Shimon Edelman's Books

The Happiness of Pursuit

What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life

By: Shimon Edelman

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The Happiness of Pursuit

What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life

By: Shimon Edelman

When fishing for happiness, catch and release. Remember these seven words -- they are the keys to being happy. So says Shimon Edelman, an expert on psychology and the mind. In The Happiness of Pursuit, Edelman offers a fundamental understanding of pleasure and joy via the brain. Using the concept of the mind as a computing device, he unpacks how the human brain is highly active, involved in patterned networks, and constantly learning from experience. As our brains predict the future through pursuit of experience, we are rewarded both in real time and in the long run. Essentially, as Edelman discovers, it's the journey, rather than the destination, that matters. The idea that cognition is computation -- the brain is a machine -- is nothing new of course. But, as Edelman argues, the mind is actually a bundle of ongoing computations, essentially, the brain being one of many possible substrates that can support them. Edelman makes the case for these claims by constructing a conceptual toolbox that offers readers a glimpse of the computations underlying the mind's faculties: perception, motivation and emotions, action, memory, thinking, social cognition, learning and language. It is this collection of tools that enables us to discover how and why happiness happens. An informative, accessible, and witty tour of the mind, The Happiness of Pursuit offers insights to a thorough understanding of what minds are, how they relate to each other and to the world, and how we can make the best of it all.

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258

Publisher

Basic Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0465029205

ISBN 13

9780465029204

Computing the Mind

How the Mind Really Works

By: Shimon Edelman

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Computing the Mind

How the Mind Really Works

By: Shimon Edelman

In a culmination of humanity's millennia-long quest for self knowledge, the sciences of the mind are now in a position to offer concrete, empirically validated answers to the most fundamental questions about human nature. What does it mean to be a mind? How is the mind related to the brain? How are minds shaped by their embodiment and environment? What are the principles behind cognitive functions such as perception, memory, language, thought, and consciousness?By analyzing the tasks facing any sentient being that is subject to stimulation and a pressure to act, Shimon Edelman identifies computation as the common denominator in the emerging answers to all these questions. Any system composed of elements that exchange signals with each other and occasionally with the rest of the world can be said to be engaged in computation. A brain composed of neurons is one example of a system that computes, and the computations that the neurons collectively carry out constitute the brain's mind.Edelman presents a computational account of the entire spectrum of cognitive phenomena that constitutes the mind. He begins with sentience, and uses examples from visual perception to demonstrate that it must, at its very core, be a type of computation. Throughout his account, Edelman acknowledges the human mind's biological origins. Along the way, he also demystifies traits such as creativity, language, and individual and collective consciousness, and hints at how naturally evolved minds can transcend some of their limitations by moving to computational substrates other than brains. The account that Edelman gives in this book is accessible, yet unified and rigorous, and the big picture he presents is supported by evidence ranging from neurobiology to computer science. The book should be read by anyone seeking a comprehensive and current introduction to cognitive psychology.

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Page Count

628

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0195320670

ISBN 13

9780195320671

Representation and Recognition in Vision

By: Shimon Edelman

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Representation and Recognition in Vision

By: Shimon Edelman

Shimon Edelman bases a comprehensive approach to visual representation on the notion of correspondence between proximal (internal) and distal similarities in objects. Researchers have long sought to understand what the brain does when we see an object, what two people have in common when they see the same object, and what a "seeing" machine would need to have in common with a human visual system. Recent neurobiological and computational advances in the study of vision have now brought us close to answering these and other questions about representation. In Representation and Recognition in Vision, Shimon Edelman bases a comprehensive approach to visual representation on the notion of correspondence between proximal (internal) and distal similarities in objects. This leads to a computationally feasible and formally veridical representation of distal objects that addresses the needs of shape categorization and can be used to derive models of perceived similarity. Edelman first discusses the representational needs of various visual recognition tasks, and surveys current theories of representation in this context. He then develops a theory of representation that is related to Shepard's notion of second-order isomorphism between representations and their targets. Edelman goes beyond Shepard by specifying the conditions under which the representations can be made formally veridical. Edelman assesses his theory's performance in identification and categorization of 3D shapes and examines it in light of psychological and neurobiological data concerning the object-processing stream in primate vision. He also discusses the connections between his theory and other efforts to understand representation in the brain.

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Page Count

378

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262050579

ISBN 13

9780262050579

Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths

A Realist's View of the Human Condition

By: Shimon Edelman

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Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths

A Realist's View of the Human Condition

By: Shimon Edelman

A guide for making sense of life--from action (good except when it's not) to thinking (depressing) to youth (a treasure). This book offers a guide to human nature and human experience--a reference book for making sense of life. In thirty-eight short, interconnected essays, Shimon Edelman considers the parameters of the human condition, addressing them in alphabetical order, from action (good except when it's not) to love (only makes sense to the lovers) to thinking (should not be so depressing) to youth (a treasure). In a style that is by turns personal and philosophical, at once informative and entertaining, Edelman offers a series of illuminating takes on the most important aspects of living in the world.

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Page Count

338

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262542781

ISBN 13

9780262542784

Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths

A Realist's View of the Human Condition

By: Shimon Edelman

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Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths

A Realist's View of the Human Condition

By: Shimon Edelman

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338

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MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262542781

ISBN 13

9780262542784

The Consciousness Revolutions

From Amoeba Awareness to Human Emancipation

By: Shimon Edelman

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The Consciousness Revolutions

From Amoeba Awareness to Human Emancipation

By: Shimon Edelman

This book is about all things consciousness, great and small. It starts by pointing to the key characteristic of consciousness, without realizing which it cannot be understood: like everything else about the mind, it is fundamentally a kind of computation. Among many other matters, this explains: how it is that we share some aspects of consciousness with bacteria; how it can arise in artificial machines and not just living ones; how the empty cocoon of the self that it spins ends up pretending to be the butterfly; and how consciousness dooms this virtual butterfly to the splendor and the suffering of being awake and aware. Unlike most other books on consciousness, this one includes a discussion of some possible ways whereby we, pinned like butterflies by our species’ history and socioeconomic circumstances, can awake to our collective predicament and join forces to do something about it. It should be of interest to all readers who care about the nature of our lived experience — and about our survival, which depends on developing critical consciousness of our dire situation and the social dynamics that shape it.

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Page Count

225

Publisher

Springer Nature

Published Date

ISBN 10

303124012X

ISBN 13

9783031240126

Language Universals

By: Morten H. Christiansen Professor of Psychology Cornell University,Christopher Collins Professor of Linguistics Cornell University,Shimon Edelman Professor of Psychology Cornell University

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Language Universals

By: Morten H. Christiansen Professor of Psychology Cornell University,Christopher Collins Professor of Linguistics Cornell University,Shimon Edelman Professor of Psychology Cornell University

Languages differ from one another in bewildering and seemingly arbitrary ways. For example, in English, the verb precedes the direct object ('understand the proof'), but in Japanese, the direct object comes first. In some languages, such as Mohawk, it is not even possible to establish a basic word order. Nonetheless, languages do share certain regularities in how they are structured and used. The exact nature and extent of these "language universals" has been the focus of much research and is one of the central explanatory goals in the language sciences. During the past 50 years, there has been tremendous progress, a few major conceptual revolutions, and even the emergence of entirely new fields. The wealth of findings and theories offered by the various language-science disciplines has made it more important than ever to work toward an integrated understanding of the nature of human language universals. This book is the first to examine language universals from a cross-disciplinary perspective. It provides new insights into long standing questions such as: What exactly defines the human capacity for language? Are there universal properties of human languages and, if so, what are they? Can all language universals be explained in the same way, or do some universals require different kinds of explanations from others? Language Universals is unique in starting with the assumption that the best way to approach these and related questions is through a dialogue between a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, computer science and biology.

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312

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199719381

ISBN 13

9780199719389

Science, Psychoanalysis, and the Brain

By: Shimon Marom

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Science, Psychoanalysis, and the Brain

By: Shimon Marom

This book is an invitation to dialogue, created by a practising physiologist, intended for the hands of dynamically oriented theory-sensitive psychologists and physiologists.

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213

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1107101182

ISBN 13

9781107101180

Enzymes of Lipid Metabolism II

By: Louis Freysz,Henri Dreyfus,Raphaël Massarelli,Shimon Gatt

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Enzymes of Lipid Metabolism II

By: Louis Freysz,Henri Dreyfus,Raphaël Massarelli,Shimon Gatt

This book presents the proceedings of the 2nd meeting on "Enzymes of Lipid Metabolism" which took place in Strasbourg in October, 1985. It is a sequel to the first conference bearing this title which took place, also in the vicinity of Strasbourg, in March, 1977. In either case the meetings were coorganized by L. Freysz of Strasbourg, France and S. Gatt of Jerusalem, Israel. The present meeting was set up as a joint NATO Advanced Research Workshop and CNRS-INSERM International Symposium. The conference was guided by two principles, namely, that science has no bounderies, neither has the study of lipid metabolism. Participants came from Europe, the USA, Israel and Japan and represented areas of research in lipid metabolism involving fatty acid s, cholesterylesters, glycero-and sphingolipids. The experimental approaches utilized purified enzymes, artificial and biological membranes, as well as a variety of cells, primary or cultured lines. A session was also devoted to modification of lipid enzymes and metabolism resulting from inherited, inborn defects such as the lipid storage diseases which are caused by genetic modification of degradative enzymes of lipid metabolism. A second type of disease stemming from a defect in a cell organnel (ie, the peroxisome) was also discussed. The eight and one and a half years which elapsed since the previous meeting, highlighted the changing emphasis of research in. lipid metabolism.

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Page Count

800

Publisher

Springer Science & Business Media

Published Date

ISBN 10

1468452126

ISBN 13

9781468452129

High-level Vision

Object Recognition and Visual Cognition

By: Shimon Ullman

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High-level Vision

Object Recognition and Visual Cognition

By: Shimon Ullman

Shimon Ullman focuses on the processes of high-level vision that deal with the interpretation and use of what is seen in the image. In this book, Shimon Ullman focuses on the processes of high-level vision that deal with the interpretation and use of what is seen in the image. In particular, he examines two major problems. The first, object recognition and classification, involves recognizing objects despite large variations in appearance caused by changes in viewing position, illumination, occlusion, and object shape. The second, visual cognition, involves the extraction of shape properties and spatial relations in the course of performing visual tasks such as object manipulation, planning movements in the environment, or interpreting graphical material such as diagrams, graphs and maps. The book first takes up object recognition and develops a novel approach to the recognition of three-dimensional objects. It then studies a number of related issues in high-level vision, including object classification, scene segmentation, and visual cognition. Using computational considerations discussed throughout the book, along with psychophysical and biological data, the final chapter proposes a model for the general flow of information in the visual cortex. Understanding vision is a key problem in the brain sciences, human cognition, and artificial intelligence. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the theories developed in this work, High-Level Vision will be of interest to readers in all three of these fields.

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Page Count

438

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262710072

ISBN 13

9780262710077

Uniform Civil Code for India

Proposed Blueprint for Scholarly Discourse

By: Shimon Shetreet,Hiram E. Chodosh

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Uniform Civil Code for India

Proposed Blueprint for Scholarly Discourse

By: Shimon Shetreet,Hiram E. Chodosh

Article 44 of The Constitution of India, provides that 'The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a Uniform Civil Code throughout the territory of India.' Even after more than six decades, this anticipated code has not been developed or implemented. This book provides a blueprint for alternative frameworks and courses of action, drawing on lessons from comparative context to develop a Uniform Civil Code for India. It explores the interplay between issues of law, culture, and religion in light of various intra-community and inter-community disputes. The book proposes a series of guidelines and considerations to inform this process. The first guideline urges that the process of preparing and implementing a Uniform Civil Code should be the function of the Legislature. The Courts can resolve certain specific points but the comprehensive code is a legislative function and not for judicial resolution. The second guideline suggests the parallel application of civil and religious law. The securing of a Uniform Civil Code must not negate the possibility of citizens availing themselves of religious law-if they so wish. The third guideline advises a gradual application of a Uniform Civil Code. The development of the code should be done topic by topic, chapter by chapter. The fourth guideline is to deploy tools of mediation in both the formation of the code and its implementation. This mediation should take on two forms—intercommunity mediation and individual mediation. The first of these two relates to a dialogue between the communities of India, to advance an agreement upon the substantive provisions of the Uniform Civil Code. The second relates to mediation between individuals, in occasions where dispute arises in the realm of personal law.

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Page Count

301

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199089477

ISBN 13

9780199089475

The Happiness of Pursuit

What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life

By: Shimon Edelman

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The Happiness of Pursuit

What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life

By: Shimon Edelman

Draws on philosophy, literature, and brain science to explain why the pursuit of happiness is a more complicated effort than understood by most people, sharing insights into how to apply scientific methods for increasing one's chances of achieving happiness.

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258

Published Date

ISBN 10

0465022243

ISBN 13

9780465022243

Language Universals

By: Morten H. Christiansen,Christopher Collins,Shimon Edelman

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Language Universals

By: Morten H. Christiansen,Christopher Collins,Shimon Edelman

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Page Count

312

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0190294116

ISBN 13

9780190294113

Book's by Shimon Edelman

The Happiness of Pursuit

The Happiness of Pursuit

Computing the Mind

Computing the Mind

Representation and Recognition in Vision

Representation and Recognition in Vision

Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths

Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths

Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths

Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths

The Consciousness Revolutions

The Consciousness Revolutions

Language Universals

Language Universals

Science, Psychoanalysis, and the Brain

Science, Psychoanalysis, and the Brain

Enzymes of Lipid Metabolism II

Enzymes of Lipid Metabolism II

High-level Vision

High-level Vision

Uniform Civil Code for India

Uniform Civil Code for India

The Happiness of Pursuit

The Happiness of Pursuit

Language Universals

Language Universals

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