Collective Consciousness and Its Discontents:: Institutional distributed cognition, racial policy, and public health in the United States - Hardcover

Wallace, Rodrick; Fullilove, Mindy T.

 
9780387767642: Collective Consciousness and Its Discontents:: Institutional distributed cognition, racial policy, and public health in the United States
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0387767649 ISBN 13: 9780387767642
Publisher: Springer, 2007

Synopsis

An earlier book by Rodrick Wallace entitled Consciousness: A Mathematical Treatment of the Global Neuronal Workspace Model, introduced a formal information-theoretic approach to individual consciousness implementing approaches developed previously by the cognitive scientist Bernard Baars and the philosopher Fred Dretske.

This book takes a more formal 'groupoid' perspective and generalizes the results of that book to processes of 'distributed cognition' characteristic of large institutions that can entertain several, sometimes many, simultaneous 'global workspaces' which must compete for resources while communicating and cooperating.

Equivalence classes of 'states' produce a network of language-analogs characterizing interacting cognitive modules which entertain multiple workspaces. Equivalence classes of these language-analogs produce dynamical manifolds describing temporal processes carried out by multiple-workspace institutions.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From the Back Cover

This book expands a recent mathematical treatment of the Baars model of individual consciousness to an institutional venue in which multiple ‘Global Workspaces’ cooperate, communicate, and compete. The result is an expansion of Dretske’s necessary conditions communications theory approach to high level cognition, having potential applications ranging from the organizational ecology of the firm to the design and analysis of highly parallel or networked autonomic computing systems. The particular example explored in detail, the failure of AIDS control and treatment in the United States, generalizes distributed cognition approaches to medical error and applies them to larger scale patterns of failure in public health, affecting populations rather than individuals. The book is written as a series of nearly independent chapters, and can be read at markedly different mathematical levels.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
Springer
Publication date
2007
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0387767649
ISBN 13 
9780387767642
Binding
Hardcover
Number of pages
216

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9781441945747: Collective Consciousness and Its Discontents:: Institutional distributed cognition, racial policy, and public health in the United States

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  1441945741 ISBN 13:  9781441945747
Publisher: Springer, 2010
Softcover