Customer Reviews

Symmetry, Causality, Mind (Bradford Books)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Leyton is an extraordinary great innovator. I had the same sensation when reading his work as I did when reading Newton's Principia: "Everything changes here!" This book is a basic introduction to his revolutionary theory of geometry in which he completely inverts mathematics for the last 3000 years. He makes mathematics the study of history, as opposed to the study of the non-historical which he shows has been the basis of mathematics since its origins in ancient Greece. His mathematical innovations are now of enormous interest in large-scale manufacturing industries including the aerospace industry in which I work. I discovered him as a result of hearing his talk at Boeing aircraft. I started by reading his innovative work on software structure, which is of great interest to us dealing with legacy systems. This lead me to his reformulation of the foundations of mathematics. Then I also discovered that he is not just a mathematician, cognitive scientist, software theorist, roboticist, etc., but also a highly respected painter, sculptor, architectural designer, composer, etc. A truly universal mind. There is no doubt that he will be studied in 2000 years just like Plato is studied today. Innovators of this magnitude are rare, and their work never looses interest. They change the directions that whole civilizations take.

Symmetry, Causality, Mind is a remarkable book. His author, Michael Leyton, observes that the mind uses shape to recover the past. Leyton presents, according to a psychological approach, the relationship between shape and time. Leyton shows that shape is converted into memory by means of symmetry. Professor Leyton's theory has been applied in numerous disciplines, such as art, anthropology, computer vision, forensic science, linguistics, and philosophy.

This is a truly interesting and original book. Leyton proposes that shape is the means of inferring history. He elaborates clearly and detail the inference rules by which shape can be converted into time. The scientific impact of Leyton's ideas has been considerable. I have seen applications of his work by people in medicine, archaeology, meterology, chemistry, linguistics, graphics, etc. A truly original mind. The book also is very well written and laid out. One of the most important books I have read.

Leyton's profound ideas are used in an enormous number of disciplines. For example, a theorem he proved while a student is now used in over 40 scientific disciplines. Physicists are now describing him as being responsible for the next great revolution in physics. In fact, he has published deep original work on the foundations of nuclear physics, the structure of African languages, robotics, the psychology of human perception, computer-aided design, the foundations of geometry, etc. He is clearly one of a handful of truly great geniuses of human history. It is quite shocking to have such an individual as a contemporary. Like being born at the same time as Leonardo da Vinci. It is well-known that he studied university physics at the age of 6, and won a national painting competition at the age of 10, and wrote his first Mahler-length symphony at the age of 12, won presidential award from the White House. His book, Symmetry Causality Mind, in MIT Press, was greeted at first with enormous controversy. At the time (14 years ago), I was working at MIT, and I remember a tremendous "buzz" in the corridors about the book. People would either condemn the book or praise it as one of the great books of human thought. Recently I attended a talk of Leyton's in the architecture department at MIT, and the almost unanimous opinion was that it was one of the most exhilarating and popular talks in the department's history. People could not stop talking about it for weeks.

This book has such enormous power that it will clearly change the course of Western civilization. Leyton is one of the greatest thinkers of all time. In terms of his achievements in all the sciences and arts, he is unique in world history - an individual who has revolutionized several disciplines simultaneously and several arts - painting, music architecture. One constantly hears the word genius about him. But this might be an understatement. He seems to be a phenomenon that has never existed before - an individual who is a genius in all disciplines at the same time. A mind like this completely defies all limits.

I heard someone describe the Nobel-prize winning scientist Richard Feynman as an extraordinary genius as opposed to an ordinary genius. The distinction was that, whereas an ordinary genius is an enormously talented version of an ordinary person, an extraordinary genius is in a completely different category. It is simply impossible to add enough talent to an ordinary person to get an extraordinary genius. Their minds and entire existences are constructed differently.

This is obviously the case with Leyton. Yet if one compares him with Richard Feynman, one finds that Feynman worked within a well-established paradigm, making extraordinary contributions to it and expanding it, whereas Leyton entirely invents the paradigm. Indeed he seems to have invented 20 paradigms. At the root of this is his extraordinary unification of all knowledge. Indeed, in his books, he seems to be the first person to actually understand what knowledge is.

His entire theory is a theory of knowledge: what it is to know. It is as a result of being able to answer this question, that he is able to enter any scientific and artistic discipline and completely revolutionize it.

This book is for those who want to live a conscious life and know what consciousness is at the same time. It is the first and only book to explain consciousness.

The book has an endless monumental depth. It will clearly be read in 2000 years, just like Plato and Socrates are read millennia after their time. It changes everything from the ground up. It wipes aside all the ideas of Western philosophy, and replaces them with an intellectual monument that completely re-builds human thought.

This is simply the greatest book I have ever read. Put aside your Hegel, Kant, Hume, etc. Leyton is far greater than all of them.

First off, let me begin by saying that this book was bought not for pleasure, but for the author's Cognitive Science class at Rutgers University. You may read reviews of Mr. Leyton's class at www.ratemyprofessor.com (NJ>Rutgers University--New Brunswick>Leyton, Michael). I am admitting this because my experience in the class--I did very well grade-wise but despised the author's King of the World attitude--may have biased my review, though I will try to be impartial.

The book explores Leyton's theories on cognitive awareness and development, and heavy emphasis was placed on his idea that the mind (in all forms of life, including experiment rats) constantly seeks out not just novel stimuli, but *complex* stimuli. I found that many of his supporting arguments seemed at first to be convincing, until I read the footnotes. Many of the experiments he references were performed by him and his collegues. I have never seen an author cite himself so many times in an academic text. That was enough to irk me, but then I researched the other experiments he cites both in the book and in his class and found that he often just whips explanations out of his rear and credits the support of his ideas to concrete experiments, rather than his own muddled memory of those experiments' conclusions.

Allow me to explain. One of his central arguments is that without available complexity, a person will either make their own complexity or die. His support of this idea is that an experiment was performed with orphaned infants kept in cribs with white sheets and white walls, many of whom died, he claims, from lack of stimulation. Further research on my part revealed that the infants died from poor care and the plights of orphans everywhere. Many were neglected in an environment where, since a World War was going on, there were too many orphans and not enough care-takers. Moreover, many of the orphans were ill to begin with, and died that way. The experiment was (obviously) never repeated in a clinical setting, so the data can't be taken in without a grain of salt. The fact that the orphans were surrounded by white sheets should hardly be taken to be the cause of death, except when trying to prove a theory with little supporting evidence. Michael Leyton often takes things out of context to support his own ideas, a plot that would land him out of favor with many higher up in the academic heirarchy were he to carry his pompous-professor attitude to his collegues (apparently, this superiority complex extends only to his students).

It would not be so bad to make up false, unsupported conclusions to support one's ideas were this not an academic text. As it is, I was shocked.

Additionally, Leyton seems to be trying to put himself on a higher level by using ridiculously complicated sentences and unnecessarily hard vocabulary as part of his writing style. I know that this is a college text, but we've been taught that when writing a scientific text, one should strive to make it accessible to all levels, the better to foster further inquiry and thought.

Nevertheless, if you take away all his bogus supportive evidence, his holy-high-chair attitude, and just leave the ideas he presents, you have a very thought-provoking text that would hopefully lead to further inquiry into the relationship between complexity and cognitive development. This is why it gets two stars instead of zero.

I would recommend that you buy the book and review it for yourself, after carefully researching his "evidence".

For a critical review of this book and of the whole of Leyton's work you may profitably read
'A Critique of Leyton's Theory of Perception and Cognition. Review of Symmetry, Causality, Mind, by Michael Leyton.'
by Hendrickx M. and Wagemans J. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Volume 43, Number 2, June 1999, pp. 314-345.
It may save you a lot of money. If you can't find the paper just contact me at marcel.hendrickx@chello.be . I'll be glad to inform you.

The ideas held within this book are very astounding. There appear to be a wide array of different applications in many fields for some of his theories. Unfortunately, his pedantic writing style and amazing overuse of seemingly meaningless and unneccesarily long words makes it very difficult to read. If you are looking to get a reasonably good understanding of the book, I would suggest that you find some sort of synopsis or abridged version. It is a pain to wade through some of the more tedious recursive definitions and principles. I imagine though that, if you could sift through and find the underlying meaning, you would be left with a great wealth of knowledge about these many subjects.