Synopsis

What follows is a brief summary of the chapters and their content.

0. On the origin of Mind
Life's need to re-represent itself
Includes table of contents.

Part I: The Stated
1. The start of the journey
The stages of this book - preparing the reader for what is to come - caution about words and their usage - introducing thought structures and patterns - why the link to Darwin - comments on the sources and methodology.

2. The mind-body myth
Socrates - Plato - Aristotle
Differences between objects and people - subjectivity and objectivity - representations and abstracts - personal characteristics and idealisations - leaving the grounds of reality - the quintessential natures of things leading to presumption - a simple version of the abstraction process.

3. The universe as a fractal
Jainism
The foundations of the Jaina cosmological model - a careful use of abstracts - from perception to representation - congruent and incongruent functionalities - the pitfalls of qualities and how the Jains handled them - a more advanced version of the abstraction process - the perception-abstraction-transference (PAT) - how the atom is seen - Jaina logic and how it shapes their cosmos.

4. Building Europe's mind: the foundations
Manichaeism - St Augustine
Before Christianity - 'up' is good and 'down' is bad - political savvy in ancient Palestine - training the mind to hate its body - functional and object abstracts - default abstracts - the ideals in the lap of the god - higher-level PATs - the higher latency of Christianity compared to other religions - the logic boundary and the proof of a god.

5. Rights and wrongs
St Thomas Aquinas - Cathars - etc!
A quick revision - ideals again and other-worldliness - a gradual increase of abstraction levels - grappling with existence and how the system of the mind responds - the terror of ungrounded PATs - stereotypes are vital - the joys of suffering - high-level abstractions and their dangers - incongruent PAT loops - the inevitability of mass destruction - time travel to a town in the Middle Ages (an exercise).

6. Into the light
Rene Descartes - Benedict de Spinoza
The age of reason is full of caution - denominative thought structures - congruent PAT loops - first encounters with the subconscious and a definition of consciousness - a schema of grounded and ungrounded associations - intuitive and cognitive functional abstracts - becoming conscious of subjectivity - fixing cars and oneself - back to God.

7. The mind as government
John Locke
What it takes to understand - the first beginnings of the complexity concept - dangers of incongruence - comparing lower with higher abstractions - sensing time - the idea as object - resonant thought structures - the contributions or otherwise of emotions - social horizon and free will - horizontal and vertical PATs - how to solve puzzles systematically - the aesthetics of children's rhymes - the Molyneux question.

8. God by any other name
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Immanuel Kant
A longing for nature and other phantasies - logic boundaries disregarded - analogies between the mind and society - the affinity of functional abstracts and its traps - selective uses of ideals and associations - conceptual containers - a precarious use of maths - abstracting to dizzying heights - a play with essences - what happens when objects are discarded in favour of highest abstracts - the functional circularity of Kant's thought processes - ...and the circuit-breaker.

9. The will for independence
Georg W.F. Hegel - (Charles Darwin) - Friedrich Nietzsche
A new Europe - history in terms of the perceived and its abstractions - how the logic boundary gets pushed ever outwards - Hegel's functional container - is 'knowledge' really knowledge? - illusion trees and what drives them - another free will - still no recognition of the subconscious - contextual associations - the subjective use of 'freedom' - functional parallels in Darwin's work - homology and synonymy - Nietzsche's mask - contextual twin structures - a push-pull approach to Christianity.

10. Anatomy of a universe
Karl Marx - Edmund Husserl - Carl G. Jung
About the interdependency between an object and its usage - the effectiveness chart - how an ideology comes into being - tracing the role of incongruent PAT chains, illusion trees, and reduced abstraction levels in one's perspective of the world - the cognitive universe of communism - another version of abstract manipulation, this time upwards - floating above the realm of objects and how one can crash in Husserl's universe - putting together the pieces of Jung's world - some down-to-earth nitpicking - God hiding behind denominative thought structures - a universe of pain.

11. In search of freedom?
Herbert Marcuse - Jean-Paul Sartre
More on the effectiveness chart with the addition of complexity - determinism and progression locks - the hankering for original bliss - sexuality handled with kid gloves - delving into the subconscious - more twin structures - Freud and Dali and all that - abstracts as high as ever - even 'nothing' is something - abstracting one's perception of oneself - rationalisation complexes.

12. Back to earth
Ludwig J.J. Wittgenstein - Karl R. Popper - Homo Sapiens
Latency in high-complex systems - a quick discourse on probabilities - and so to a definition of Life - trying to deconstruct language - a pseudo recursion - affinity relationships and pattern recognition at different scales - the problem with induction - foregoing statistical evidence in favour of functional possibility - the pitfalls of patterns - a functional picture of the mind of the boy Calvin as he fears monsters under his bed.

13. A change of pace
Where we are now and where we are going - defining the conceptual space of Otoom - some more words on words.

Part II: The Unstated
14. From: Chaos (?)
Neurons - complexity - post-bio - a quick summary of neurons - what is complexity? - iterating systems transposed into a live environment - the sheer magnitude of complexity - the problems with describing a complex system - some misunderstanding - functional scales - a generic description of intelligence - what it takes to be intelligent - introducing a non-biological, intelligent system - parallels to nature - what it takes to have distinct representations - stable, periodical, and strange attractors and how they lead to affinity relationships - the significance of depth-first traversal - content is not important but relationships are - samples of output and what they mean - the importance of affinity potential and self-organisation - teleology: humbug!

15. To: Order (?)
Abstractions - clusters - consciousness
What abstractions really are - the kind of problems a robot has to deal with - calculating latency in terms of fitness peaks and comparing it with the output from the computer program - a homo-centric interpretation of the program's output - what we can learn from apraxia patients - more about object and functional abstracts - conceptual relativity - colour, what's a colour? - to some extent we all are split-brain patients - the famous grain problem and what's wrong with it - autocatalytic closure - Turing's halting problem and what it teaches us - the nature of memory and how it can deceive - how emotions affect one's affinity relationships - the underlying mechanics of consciousness - a simile from a toy - how consciousness tricks us - an experiment with time - the context of myth creation - abandoned children.

16. Setting the scene
Society
A trivial question - the emergence of culture - the ultimate home of homo sapiens - grounded and ungrounded affinity relationships - the latency of a resource space - autocatalysis writ large - why religions came into being and when - the benefits or otherwise of intelligence - the ramifications of high and low abstracting minds - conceptual intersections - the drug issue as an example of identity containers and what they do - how statistical facts can be turned into illusion trees - abstraction complexes influencing such things as violence, education, culture - the evangelism of the Christian West - environmental concerns becoming a religion - a list of behaviour forms demonstrating a balance of emotional influences.

17. Heralds of doom
Religion - Woman - Sex
The Christian Bible from a functional perspective - religious rule sets in terms of cognitive modules - the moral background of the West - the transference of will in religious mind sets - the Iraq war as an example - debunking ideals and perfection - delineating cognitive functions against the biological background of gender - affinity relationships as they apply to 'mother' and 'carer' - the ideological side of feminism - how perceptions are construed - education again - what happens when language becomes amorphous - testing one's vocabulary - the biological platform for sex and how an orgasm could be interpreted - it's eros, not sex! - religious illusion trees and how we hate and fear eros - the nature of humiliation - the travails of William James Chidley - religious violence towards the self - homosexuality and how it got treated - the moral double-bind - celebrating victimhood - Rodin vs nature - using memory to get what one wants - the question of age - induction of trauma - a history of eros in tabular form.

18. PAT^n+/-
Futures
Information transfer in dynamic, complex resource spaces - limits to the survival of a system - Fukuyama's radius of trust - the decomposition of social structures and the formation of conceptual islands - global migration - Islam in the West - moralism, privacy and security issues - many futures - the EU in terms of the dynamics of the effectiveness chart - street children, slums and the definition of 'home' - gene research and biological latency - summarising: ageing, environmentalism, feminism, immigration, the matron state, moral primitivism, polarisation of demographics, religion, security and privacy, unemployment - warnings.

19. Debrief
Some advice for my critics - acknowledgements.

Appendix
Parallels between the wetware and software - description of the setup - pseudo code - linear vs distributed systems - depth-first vs breadth-first transmission - the adjustment procedure - the appearance of stable, periodical, and strange attractors - what the screen displays tell us - affinity values between nodes - affinity relationships and their potential - fuzzy logic applied to in- and outputs - test runs - the emergence of memory and abstractions - Einstein's mystery(?) - some SI units - an example of fuzzy thinking - an 'Otoom-friendly' version of a Bill of Rights.

Bibliography
Sources ordered chapter by chapter, plus a general list with the sources ordered by date or name.

Glossary

Overview of chapters
What you are reading now.

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