Books

The FourthEdition corrects errors in the Third Edition, and adds two Chapters of Lecture Notes and Study Guides.

This book may be right on time. It presupposes that minds are congregations of ``imagination machines" called mental models, and that some mental models are expressed verbally, diagrammatically and mathematically in specialized natural sub-languages called ``microlects." A verbal microlect is characterized by its vocabulary, since grammar is inherited from the ambient natural language. A diagrammatic or mathematical microlect must be defined by an explicit vocabulary and grammar. This book emphasizes  diagrammatic microlects, and is focused on a new ``universal assembly language" called timing machines, which are based on objective time and probability.

The mental model of objective time in Physics corresponds to a mathematical microlect based on the continuum of Real Numbers. The new mental model of subjective time in this book synthesizes and extends work by Henri Bergson on ``duration," William James on ``specious present," and Edmund Husserl on ``phenomenology of temporal awareness." This necessitates a preliminary mental model of conscious thought and focus of attention.

Edmund Husserl dwelled on the basic phenomenological fact that one never perceives a shape in space in its entirety at once, a partial view of a shape from one viewpoint at a time is all one may have. This observation raises a question, what is the least mathematical structure corresponding to a qualitative shape, and from which it is possible to derive its partial views? This is about mathematical phenomenology, not neurophysiology.

Chapter 1 uses the history of the physics of the MRI Machine to present examples of mental models and their verbal and diagrammatic (not mathematical) microlects. These examples cleave into mental models of visible apparatus, and mental models of invisible structures, atoms. Chapter 2 introduces the timing machines microlect and provides a number of examples from mathematics, physics, computer science, chemistry, and neurophysiology. Chapter 3 simplifies timing machines enough to present the Micro-Timing Formula, which is an algorithm for simulation, emulation, and prediction of timing machine behavioral propensities. Chapter 4 surveys mental models of conscious thought by a physicist, a psychologist, and a historian-philosopher of medicine. 

These lead up to a mental model of Structure of the Mind. Chapter 5 discusses very simple conscious thought experiments that anyone can do. Chapter 6 synthesizes and extends Bergsonian and Husserlian mental models of subjective time. Chapter 7 lays out a mathematical research program for the study of qualitative shape in the plane, and Chapter 8 discusses mental models and microlects and their significance for education. The book concludes with a philosophical analogy, that mental models and their microlects are to their referents as partial views are to shapes.