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Consciousness is an intriguing mystery, of which standard accounts all have well-known difficulties. This book examines the central question about consciousness: that is, the question of how phenomenal features of our experience are related to physical features of our nervous system. Using the way in which we experience color as a central case, it develops a novel account of how consciousness is constituted by our neural structure, and so presents a new physicalist and internalist solution to the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness, with respect specifically to sensory qualia. The necessary background in philosophy and sensory neurophysiology is provided for the reader throughout. The book will appeal to a range of readers interested in the problems of consciousness.
Realism and the Novel combines arguments about realism's emergence in the European eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with essays on its persistence throughout the world and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Moving away from a diffusionist account of culture – one where the realist novel is understood to have an autonomous national development in the West that then spreads across the globe – Realism and the Novel focuses, instead, on the ways the relationship between center and periphery informs both realism's origins and its continued relevance. At the same time, this collection takes seriously the semi-autonomy of literary form; the realist inheritance is not only an imposition. Rather, in its multiple incarnations, the realist novel has shown itself to be an exceptionally varied and multi-faceted form for representing the disparate social worlds of imperial modernity.
Scientific computing plays a critically important role in almost all areas of engineering, modeling, and forecasting. The method of finite differences (FD) is a classical tool that is still rapidly evolving, with several key developments barely yet in the literature. Other key aspects of the method, in particular those to do with computations that require high accuracy, often 'fall through the cracks' in many treatises. Bengt Fornberg addresses that failing in this book, which adopts a practical perspective right across the field and is aimed at graduate students, scientists, and educators seeking a follow-up to more typical curriculum-oriented textbooks. The coverage extends from generating FD formulas and applying them to solving ordinary and partial differential equations, to numerical integration, evaluation of infinite sums, approximation of fractional derivatives, and computations in the complex plane.
How is new knowledge produced in the social, natural, and biomedical sciences? What is the role of serendipity versus planning? How has technology changed knowledge production, from AI to large datasets? This book presents insights into the pursuit of new knowledge from fields as diverse as medicine, engineering, linguistics, and theology. Over twenty researchers and scientists describe the modalities of discovery in their disciplines, offering a diverse survey of the social norms and politics of knowledge. Written in nontechnical language, this collection is designed to make research practices from widely different domains comprehensible to each other. A generative synthesis in the final chapter offers new insights into how discovery happens and its consequences for science and society. On Discovery will be essential reading for anyone interested in philosophical and social dimensions of knowledge.
The second edition of this engaging textbook for advanced undergraduate students and beginning graduates covers all the core subjects in linear algebra. It has a unique emphasis on integrating ideas from analysis, in addition to pure algebra, and features a balance of abstraction, practicality, and contemporary applications. Four chapters examine some of the most important of these applications, including quantum mechanics, machine learning, data science, and quantum information. The material is supplemented by more than 550 exercises suitable for students from a wide variety of backgrounds, including over 200 exercises new to this edition. Selected solutions are provided at the back of the book for use in self-study, and full solutions are available online to instructors.
AI's next big challenge is to master the cognitive abilities needed by intelligent agents that perform actions. Such agents may be physical devices such as robots, or they may act in simulated or virtual environments through graphic animation or electronic web transactions. This book is about integrating and automating these essential cognitive abilities: planning what actions to undertake and under what conditions, acting (choosing what steps to execute, deciding how and when to execute them, monitoring their execution, and reacting to events), and learning about ways to act and plan. This comprehensive, coherent synthesis covers a range of state-of-the-art approaches and models –deterministic, probabilistic (including MDP and reinforcement learning), hierarchical, nondeterministic, temporal, spatial, and LLMs –and applications in robotics. The insights it provides into important techniques and research challenges will make it invaluable to researchers and practitioners in AI, robotics, cognitive science, and autonomous and interactive systems.
This text examines Markov chains whose drift tends to zero at infinity, a topic sometimes labelled as 'Lamperti's problem'. It can be considered a subcategory of random walks, which are helpful in studying stochastic models like branching processes and queueing systems. Drawing on Doob's h-transform and other tools, the authors present novel results and techniques, including a change-of-measure technique for near-critical Markov chains. The final chapter presents a range of applications where these special types of Markov chains occur naturally, featuring a new risk process with surplus-dependent premium rate. This will be a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students working in probability theory and stochastic processes.
It has long been understood that illness is influenced not only by our bodies' physiology, but also language, culture, and meaning. This book, written by renowned cultural psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer, explores of the influence of metaphor, narrative, and imagination in experiences of suffering and processes of healing across cultures. It emphasizes how metaphor can open a window to the hidden mechanisms of healing driven by meaning and symbolism, myth and imagination. At the same time, it offers a rigorous critical account of the metaphors embedded in the epistemology and practice of contemporary biomedicine, psychiatry, and psychotherapy. In doing so, it exposes the sociomoral and political dimensions of these dominant approaches to understanding and treating illness.
Securing Democracies examines the attacks on voting processes and the broader informational environment in which elections takes place. The volume's global cadre of scholars and practitioners highlight the interconnections among efforts to target vulnerable democratic systems and identifies ways to prevent, defend against, and mitigate their effects on both the technical and informational aspects of cybersecurity. The work takes a wider view of defending democracy by recognizing that both techniques-attacking infrastructure and using misinformation and disinformation-are means to undermine trust and confidence in democratic institutions. As such, the book proposes a wide range of policy responses to tackle these cyber-enabled threats focusing on the geopolitical front lines, namely Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
How did modern territoriality emerge and what are its consequences? This book examines these key questions with a unique global perspective. Kerry Goettlich argues that linear boundaries are products of particular colonial encounters, rather than being essentially an intra-European practice artificially imposed on colonized regions. He reconceptualizes modern territoriality as a phenomenon separate from sovereignty and the state, based on expert practices of delimitation and demarcation. Its history stems from the social production of expertise oriented towards these practices. Employing both primary and secondary sources, From Frontiers to Borders examines how this expertise emerged in settler colonies in North America and in British India – cases which illuminate a range of different types of colonial rule and influence. It also explores some of the consequences of the globalization of modern territoriality, exposing the colonial origins of Boundary Studies, and the impact of boundary experts on the Paris Peace Conference of 1919–20.
Australian languages form a large genetic group with many interesting and distinctive phonological and morphological properties. Written by two experts in the field, this is the first book-length treatment of this topic, providing an in-depth discussion of a wealth of little-known data on the sound systems and word structures of Australian Indigenous languages. It includes a critical evaluation of theoretical approaches from the 1950s up to the current day, including recent experimental, psycholinguistic and processing-based research. Each chapter addresses a major aspect of phonology, including the segmental inventories, complex phonotactic systems, alternations, prosodic phonology and morphology, the behaviour of phonological domains, and the unusual nature of sound change in Australia. The authors also add to this their own groundbreaking findings, and frame each chapter to inform future phonological research and theory. It is essential reading for scholars and students in phonology, phonetics, speech science, morphology, and language typology.
In this book, Phillip Wiebe examines religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences, assessing how these experiences appear to implicate a spiritual order. Despite the current prevalence of naturalism and atheism, he argues that experiences purporting to have a religious or spiritual significance deserve close empirical investigation. Wiebe surveys the broad scope of religious experience and considers different types of evidence that might give rise to a belief in phenomena such as spirits, paranormal events, God, and an afterlife. He demonstrates that there are different explanations and interpretations of religious experiences, both because they are typically personal accounts, and they suggest a reality that is often unobservable. Wiebe also addresses how to evaluate evidence for theories that postulate unobservables in general, and a Theory of Spirits in particular. Calling for more rigorous investigation of these phenomena, Wiebe frames the study of religious experience among other accepted social sciences that seek to understand religion.
This book chronicles important formal and theoretical innovations in Latinx literature during a period when Latinx writers received increasing acclaim while their communities became targets of rising hostility. The essays in this collection show how Latinx writers confront this contradiction by cultivating an understanding of Latinx experience in its transnational dimensions, by recovering histories that were suppressed or erased, by engaging in burgeoning decolonial projects that resist Western epistemologies, and by forming coalitions and solidarities within Latinx groups as well as with other minoritized racial and ethnic communities to challenge state violence and US imperial projects. The book highlights the increasingly important role of genre, form, and media in the contemporary Latinx literature and provides an account of how the shifting demographics and new migrations of Latinx people have not only resulted in new narratives and art but also altered and expanded how we imagine the category 'Latinx.'
Widening the perspective offered by the traditional canon, this history reveals the poetry of Italy between 1200 and 1600 as a site of plurality of genre, form and even language, including not just written texts but also those presented in performance. Within this inclusive framing, poetry's content, its cultural and geographical contexts and its material media of transmission are given equal weight. Decentring major figures and their texts while recognising their broad influence, the innovative theoretical and methodological framework complements the variety and liveliness of poetic activity on the Italian peninsula over four centuries, from the first manuscript experiments in verse through to sophisticated print productions and elaborate performance media. Offering original, multidisciplinary insights into current debates and discoveries, this history enlarges the scope of what we understand Italian premodern poetry to be.
This indispensable text presents an overview of the essential knowledge, understanding and skills in Lifestyle Medicine including a thorough explanation of the '6 Pillars' concept. There are no shortage of clinicians interested in the subject, but knowing where to start has, until now, been a challenge. Based around the innovative 'Bridge' diagram of Lifestyle Medicine, this textbook provides a clinically-oriented perspective for undergraduate and postgraduate learners interested in evidence-based, person-centred care. Packed with practical guidance on preventing, managing and treating lifestyle-related chronic conditions, sample scripts and assessments to trigger conversations and engagement with patients are included. With contributions from around the world, this guide is a fantastic resource to start developing the essential clinical skills necessary for the practice of Lifestyle Medicine.