John Sutton Textbook pdf download

But no more; after that there's plenty of useful description of robots designed under this rubric, and thought provoking that is, but we learn nothing more about autonomy itself or what role it might play in grounding 74 AAHPSSS, That something more might be in order is indicated by Clark's own characterisation above, a curious one for someone who wants to re-unite body and mind.

For, contrary to what is suggested, surely motion is among a creature's actions, not an extra item. Again, contrary to what is suggested, action is an intrinsic component of surviving, not an additional item. An organism must so interact with its environment and within itself that it acquires the resources necess- ary for viability for cellular repair, locomotion, heating, etc.

For this purpose it needs perception-organisation-action-feedback cycles on which it can obtain successful closure. Clark misses this issue, but it returns to haunt him. Independently viable systems have to be autonomous in the above sense to at least some minimal degree. These organisational requirements provide a set of constraints, further to those imposed by environmental selection, on biological dynamics, constraints which are suppressed in the standard selectionist models.

But autonomy constraints are crucial to understanding the structure of adaptive strategies available to an organism type because the required modifications must be so organisationally coherent that autonomy is preserved. These factors are key, for example, to explaining the difference between genetic variety coupled with shallow organisation and behavioural adaptability coupled with deep organisation but genetic uniformity, as divergent adaptive strategies, the latter alone leading to intelligence.

The robots Clark mentions are not autonomous, they do not have closure over any essential function and no self-control, though they share some of the same general functional features as autonomous systems and most importantly their construction is moving in that direction.

I think it clear that the book cries out for an analysis of the concept of autonomy to undergird it. And while this is not the occasion to expound my own views, as just hinted, I believe that autonomy is also the right organisational constraint on which to ground a truly embodied account of intelligence. Very briefly, the internal organisation and control auton- omy requires can be elaborated into a platform for intelligent capacities.

Autonomous systems beyond some minimum level of complexity have an intrinsic tendency to adaptability, that is, to the capacity to adapt adaptations, because they must be capable of coherent sequencing and modification of actions. And such autonomous, adaptable systems are intrinsically anticipative. Their functionalities imply that their environ- mental and internal actions anticipate responses that will support those properties.

Hunting is feed forward action anticipating subsequent eating and satiation signals. Anticipative feedforward is fundamental to all self- controlling systems, it combines with error-corrective feedback to deliver powerful learning and response capabilities. And thus we arrive at Auton- omous, Adaptable, Anticipative systems AAA systems , which already show all the hallmarks of intelligence.

They display complex internal control of anticipative response, conditionalising it on many subtle signals and, to the degree their control architecture is coherently adaptable, they are able to modify it and thus learn.

Thus cognitive capacities are grounded in the organisational and control capacities of AAA systems. Autonomy is a dynamically grounded organisational property, but it does involve, as Clark argues, going beyond mere dynamical pattern formation.

This is just part of the story that underlies Clark's elegant synthesised surface, and needs developing. There needs to be and are related analy- ses of action, semiotics for control, epistemics and error correction, sem- antics and off-line emulation, and so on.

Other analyses remain unnoted; for example, emulation is briefly mentioned, but its significance left undiscussed. One could dispute the whole approach, but that would be to ask Clark to write a different book and anyway, I am far too much in agreement with him. One could dispute mere details, but Clark's account is too balanced and clear for that to be profitable here.

But overall a splendid and timely work, whatever your theoretical proclivities. A typical recent effort is Beer et al. New York: Academic Press, Cambridge, Mass. O'Donoghue and R. Kitchener eds The Philosophy of Psychology. London: Routledge, See the tantalising Vehicles by Braitenberg, Cambridge, Mass. For some more details see Hooker, Reason, Regulation and Realism, including analysis of Piaget who made endogenous control explicitly central in the s, and W.

Christensen and C. Hooker in Evolution and Cognition, 3 , Wayne Christensen, a PhD student and member of the dynamical systems research team at Philosophy, Newcastle University, has contributed as substantially as I to the story summarised here.

Compare his colleague Grush's nice linkage of it to representation in Philosophical Psychology, 10 , 1.

Could off-line emulation be the intended source of Clark's representation? While the roots of the discipline can be traced back to the s, its real beginnings in the early s involved the application of ideas derived from conventional digital computers to human cognition, spawning the now appropriately named classical computational theory of mind: the doctrine that cognition is a species of symbol manipulation. Then, in the mids, the field witnessed its first major shake-up with the advent of neurally inspired, parallel distributed processing PDP computational models, which substituted operations over activation patterns for symbol manipulations, and many theorists in the field started talking passionately about connectionism.

Now, scarcely ten years later, the field is once again in tumult, this time with the arrival of dynamical systems theory, which, because it eschews the concept of representation, threatens to create an even greater rift in the field than that which occurred between connectionism and classicism.

It is in this revolutionary milieu that Andy Clark's latest book Being There is situated. Clark rose to prominence through his advocacy of connectionism, with his two previous books Microcognition and Associ- ative Engines containing some of the most penetrating philosophical work to be found on this alternative approach to the mind. But Clark, who might have expected to spend a few more years developing con- nectionism in a relatively stable intellectual environment, now finds himself defending it against the even newer dynamical systems vision of cognition.

Clark's response to this predicament is to preach ecumenism. Just as Microcognition argued that we shouldn't throw out all the classical insights as we stampede towards connectionism, Being There puts the case for combining the embodied, embedded aspects of cognition highlighted by dynamical models, with the commitment to representation, and hence computation, that we find in connectionism and classicism, for that matter.

This is a sensible position, in my view. And there is much to admire in Clark's latest book. He is a gifted expositor, and Being There is brimming with detailed and entertaining discussions of the new light that dynamical systems theory is throwing on the role played by both the body and the environment in shaping cognitive processes.

His point here is that such radicalism is unjustified and counter-productive, inviting competition between dynamical and computational conceptions of cog- nition where progress is more likely to be achieved through cooperation see especially Chapter 8. While there is much in Being There that I like, the nature of review symposia forces the commentator to look for points of discord rather than concurrence, simply because disagreements are bound to more interesting and response-provoking.

In what follows, therefore, I will focus on the one major ecumenical theme propounded in Being There that I find difficult to accept. This is Clark's advocacy, especially in the third and final part of the book, of the extended nature of the embedded, embodied mind. Talk of the mind leaking out of the brain and into the world is in the air these days. In philosophy it's primarily driven by externalist theories of mental content, which hold that the meaning of some mental states is determined by the causal relations that internal brain states bear to extrinsic, environmental factors.

But Clark is quite explicit that his motivation is quite different see especially note 23, p. For him the seepage of the mind into the environment is licensed by the subtle couplings between the brain and aspects of the environment, so empha- sised by dynamical systems theory, that make it reasonable to suppose that certain extra-bodily resources play a constitutive role in some cognitive operations.

So there must be principled ways of isolating those external props that become part of the mind from the absolutely vast number that don't. His favourite example is that of a notebook, which is our constant companion, and in which we make all manner of scribblings. In making these claims about the mind's extension beyond the skin and skull, Clark is opting for one of the two traditional ways of distinguishing between the mental and the merely physical. One way is to suppose that consciousness is the mark of the mental, and hence determines the extent of the mind.

But Clark thinks that conscious experience is fully explained by the current state of the brain, so there is no basis here for any mind expansion see pp. The other way, on which Clark relies, is to focus on the property of intentionality, whereby mental states possess the property of aboutness or, in the language of cognitive science, representational content.

The mind's boundaries, according to this second approach, are drawn around the representational vehicles it manipulates in the course of cognition. And so intimate is the causal commerce between human brains and certain written and spoken words, according to Clark, that these external artefacts themselves constitute part of the mind's representational substrate.

But I'm not convinced. It's not that I object to the general criterion by which Clark seeks to include these representational vehicles in the mind namely, that they are functionally isomorphic with those that standardly encode information in long-term memory.

The problem, as I see it, is that, at least in the context of a broadly connectionist under- standing of cognition, even his best examples fail to satisfy this condition. No matter how vigorous the causal commerce between parts of my mind and information I record in a personal notebook, these external symbols do not have the same causal properties as the representational vehicles responsible for my memories.

To see this, it's necessary to step back somewhat and rehearse some of the now fairly familiar details of the mind's information coding and processing capacities, as these are understood from a connectionist perspective. It's commonplace for theorists to distinguish between explicit and nonexplicit forms of information coding in a computational device. Representation is typically said to be explicit if each distinct item of information in the device is encoded by a physically discrete object.

Information that is either stored dispositionally or embodied in a device's primitive computational operations, on the other hand, is said to be nonexplicitly represented. It is reasonable to conjecture that the brain employs these different styles of representation. The representational capacities of PDP systems rely on the plasticity of the connection weights between their constituent processing units. By altering these connection weights, one alters the activation patterns the network produces in response to its inputs.

As a consequence, an individual network can be taught to generate a range of stable target patterns in response to a range of inputs.

These stable patterns of activation are semantically evaluable, and hence constitute a form of information coding. What is more, because these patterns are physically discrete, structurally complex objects, which each possess a single semantic value, it is reasonable to regard the information they encode as explicitly represented.

So a network, in virtue of its connection weights and pattern of connectivity, can be said to store appropriate responses to input. This form of information coding constitutes long-term memory in PDP systems. Such long-term storage of information is superpositional in nature, since each connection weight contributes to the storage of every stable activation pattern every explicit representation that the network is capable of generating. Consequently, the information that is stored in a PDP network is not encoded in a physically discrete manner.

The one appropriately configured network encodes a set of contents corresponding to the range of explicit tokens it is disposed to generate. For all these reasons, a PDP network is best understood as storing information in a non-explicit fashion. These facts about information coding in PDP systems have major consequences for the manner in which connectionists conceptualise cognitive processes. Most importantly, information that is non-explicitly represented in PDP networks need not be rendered explicit in order to be causally efficacious.

This is because it is a network's connection weights and connectivity structure that is responsible for the manner in which it responds to input by relaxing into a stable pattern of activation , and hence the manner in which it processes information. There is a strong sense, therefore, in which it is the non-explicit information in a network i. From a con- nectionist perspective it's possible to envisage how, whenever we act in the world, a very large amount of information could be automatically and unconsciously guiding our behaviour.

But these same facts about connectionism would appear to be destructive of Clark's attempts to extend the mind beyond the skull. It is quite clear that the information encoded in the form of symbols in a personal notebook doesn't have these causal properties, and hence isn't functionally isomorphic with the information contained in our long-term memory.

There are two important points of difference here. The first is that the external symbols are causally passive: the information they encode doesn't do any work unless we bring them under the gaze of our perceptual equipment. The second difference is that such externally recorded information, when it does become causally engaged with parts of the mind, does so only in a causally discrete fashion: each separate piece of information, coded by a distinct symbol structure, must be individually accessed and processed.

These differences would thus seem to mark an important natural boundary; one that makes it hard to justify, even on Clark's own terms, any extension of the mind's representational substrate to include our written and spoken words.

Incidentally, this talk of the causal passivity and discreteness of external symbols should call to mind one of the of-cited differences between connectionism and classicism. One of the reasons that classicism presents a very different picture of cognition from connectionism is because it holds that information in long-term memory, unlike that stored in a PDP network, is just like the information recorded on a piece of paper, as it must be discretely accessed by some processing mechanism before it can causally influence ongoing cognitive operations.

This is not to say that classicists are committed to the view that all long-term memories are stored explicitly. In fact, given the sheer bulk of information that is stored in the brain, classicists are committed to the existence of highly efficient, generative systems of information storage and retrieval, whereby most of our knowledge can be readily derived, when required. But such information, while stored in a non-explicit form, must first be rendered explicit before it can be causally effective.

So Clark's case for extending the mind across those symbols inscribed in various external media would be much stronger in the classical context. But this just serves to high- light why it is a mistake to enlarge the mind's boundaries in this way.

As many theorists have argued, it is precisely because classicism is com- mitted to this account of memory and information processing that is, 82 AAHPSSS, Many of us study cultural understandings, often called cultural models, and increas- ingly now conceived of as shared cognitive schemata; and while a number of us explore what these shared schemata do, it has not much concerned us that they had to have evolved to do it, nor what the consequences of their evolution might be for the form they take.

Andy Clark's rich synthesis invites us to begin rethinking our enterprise in terms of culture's coevolution with, and role in, human cognition, and it offers many applicable lessons from the design of robots and the evolution of various organisms. Yet, when Clark writes of internal representations that provide the brain with scaffolding, he is not thinking of culturally provided ones which, for him, are external.

I read this book with a growing sense that it was the book I had been looking for. For more than a year now, I have been musing over the evolutionary implications of some findings of mine, and searching for an evolutionary framework in which to put them. I would like to use my turn in this symposium to bring my material to bear on Clark's treatment of culture, and to see if he will agree to the extension of culture's role in human task solutions that I propose, an extension that seems to me to be very much in the spirit of his argument.

What I will describe are unspoken, internal cultural representations that mediate performance of two every- day cognitive tasks. The particular task solutions I report are less important in and of themselves, than for the much more extensive class of such cultural solutions as-yet-unidentified that I believe these two to represent. Indeed language is cultural, too; but it is only a part of our cultural equipment.

They are not to be equated, either, with inner speech p. More generally, though they are cultural, they are not external artefacts. Being automatic and out of awareness, hence unarticulated, and being otherwise unmediated by external artefacts, these culturally shared internal representations are so invisible that other people will be as surprised as I was to discover that we have been using them all along.

Which makes it understandable that this class of problem solutions has gone unrecognised and unstudied by comparison to both the tasks that 84 AAHPSSS, I want to argue that the internal representations I will describe are as much a part of what Clark terms e. Both tasks are frequent and recurrent, making it understandable why cultural solutions to them have evolved, and why, in Clark's terms pp.

The first task is a communicative one, that of clarifying what we mean to say to our audience by use of metaphor. To clarify what I mean, I will give the following two wholly typical examples. We've had our problems, but overall, we have had a good relationship. I never, ever want to put on another uniform.

That is why the metaphor of a marriage gives readers a surer sense of what Brett wants to convey about his relationship with his team. These include two-dimesional images, M-mode tracings, spectral Doppler and colour Doppler echocardiograms. A short commentary follows in which the relevance of the echocardiographic. Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy. Authors: Martin St. Cardiac resynchronization therapy CRT is one of the most exciting new advances in the treatment of chronic severe NYHA symptom class heart failure associated with dyssynchronous ventricular contraction that is refractory to medical treatment.

John Sutton, Susan E. Catherine M. Read Paper. Sutton Includes bibliographical references and index Classification -- Definitions and fundamentals -- Nozzle theory and thermodynamic relations -- Flight performance -- Chemical rocket propellant performance analysis -- Liquid propellant rocket engine fundamentals -- Liquid propellants -- Thrust chambers -- Liquid propellant. Welcome to Synology Web Station!. This book was designed to be used as a text in a one- or two-semester course, perhaps supplemented by readings from the literature or by a more mathematical text such as Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis or Szepesvari.

This book can also be used as part of a broader course on machine learning, arti cial intelligence, or neural networks.