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Is it possible to guide the process of self-organisation towards specific patterns and outcomes? Wouldn’t this be self-contradictory? After all, a self-organising process assumes a transition into a more organised form, or towards a more structured functionality, in the absence of centralised control. Then how can we place the guiding elements so that they do not override rich choices potentially discoverable by an uncontrolled process? This book presents different approaches to resolving this paradox. In doing so, the presented studies address a broad range of phenomena, ranging from autopoietic systems to morphological computation, and from small-world networks to information cascades in...
Autonomous robots may become our closest companions in the near future. While the technology for physically building such machines is already available today, a problem lies in the generation of the behavior for such complex machines. Nature proposes a solution: young children and higher animals learn to master their complex brain-body systems by playing. Can this be an option for robots? How can a machine be playful? The book provides answers by developing a general principle---homeokinesis, the dynamical symbiosis between brain, body, and environment---that is shown to drive robots to self- determined, individual development in a playful and obviously embodiment- related way: a dog-like ro...
Papers presented at NIPS, the flagship meeting on neural computation, held in December 2004 in Vancouver.The annual Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference is the flagship meeting on neural computation. It draws a diverse group of attendees--physicists, neuroscientists, mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists. The presentations are interdisciplinary, with contributions in algorithms, learning theory, cognitive science, neuroscience, brain imaging, vision, speech and signal processing, reinforcement learning and control, emerging technologies, and applications. Only twenty-five percent of the papers submitted are accepted for presentation at NIPS, so the quality is exceptionally high. This volume contains the papers presented at the December, 2004 conference, held in Vancouver.
The main intention of this book is to describe and develop the conceptual, structural and abstract thinking of mathematics. Specific mathematical structures are used to illustrate the conceptual approach; providing a deeper insight into mutual relationships and abstract common features. These ideas are carefully motivated, explained and illustrated by examples so that many of the more technical proofs can be omitted. The book can therefore be used: · simply as an overview of the panorama of mathematical structures and the relations between them, to be supplemented by more detailed texts whenever you want to acquire a working knowledge of some structure · by itself as a first introduction t...
An engaging and insightful journey into human consciousness. What if our goal had not been to land on Mars, but in pure consciousness? The experience of pure consciousness—what does it look like? What is the essence of human consciousness? In The Elephant and the Blind, influential philosopher Thomas Metzinger, one of the world's leading researchers on consciousness, brings together more than 500 experiential reports to offer the world's first comprehensive account of states of pure consciousness. Drawing on a large psychometric study of meditators in 57 countries, Metzinger focuses on “pure awareness” in meditation—the simplest form of experience there is—to illuminate the most fu...
Studies of the evolution of animal signals and sensory behaviour have more recently shifted from considering 'extrinsic' (environmental) determinants to 'intrinsic' (physiological) ones. The drive behind this change has been the increasing availability of neural network models. With contributions from experts in the field, this book provides a complete survey of artificial neural networks. The book opens with two broad, introductory level reviews on the themes of the book: neural networks as tools to explore the nature of perceptual mechanisms, and neural networks as models of perception in ecology and evolutionary biology. Later chapters expand on these themes and address important methodological issues when applying artificial neural networks to study perception. The final chapter provides perspective by introducing a neural processing system in a real animal. The book provides the foundations for implementing artificial neural networks, for those new to the field, along with identifying potential research areas for specialists.
This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Information Decomposition of Target Effects from Multi-Source Interactions" that was published in Entropy
Within our knowledge, the series of the International Conference on Cognitive Neurodynamics (ICCN) is the only conference series dedicating to cognitive neurodynamis. This volume is the proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Cognitive Neurodynamics held in 2011, which reviews the progress in this field since the 1st ICCN - 2007. The topics include: Neural coding and realistic neural network dynamics, Neural population dynamics, Firing Oscillations and Patterns in Neuronal Networks, Brain imaging, EEG, MEG, Sensory and Motor Dynamics, Global cognitive function, Multi-scalar Neurodynamics - from Physiology to Systems Theory, Neural computing, Emerging Technologies for Brain Computer Interfaces, Neural dynamics of brain disorders.
In Federalism and Subsidiarity, a distinguished interdisciplinary group of scholars in political science, law, and philosophy address the application and interaction of the concept of federalism within law and government. What are the best justifications for and conceptions of federalism? What are the most useful criteria for deciding what powers should be allocated to national governments and what powers reserved to state or provincial governments? What are the implications of the principle of subsidiarity for such questions? What should be the constitutional standing of cities in federations? Do we need to “remap” federalism to reckon with the emergence of translocal and transnational organizations with porous boundaries that are not reflected in traditional jurisdictional conceptions? Examining these questions and more, this latest installation in the NOMOS series sheds new light on the allocation of power within federations.
TheInternationalSymposiumCreatingBrain-LikeIntelligencewasheldinFeb- ary 2007 in Germany. The symposium brought together notable scientists from di?erent backgrounds and with di?erent expertise related to the emerging ?eld of brain-like intelligence. Our understanding of the principles behind brain-like intelligence is still limited. After all, we have had to acknowledge that after tremendous advances in areas like neural networks, computational and arti?cial intelligence (a ?eld that had just celebrated its 50 year anniversary) and fuzzy systems, we are still not able to mimic even the lower-level sensory capabilities of humans or animals. We asked what the biggest obstacles are and how we ...