abstract
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What is mind? We are each certain we have one of our own and most of us would claim to know what we mean when we speak of it. Yet when we try to go beyond the first assertion that our minds exist we find ourselves presented with, to use one of Winston Churchill's phrases, a riddle wrapped in an enigma inside a mystery. The riddle of mind has been a challenge and a debate for scholars for some twenty-four centuries. The question of mind has long challenged the concerted wisdom of theologians, philosophers, and scientists alike. Mind has been called by some "the battered offspring of the union of philosophy and psychology" and, like an abused child, the topic of mind is one psychology and neuroscience have alternately embraced, then denied, beaten, and locked away, and then embraced again. Many have equated this most quintessential character of what it is to be a human being with spirit or soul; others have dismissed it as a nothing-more-than-a-reflection or image of brain activity. No one really denies the existence of at least his or her own mind, but arguments over the nature of its substantial existence have been endless. Almost every psychology textbook mentions it briefly in the opening pages and then refuses to speak of it again.
This book presents the fundamental principles of the phenomenon of mind. It provides a mathematical treatment of mind functions and the organization of information and knowledge processing. The book is a companion to the author's early publication, The Critical Philosophy and the Phenomenon of Mind.