What is Thought?: Book announcement

[Eric Baum]

New Book:

What is Thought?
Eric B. Baum

MIT Press  478p   

Best price right now is at Barnesandnoble.com (BN.com) $32, with free shipping.

To buy this book:
Barnes and Noble.com: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=2WI405VPJU&isbn=0262025485&itm=17

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0262025485/qid=1074532277/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/002-6265544-0286451?v=glance&s=books

MIT Press: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?sid=AF8A6531-E5E9-4710-A781-CA47C6B64621&ttype=2&tid=9978

This reports on a 10+ year project to see whether what
I viewed as the worldview of the connectionist/COLT community
could extend in any plausible way to explain all the capabilities
of mind. I found such an extension, but only after being constrained 
into conjectures that are at odds with what I would have expected. 

*What is Thought?* proposes a model that explains how mind is equivalent 
to execution of a computer program, addressing aspects such as 
understanding, meaning, creativity, language, reasoning, learning, and 
consciousness, that is consistent with extensive data 
from a variety of fields, and that makes empirical predictions.
Meaning is the computational exploitation of the compact
underlying structure of the world, and mind is execution of an evolved
program that is all about meaning. Occam's Razor, as formalized
in the recent computer science literature, is explained and
extrapolated to argue that meaning results from finding a compact 
enough program behaving effectively in the world; such a program 
can only be compact by virtue of code reuse, factoring into 
interacting modules that capture real concepts and are reused 
metaphorically. For a variety of reasons, including arguments based
on complexity theory, developmental biology, evolutionary programming, 
ethology, and simple inspection, this compact Occam program 
is most naturally seen to be in the DNA, rather than the brain. 
Learning and reasoning are then fast and almost automatic
because they are constrained by the DNA programming
to deal only with meaningful quantities. Evolution itself is argued
to exploit meaning in related ways. Words are labels for meaningful
computational modules. Using the abilility to pass along programs
through speech, humans have made cumulative progress in constructing,
as part of their minds, useful computational modules built on top of 
the ones supplied by evolution. The difference between human and chimp
intelligence is largely in this additional programming, and thus can
be regarded as due to better nurturing. Human written computer
programs, however, are generally not highly compressed and thus don't 
display understanding in the same way as human thought, but
experiments are described in which modular computer programs were 
evolved that achieve abilities giving insight into how programs
can evolve understanding.  

The many aspects of consciousness
are also naturally and consistently understood in this
context. For example, although the brain is a distributed 
system and the mind is a complex program composed of many 
modules, the unitary self emerges naturally
as a reification (manifestation) of the interest of the genes.
Qualia (the sense of experience of sensations such as pain
or redness) have exactly the appropriate nature and meaning that 
evolution coded in the DNA so that the compact program behaves 
effectively. 

No previous familiarity with computer science (or other fields)
is assumed-- *What is Thought?* presents a pedagogical
survey of the relevant background for its arguments.


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