Atmanspacher, Acta Biotheoretica, Vol. 54, 2006) From the Back CoverThis book brings together the fundamental ideas of information theory and the statistical mechanics of phase transitions within the context of the neurosciences, culture, immunology and socio-psychological studies. Outlined is a program pertaining to a dynamic and semantic extension of current models for the global neuronal workspace as were previously introduced by Baars, Dretske and others. Topics include original applications of rate distortion and large deviations theory, biological renormalization, and retinal tuning as means towards understanding consciousness on the large scale. The overall treatment is concise, has been well thought out, and the mathematical details should be accessible to both students and researchers in the cognitive and life sciences. - James Glazebrook Ph.D, Eastern Illinois University, USA