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Philosophers from the time of Plato and Aristotle struggled with the nature of the mind, its relationship to the body and to objective physical reality. For Aristotle, sensations and their relationship to perception and reasoning were of central importance. Attention was not an essential aspect of Aristotle’s epistemology; sensory experience was thought to take on the form of the external world [1]. Descartes in his quest to create a philosophy of the mind observed “Regarding those matters which I think I see utterly clearly with my mind’s eye … when I turn to the things themselves which I think I perceive very clearly, I am so convinced by them that I spontaneously declare: let whoever can do so deceive me” [2]. In his writings and those of the other renaissance philosophers of his time, one sees the emergence of the role of consciousness in the process of perceiving, as in his use of the idea of “my mind’s eye.” Clearly based on introspection, Descartes made a crucial distinction between “external” sense perception and perception that was genuinely clear and distinct. For Descartes, the external senses resulted in “a spontaneous impulse to believe something,” but he did not view this type of impulse as irresistible, whereas clear and distinct perceptions that become conscious were seen as irresistible. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to review the various philosophical perspectives on consciousness and the nature of attention, it is apparent that even though many of the renaissance philosophers did not explicitly use the term attention, they were struggling to make sense of experiential phenomena that was at in its essence attentional.

Adaptive behaviour research has been heralded as a new paradigm in the cognitive sciences, whose main virtue is in eschewing the notion of representation. But the assumption that this new paradigm is immune from Heideggerian critiques which have been seen to be relevant to traditional representational AI is false. Behaviour-Based ideas are in accordance with an aspect of the critique but omit to confront the nature of language. The problem is the elusiveness of the traditionary aspect of language which ultimately renders any computational cognitive science impotent. It in not only the traditional notion of representation which needs despatching, but also a related notion of reality as purely physical reality. This paper identifies common structures in contemporary thought which serve to raise the traditionary aspect of language to the fore.

In the course of industrial product development, a point comes when the product concept must move from engineering drawing to physical reality. The activity surrounding this point of first substantiation of a product concept can be labeled prototyping. Prototyping is important because it is the ultimate means for verifying product concepts. Because it is the first substantiation of a product, prototyping can be very expensive and time-consuming. This is the basis for seeking methods of rapid prototyping. Rapid prototyping (RP) offers the lure of faster, cheaper product development which can ultimately impact customer satisfaction and future profits.

As a street directory is essential to a traveller, so a map of the human brain is the most fundamental guide for anatomists, pathologists, neurologists, radiologists and psychologists. Neuroscience requires standard maps, terminology and coordinate systems for the effective study of the normal and diseased brain (Mazziotta, submitted for publication). In geographic atlases on a single physical reality a myriad of abstract representations can be superimposed, such as climate, religious affiliations and crime statistics. In an analogous fashion to mapping roads on LANDS AT images, the connections, neurochemistry, cell types and other brain imaging data can be superimposed on anatomical data, the “backbone ” of the wider neuroscience research activity (Perchura and Martin, 1991).

Of the positive attributes of model building with T, rigidity ranks high on the list. The ability to mirror the structural features of our physical reality with flexible mathematics bespeaks more the talents of the model builder than any fundamental connection of the mathematics to reality. To lay claim to such a connection a mathematical idea must, in my opinion, satisfy at least the three qualities that so distinguish T: selectness; inflexibility; and consistency with those aspects of physical reality it is intended to explicate. This chapter should highlight these qualities.

Among the most intriguing and fascinating aspects of the physico-chemical phenomena taking place in very different systems, which form the subject matter of disciplines as diverse as nuclear physics, atomic physics, physics and chemistry of individual molecules, of atomic and molecular clusters, and even of liquids and solids (each of these has well-defined limits of applicability), are those that cross the interdisciplinary boundaries and are common for the different systems. Unearthing universality is one of the central objectives of a scientific pursuit not only because universal means fundamental, but also because universality introduces a unifying and often simplifying order into our picture of the physical reality.

The most fundamental change in Physics this century has been in the role of the observer. One consequence of the latter is symmetry, i. e., that two observers must perceive the same physical reality structure, as in relativity, and a second consequence is Quantum Mechanics. What we propose here is that an underlying nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE) can describe high-energy physics phenomena.

How the mind and body interact has been the focus of philosophical speculation since the time of Plato and Aristotle. The mind—body problem was central to the ideas of Descartes and many subsequent philosophers. Until the 19th century, it was commonly believed that “mental” experience was beyond the scope of physiological study. Cognition is still regarded by some scientists as a metaphysical entity without physical reality. This view was justifiable in light of the limitations of technology prior to the 20th century, and the great distance that seemed to exist between cognitive and physiological phenomena. As physiological investigations were often limited to the study of lower animals, it was extremely difficult to draw conclusions about the interactions of bodily state and cognition.

Sociality and technology are not simply general underpinnings which yield an amorphous consciousness. Quite the contrary, sociality and technology exist as specific social-technological systems which endow consciousness with particular form and content. Consciousness only emerges in the struggle to comprehend, create, and transform a particular social, technological, and physical reality. Accordingly, consciousness’s activity and organization are thoroughly imbued with that reality. The features of psychology that were described in Chapter 1 are only abstractions that have been intellectually lifted from sensuous life activity. The statement that “thought is stimulated by language” is a summary description of the fact that different kinds of language exist which stimulate quite different kinds of thinking. The summary description is abstract in the sense that it extracts a common quality from the different instances. The instances are concrete in that they are integrated configurations of numerous real properties. While abstractions are real in the sense that different particulars do have common qualities, abstractions must always be recognized as emanating from concrete particulars; they do not exist in and of themselves.1 Beneath the serene, imperturbable homogeneity of abstractions lies a vibrant, discordant concreteness. The comfortable, secure feel of invariant abstractions is only the external shell of a most unstable, variable lived struggle to produce concrete phenomena. Accordingly, psychological abstractions such as thinking, feeling, perceiving, learning, and communicating must be grounded in sensuous life activity. Psychology is the psychology of real, living individuals engaged in a definite mode of social life and intercourse with nature. Psychological functions are not independent of practical life. As Vygotsky (1989, p. 65) said, “It is not thought that thinks; a person thinks.”

Among the potential liabilities of nuclear power, nuclear waste is at the center of a great part of the public and policy discussions. Although political, social, economic and even ethical issues are important parts of those discussions, there exist physical and biological bases upon which much of these discussions depend. To insure that the discussions will lead to proper decisions, it is crucial that the characteristics of nuclear waste be measured and reported in a way that both accurately reflects physical reality and also is relevant to human concerns. It is incumbent upon the technical community to help develop and deploy indices for this task and to resist the use of indices that tend to distort the true physical character of the wastes. It is only through properly and carefully constructed indices of physical conditions that informed policy is served in arenas where technical factors have such an important role.

There used to be two realities in the world of physics: Experiment and Theory. Now there are three, and the third one is The Computer. In the community of physicists outside of the computer-simulation enclave, there is a good deal of skepticism about computer simulations of many-particle systems. This skepticism is certainly justified at the present time. Nevertheless, in my opinion, computer simulation will affect the progress of physics in a profound way. The many-body problems that we worked on for decades will finally yield to computer simulation. This does not mean that many-body problems will suddenly become simple; the complications of these problems will appear in a new form. The question will be, how are computer simulations to be interpreted in terms of the mathematically posed problem, or in terms of physical reality. A computer-generated many-particle process contains an enormous amount of information, and the challenge will be to extract the information we want, leaving computer artifacts behind. In other words, the computer may have the answer, but we will have to figure out the question.

When we simulate dynamic physical processes with a computer, we must know the equation of state (EOS) for the materials in question. The more accurate the equation of state, the closer the program can simulate the physical reality. This study was undertaken to obtain equation of state expressions for silicon dioxide (SiO2), water (H2O), and SiO2 + H2O mixture. Such expressions are of primary interest to the designers of underground nuclear tests because cavity size, pressure, and other seismic disturbances of the explosion depend on the state properties of rock media. To date, a rather crude EOS expression (such as an ideal-gas law) has been used to satisfy an actual need.

This set of four lectures was given for relativists. Consequently, we have not focused on a review of the latest results obtained in supergravity, but rather tried to give a coherent account of the fundamentals of supergravity. Many people who are keen to understand what supergravity is, fail because of always the same technical details. Thus we give, in these lectures, these details — especially a proof of gauge invariance — and not a sketchy description of how, in principle, to obtain the results. In this year of Einstein’s centennial celebration, research in classical general relativity is less intense than it was in the first half of our century. There are, however, some new developments: twistors, Hawking radiationand supergravity, to mention a few. Supergravity is a beautiful mathematical theory, but so far it has not yet contributed to our understanding of physical reality. That may come; perhaps Fermi-Bose symmetry and a space-time with bosonic and fermionic coordinates are reality.

Paradox is a word of Greek origin: it means against expectation, against the common opinion (para + doxa). The paper of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR)(1) in 1935 shocked the whole physics community because its far-reaching conclusions were against expectation. The EPR ingredients were only two: a reality criterion (what is called today a realistic attitude) and a firm belief in what is known as Einstein’s locality. Starting from this simple recipe they showed that quantum mechanics is not a complete theory: there exist elements of physical reality which have no counterpart in the quantum-mechanical formalism.

Now that the most important primary processes of energy absorption have been considered (Chapter 4), and powerful formalisms for the description of dose-response relationships have been developed (Chapter 2 and 3), the unavoidable problem arises of linking the formal description with physical reality. The resultant systematic presentation of this chapter is therefore particularly valuable, as its conclusions will provide some important aids for the better understanding and assessment of many radiation biological phenomena (for example, the temperature and oxygen effects). The considerations of this chapter require first of all a precise definition of the term “hit”, as this was not possible in the previous discussion of the hit theory.