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neoteny's avatar

There are two books which you *have to* read (if already haven't done so):

1. *Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain* by Antonio R. Damasio. Besides being an incredibly informative book about human neuroscience, it also features Damasio's *somatic marker hypothesis*, which is in a nutshell: when reacting to a situation, our brains 'project' past images of the arising/developing situation 'into' our bodies (soma) & our reactions are guided by the sense data coming 'upward' from our bodies into our brains -- essentially we poll our bodies: "how do I *feel* about this (developing) turn of events?"

2. *Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology* by Valentino Braitenberg. A most insightful thought experiment about brains based on the neurological/cybernetic research conducted by (the late) Braitenberg. I can assure you that you'll be royally entertained: it is pure mind candy. For a teaser, here are the chapter headings:

1. Getting around

2. Fear and Aggression

3. Love

4. Values and Special Tastes

5. Logic

6. Selection, the Impersonal Engineer

7. Concepts

8. Space, Things, and Movements

9. Shapes

10. Getting Ideas

11. Rules and Regularities

12. Trains of Thought

13. Foresight

14. Egotism and Optimism

(Both books can be found on the net in PDF forms; I'm not going to link to them for copyright reasons, but with reasonable effort, you can start reading them after 10 minutes of searching.)

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Nick O'Connor's avatar

Great stuff. Will read again in a few days' time to build on my understanding of it. Will then read again in a few more days to build on my understanding of it. Will then...

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