Symmetry, Causality, Mind (Bradford Books) (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is a remarkable book. Its claim is that perception is none other than the recovery of causal history. One cannot but be struck by the depth, novelty, and brilliance of Leyton's accounts, page after page, of even the most minute and ordinary of perceptual phenomena - claims which contradict virtually every previous treatment of these phenomena."
—Eleanor Rosch, Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Product Description

Michael Leyton's arguments about the nature of perception and cognition are fascinating, exciting, and sure to be controversial. In this investigation of the psychological relationship between shape and time, Leyton argues compellingly that shape is used the the mind to recover the past and as such it forms a basis for memory. He elaborates a system of rules by which the conversion to memory takes place and presents a number of detailed case studies--in perception, linguistics, art, and even political subjugation--that support these rules.

Leyton observes that the mind assigns to any shape a causal history explaining how the shape was formed. We cannot help but perceive a deformed can as a dented can. Moreover, by reducing the study of shape to the study of symmetry, he shows that symmetry is crucial to our everyday cognitive processing. Symmetry is the means by which shape is converted into memory.

Perception is usually regarded as the recovery of the spatial layout of the environment. Leyton, however, shows that perception is fundamentally the extraction of time from shape. In doing so, he is able to reduce the several areas of computational vision purely to symmetry principles. Examining grammar in linguistics, he argues that a sentence is psychologically represented as a piece of causal history, and archaeological relic disinterred by the listener so that the sentence reveals the past. Again through a detailed analysis of art he shows that what the viewer takes to be the experience of a painting is in fact the extraction of time from the shapes of the painting. Finally, he highlights crucial aspects of the mind's attempt to recover time in examples of political subjugation.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 630 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (April 15, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262621312
• ISBN-13: 978-0262621311
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,122,687 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

68 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful Book, July 27, 2006

By	Ed Stanton (Aerospace Industry) - See all my reviews

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.

62 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding., July 16, 2002

By	James Johnson (New York) - See all my reviews

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.

67 of 74 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb book, August 8, 2001

By	Lucy C Niemeyer Farias "lcnf" (Rio de Janeiro, RJ Brasil) - See all my reviews

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.