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

Wallace, Rodrick; Fullilove, Mindy T.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0387767649 ISBN 13: 9780387767642

Verlag: Springer, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Deborah Wallace, PhD, received her PhD in symbiosis ecology from Columbia University in New York City in 1971. In 1972, she became an environmental studies manager at Consolidated Edison Co. and participated in pioneering environmental impact assessment. She became a manager of biological and public health studies at New York State Power Authority in 1974 and remained there until early 1982. In 1980 she completed a MiniResidency in epidemiology at Mount Sinai Medical Center. In the mid-1970s, she also founded Public Interest Scientific Consulting Service, which produced impact assessments of massive cuts in fire service in New York City. She also probed the health threats that plastics in fires posed to firefighters and became an expert witness in litigation for plaintiffs in large fires fueled by plastics. From 1985 to 1991, she worked for Barry Commoner at the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College. From 1991 to 2010, she tested consumer products andservices for their environmental and health impacts at Consumers Union. She retired in 2010 but continues data analysis, research, and scientific publications. Her first paper was published in 1975, and her last publication, a book, in 2021.

Rodrick Wallace, PhD, is a research scientist in the Division of Epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, affiliated with Columbia University's Department of Psychiatry in New York City. He has an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a PhD in physics from Columbia University, and completed postdoctoral training in the epidemiology of mental disorders at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He worked as a public interest lobbyist, including two decades conducting empirical studies of fire service deployment, and subsequently received an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In addition to material on public health and public policy, he has published peer reviewed studies modeling evolutionary process and heterodox economics, as well as many quantitative analyses of institutional and machine cognition. He publishes in the military science literature, and in 2019 received one of the U.K. MoD RUSI Trench Gascoigne Essay Awards.

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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.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Springer
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0387767649
• ISBN 13: 9780387767642
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 216
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: ProductSafety@springernature.com; ProductSafety@springernature.com; ; Poststr. 9; Darmstadt; 64293; Deutschland