Books about Sameness from Amazon.com

Foreword by Daniel Dennett

While it is fashionable today to dismiss the "bad old days" of artificial intelligence and rave about emergent self-organizing systems, Robert French has created a model of human analogy-making that attempts to bridge the gap between classical top-down AI and more recent bottom-up approaches.

The research described in this book is based on the premise that human analogy-making is an extension of our constant background process of perceiving--in other words, that analogy-making and the perception of sameness are two sides of the same coin. At the heart of the author's theory and computer model of analogy-making is the idea that the building-up and the manipulation of representations are inseparable aspects of mental functioning, in contrast to traditional AI models of high-level cognitive processes, which have almost always depended on a clean separation.

A computer program called Tabletop forms analogies in a microdomain consisting of everyday objects on a table set for a meal. The theory and the program rely on the idea that myriad stochastic choices made on the microlevel can add up to statistical robustness on a macrolevel. To illustrate this, French includes the results of thousands of runs of his program on several dozen interrelated analogy problems in the Tabletop microworld.

French's work is exciting not only because it reveals analogy-making to be an extension of our complex and subtle ability to perceive sameness but also because it offers a computational model of mechanisms underlying these processes. This model makes significant strides in putting into practice microlevel stochastic processing, distributed processing, simulated parallelism, and the integration of representation-building and representation-processing.

A Bradford Book.
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This groundbreaking book for physicians, biologists, and students analyzes the problem of how the sameness and difference in living things are controlled normally, in the course of development and maintenance, and abnormally, in the course of defective growth, tumors, and cancer. Like everything else in life, the biological sameness and difference in organisms has evolved. An understanding of this biological evolution will help control abnormalities, such as those associated with birth defects and invasive, destructive tumors..
Price: $99.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In this book, which revises and greatly expands his classic work Sameness and Substance (Blackwell, 1980), David Wiggins examines the logic of identity, the ideas of substance and change, essence, predication and mortal predication, personhood, and personal memory. This important book will appeal to a wide range of readers in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and analytic philosophy..
Price: $24.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Race/Sex is the first forum for combined discussion of racial theory and gender theory. In sixteen articles, avant-garde scholars of African American philosophy and liberatory criticism explore and explode the categories of race, sex and gender into new trajectories that include sexuality, black masculinity and mixed-race identity.

Race/Sex contains many new and provocative insights, such as Berel Lang's construal of racism and sexism as metaphysical stances; Jorge Garcia's argument that racism and sexism are both best understood as "in the heart"; Lewis Gordon's conclusion that in America, "the phallus is white skin"; Naomi Zack's historical analysis of the sexualization of black female race through the monetarization of black maternity; Laurie Shrage's use of queer theory to liberate choices of racial, as well as gender, identity; and John Pittman's presentation of the performative dimensions of black masculinity in Malcolm X's autobiography. Clearly written and insightful, Race/Sex is likely to spark debate and further research in "unified field theory.".
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Occasions of Identity is an exploration of timeless philosophical issues about persistence, change, time, and sameness Andre Gallois offers a critical survey of various rival views about the nature of identity and change, and puts forward his own original theory. He supports the idea of occasional identities, arguing that it is coherent and helpful to suppose that things can be identical at one time but distinct at another. Gallois defends this view, demonstrating how it can solve puzzles about persistence dating back to the Ancient Greeks, and investigates the metaphysical consequences of rejecting the necessity and eternity of identities..
Price: $16.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]