Collective Consciousness and Its Discontents: [electronic resource] : Institutional distributed cognition, racial policy, and public health in the United States /
Wallace, Rodrick.author.
Fullilove, Mindy Thompson,1950-author.
This book expands a recent mathematical treatment of the Baars model of individual consciousness to an institutional venue in which multiple ‘Global Workspaces’ cooperate, communicate, and compete. The result is an expansion of Dretske’s necessary conditions communications theory approach to high level cognition, having potential applications ranging from the organizational ecology of the firm to the design and analysis of highly parallel or networked autonomic computing systems. The particular example explored in detail, the failure of AIDS control and treatment in the United States, generalizes distributed cognition approaches to medical error and applies them to larger scale patterns of failure in public health, affecting populations rather than individuals. The book is written as a series of nearly independent chapters, and can be read at markedly different mathematical levels.
Description based upon print version of record.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Consciousness And Distributed Cognition -- Formal Theory -- Pathologies Of Collective Consciousness -- Disease And Collective Consciousness -- The Failure Of Aids Control And Treatment In The Us -- Final Remarks -- Mathematical appendix -- References.
This book expands a recent mathematical treatment of the Baars model of individual consciousness to an institutional venue in which multiple ‘Global Workspaces’ cooperate, communicate, and compete. The result is an expansion of Dretske’s necessary conditions communications theory approach to high level cognition, having potential applications ranging from the organizational ecology of the firm to the design and analysis of highly parallel or networked autonomic computing systems. The particular example explored in detail, the failure of AIDS control and treatment in the United States, generalizes distributed cognition approaches to medical error and applies them to larger scale patterns of failure in public health, affecting populations rather than individuals. The book is written as a series of nearly independent chapters, and can be read at markedly different mathematical levels.
Public health.
Health informatics.
Epidemiology.
Public Health.
Health Informatics.
Epidemiology.