The area of the mind and brain is a difficult one to present to the non-specialist, since on the one hand, it requires an understanding of traditional philosophical areas like epistemology, and modern scientific areas such as perception, psychophysics, and neurobiology. This makes it a formidable area to try to read and get some background in for the layman, but there is no more fascinating and important subject than the understanding of our own minds, brains, and selves, and yet few people, even those trained in the sciences, have a knowledge of it.

This book presents this difficult and technical area in a clear, concise and even engaging and witty way, using a cartoon-like style to illustrate and elaborate on the concepts of the text. If there is an easier way to get a basic grasp of the issues I haven't seen it, and I enjoyed reading this book although this is my own specialty and I can read the more technical literature too, because it gave me many ideas about how to explain the concepts better myself in my own conversations with people.

I just wanted to make one other comment. A long-standing and still controversial issue in the mind-brain field is the problem of psychophysical reductionism. This is the idea that the mind can ultimately be reduced to the actions of individual neurons, and to brain physiology in general. Although there is now a great amount of research to support this idea now, I didn't want to discuss idea so much as people's usual reactions to it.

The main problem here is that as human beings we seem to have an aversion to being reduced to our biology, as if this makes us some sort of machine, or at least a "biological machine." For many people, our new understanding of the brain doesn't seem to leave much room for phenomena such as consciousness, let alone the soul. Human beings are a very creative and resourceful species. Our imaginations take flight so easily, both as individuals and as a species, that we shudder at the thought that the mind can be reduced to mere matter, to "ordinary" biology.

This biology, however, is far from "ordinary." Your brain contains 60 trillion neurons, which are connected to anywhere from 3,000 to 100,000 other neurons. This is a lot of interconnections. To calculate how many connections this is, is very interesting. Mathematically, this is known as a "combinatorial explosion" problem because of the large numbers generated.

In practical terms, this means that the number of interconnections in a human brain is greater than the number of atoms in the Milky Way galaxy, which contains 80 billion stars. Another way of saying it is that your brain is the equivalent of millions of the most powerful computer chips. Your brain is thousands, probably millions, of times more complex than the most powerful computer we can build-- not bad for a blob of "mere matter" that weighs only 3 pounds.

This having been said, is it really so bad to have one's consciousness reduced to neuronal mechanisms?"

Anyway, I just wanted to make a few comments on that, since it's relevant to the subject of this book. Overall, this is a fine introductory book on the mind-body problem that should give you the background to undertake more technical books in the area.

This is an outstanding collection of papers, the most comprehensive probably ever published, on the issues relating to the philosophy of mind. They range from classical considerations such as the Cartesion dichotomy to modern analytical philosophy. They're really too diverse to summarize here, but if you already have a background in the subject, this book would be a great way to get up to date on what's going on.

This is an area I've worked in myself, and I thought I'd add a few more of my own comments to the debate, by way of considering a certain proposition. This is the statement that "You cannot know who you are and be who you are simultaneously. I owe the Canadian philosopher, Stephen Garvey, for this fascinating question, and he did the very interesting thing of opening up a "philosophy competition" to debate this proposition on a website he created expressly for this purpose. My background is both in philosophy and psychobiology, and so I would like to consider this proposition in the the light of that information.

Although it may be difficult to overcome this proposition, I don't see that the statements that we cannot know who we are and be who we are simultaneously are necessarily mutually exclusive.

Because of the existence of the condition "at the same time," this proposition really has three parts, not just two. If we can in fact know who we are at certain moments in time, and be who we are at certain moments in time, but these moments are contiguous but not overlapping, then we have achieved two of the three conditions. Then the only issue that remains is the one of simultaneity.

If it is thought that this is in fact the case, then the problem really comes down to a matter of the temporal exclusivity of the two main statements, and whether this one issue can in fact be overcome.

However, if we concede that being is a constant as long as we are alive, and that it cannot be isolated into discrete moments of time, then in that case, the condition of simultaneity can be removed for the statement "be who we are" since our being is not simultaneous with anything, it is simply continuous or a constant. If this is conceded, then the proposition is overcome if one can attain knowledge of one's self or who we are at any point during our existence.

In regard to the above, Garvey asked, "What is behind our knowing that allows us to know who we are without being who we are? How can we know, eat, or walk without being who we are?" I don't think that is possible either. However, even if it is conceded that knowledge, and perhaps even the knowledge of who we are, is not a constant and may be fragmentary or isolated in time, this is not a problem if it can be demonstrated that we can know who we are at any point in time (no matter how infinitesimally small) while we exist, which as we have concluded, is a constant.

Therefore, if during a typical lifetime of 70 years or so (a period comprised of approximately 2.2 billion seconds) we are able to know who we are for even a second, or even a millisecond during that period, we shall know who we are and be who we are simultaneously, and the proposition is overcome.

Then the problem really comes down to what is acceptable proof of the knowledge of who we are. Garvey pointed out that this is really a matter of knowing who we are either as what we know or knowledge as form, and the temporal exclusivity argument from the standpoint of being as a temporal constant. Since we have conceded being is a constant, there is nothing inherent in being itself that precludes the possibility of knowing who we are and being who we are simultaneously.

Therefore, is there anything in knowing who we are that precludes it from being simultaneous with being who we are? If it is conceded that it is not then we are now much closer to overcoming the proposition.

Anyway, just a few comments of my own on the thorny problem of the mind-brain question that are appropos of the subject of the current book.

I'm surprised I'm the first person to review this book. This book discusses classical Japanese jiu-jitsu, presenting the history of the art as it can best be reconstructed, along with many illustrations and discussions of the techniques. Just as with the approximately 200-300 schools of swordsmanship that existed between 1000 A.D. and the mid-1800's, when they went into decline (with only about 15 surviving today), there were many styles also of jiu-jitsu, often associated with a particular martial art tradition that included training in the yari (spear), naginata (halberd), the bow, and various other weapons, but most importantly, the sword, as in the famous Kashima-Shinryu style that Karl Friday has capably discussed in his scholarly book, Legacies of the Sword.

Here Craig attempts to do the same thing for jiu-jitsu and I think succeeds very well. Except for articles in various martial arts journals, there is no book accessible to the general reader that deals with this important topic. Overall, a fine book with much valuable information that should be of interest to martial artists with an interest in the old school or koryu Japanese arts.

This book provides an excellent introduction to the theory and practice of scientific method. Basic concepts and procedures are discussed ranging from the role of experiment, probability, and statistics to the nature and structure of hypothesis and theory. Appropos of that topic, I thought I'd discuss somemore concepts related to that here. Specifically, I recently came across a discussion of the "structure of science" and how that differs from pseudoscience and non-science activities. But just exactly what does "structure" mean in regard to science?

First of all, the word 'structure' is much too general and doesn't really mean much by itself. However, if we take it to mean the actual structure and nature of theory building in a particular discipline and also the scientific method actually employed, we are getting somewhere, as even the physical sciences differ more than one might think, even in regard to something as seemingly basic as scientific methodology, and we can contrast and compare them with regard to these two requirements very easily.

But in order to determine and compare their differences, we will need a couple of basic definitions. First, what is science and what is scientific method? A good starting position is that science is a combination of at least two things--the hypothetico-deductive method combined with some sort of empirical validation. Notice I say "empirical" and not "experimental," since this will come up later. A stronger definition would require some form of experimental validation, such as what occurs in experimental physics and experimental psychology. A good basic definition of the experimental method is that it consists of systematic variation under controlled conditions in order to determine causal relationships. So a scientific discipline could be said to be one that meets these two criteria. So far so good.

The problem with this definition, although it is almost universally accepted, is that even among the physical sciences, there are interesting exceptions. For example, take the science of planetary astronomy. No-one can start and stop the planets in their orbits to make experiments, and yet no-one doubts astronomy is a science, because it can make predictions about eclipses down to the second that are valid, and yet planetary astronomy seems to lack one important aspect of science. Hence, astronomy is an empirical rather than an experimental discipline. But it's still considered a science since it produces models that make very accurate and verifiable predictions about reality, and there is no better test of a science that its ability to make accurate predictions on the basis of observations. (Also, anybody who thinks planetary astronomy isn't a real science should try picking up a textbook on something known as Lagrangian Mechanics).

This implies that a better definition of science is the ability to make and validate predictions. This is not a bad idea, and is basically the definition of a theory. There is a lot of confusion about what a theory is in science, but if you keep that one criterion in mind, you can't go far wrong. Occasionally you will see it said that theories differ from hypotheses in being more complex and broader in scope, but although this might be true sometimes, this isn't a really a true distinction between hypothesis and theory. The only real difference between a theory and a hypothesis is that a theory has been tested more times and has more experimental validation, and so greater confidence is therefore placed in it.

But getting back to the our discussion of comparative differences in theory construction and method, we run into further problems when we come to the historical sciences, which include disciplines such as historical geology, many areas of psychology, and many areas of biology. But first, we need a definition of historical versus non-historical science. A good definition is that sciences like physics and chemistry are concerned with phenomena controlled by presumably universal natural systems that are non-historical, that is, independent of the time at which they operate. However, biological organisms and even the earth itself are historical entities whose characteristics may change through time, and whose workings may depend on historical laws that are not unchangeable and invariant, as in physics. This is the difference between historical and non-historical science.

So now let's consider the situation in historical geology. Instead of the deductive prediction of future events from known, present causes, it turns the scientifc method on its head to become inductive inference of ancient causes from their historical results. Hence, historical geology doesn't appear to be a science in the usual sense, and yet nobody doubts that it is indeed a real science, because, well, basically because it works, and no-one is too worried about its rather strange logic and methology.

I could go on further about this, but this is a pretty long review already and will do for a basic discussion of the topic of how several of the sciences differ in regard to their theoretical structures and scientific methods. There is another distinction one could make, say, between the mathematical sciences and statistical sciences because there we find differences in a science's ability to connect causes and effects reliably, with the difference being one of deterministic versus probabilistic causation, but as this is already a longer review than I intended, as I said, I will stop here. I hope you found my little discussion of the nature of theory and structure in science useful.

I already had the Introducing Logic book, which I thought was excellent, so I thought I'd try this one too in the series. I certainly never thought I'd see a book on quantum physics that was as good as this one done in such a cartoon-like style. I really liked the Introducting Logic book, and I wasn't disappointed with this one either. It presents the many strange and even paradoxical phenomena of quantum physics in a clear and concise way, and the illustrations are a fun and amusing way of keeping the reader's attention while helping to further the reader's understanding of the concepts. Even presented in such an engaging way, however, they're still not easy. Quantum physics is just not very intuitive and you just have to get used to that fact, but this book will give you a basic understanding of the area without too much cognitive anguish and serious brain strain.

After reading this book, if you're interested in further material, the late, great Richard Feynman's book, QED, is still the best introduction for the non-specialist. It contains almost no math and Feynman uses mainly spatial concepts to illustrate and explain quantum electrodynamics in a less mathematical, more intuitive way with his usual wit, enthusiasm, and style. The concepts are explained clearly and concisely in a way that is accessible to the layman and non-physicist. After reading this book, if you're interested in a more mathematical treatment, I would recommend the R.I.G. Hughes book, The Structure and Interpretation of Quantum Theory. It uses a little calculus, but mostly sticks to presenting the mathematics of quantum linear algebra, vector spaces, tensors, and matrix theory as developed by David Hilbert specifically for use in quantum mechanics. It's much more technical than Feynman's book but will give you a much better understanding of quantum mechanics in terms of the mathematical theory.

I'm almost in complete agreement with Searle on his position that the mind depends completely on the brain and that the dichotomy between mind and brain in philosophy is false. Although one must be careful not to subscribe to a simple mind/brain psychophysical isomorphism, nevertheless, it is quite obvious at this point as a result of the research of the last 75 years in the brain sciences that the mind depends on, and results from, brain mechanisms and processes.

In this book, Searle discusses and critiques the work of a number of theorists and makes numerous observations related to these points, and I thought I'd add a few more. So I'll just make a few observations about the neuroscience for the road, since that's my specialty, including some interesting work related to the clinical side, since some of it is quite fascinating (especially the "orgasmotronic people" I discuss at the end). :-)

The first area I'd like to discuss relates to the area of emotions and specifically mood disorders, which has focused on the neurochemical and serotonin and dopaminergic issues, especially since these chemicals have a profound influence on the limbic system areas and the areas they connect with, such as the temporal, frontal, and prefrontal cortex. The limbic system is an older area of the mammalian brain that has profound effects on emotional behavior and many aspects of personality. It is well established that chemical imbalances and/or damage, such as through trauma and stroke and so on, can cause various syndromes, ranging from mood and emotional disorders to cognitive deficiencies. We still have a lot to learn about this, but the basic chemical pathways have been worked out. For example, deficits in long-term motivation (which many people have) have been found to be associated with the nerve pathways connecting the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system.

Another avenue of research that looks promising relates to schizophrenia, which is that what we call "consciousness" actually results from the integration of separate and diverse brain areas acting in concert, and that when this integration becomes impaired, there are problems. Of course, it remains to be seen if can be treated some way, but again, our understanding of the possible mechanism is continuing to progress.

Another example of how our emotional life depends on the brain is the finding that 70% of death-row inmates have been found to have abnormal EEGs and brain waves emanating from the amygdala, another important structure in the limbic system. The amygdala is involved in aggressive and even homicidal behavior. In one famous case, a formerly quiet, unassuming man developed an amygdalar tumor and shot 17 people and wounded 30 others before he was stopped. There are now drugs that treat abnormal electrical activity in the brain, and the hope is that someday they may even be able to detect and prevent situations like this.

For another fascinating example, take homosexuality, which many people still think is a form of psychopathology. Freud said it was because the boy didn't have a strong father figure, and so doesn't know better. For years homosexuals were treated with psychoanalysis with no effect. Then about 20 years ago, a scientist at Caltech made the amazing discovery that heterosexuals and homosexuals had different neurochemical and anatomical characteristics in one of the limbic areas known as the neurosecretory zone of the preoptic hypothalamic nucleus. In fact, he was able to get animals to display either heterosexual or homosexual behavior by diffusing neurosynaptic chemicals into the preoptic area. So much for the Freudian theory. This research proves that this aspect of our behavior is due entirely to how are brains are wired from birth, and has nothing to do with old notions of psychopathology.

One of the most fascinating cases I came across was a number of people who had been perfectly normal, but had recently become almost complete "vegetables" and had to be hospitalized. At least so they seemed on the surface. There was nothing wrong with them cognitively, they still had normal reasoning ability and could talk and socialize if they wanted to. They just had no interest in it. They progressively lost interest in their famlies, jobs, friends, everything, and eventually had to be hospitalized.

It was discovered that these people had developed an epileptic seizure focus in the orgasm center in the brain. If I remember right, it had the tongue-twisting name of the nucleus reticularis gigantocellularis. In any case, it was in one of the somatosensory processing areas in the thalamus, which is a structure just below the cortex but above the limbic system. Although this is technically a form of epilepsy, there are no convulsions associated with this syndrome (just as there aren't in the case of temporal-lobe epilepsy, which, since it occurs in the memory and associational area of the brain, can produce intense visions and memories, as well as emotional states).

Now it was obvious why these people weren't interested in anything else in their lives. They had orgasms that went on for several minutes, and due to the intensity of the electrical discharge, were probably 10 to 100 times as intense as a normal person's orgasms. And they kept having them. Especially the women patients said it was better than anything they could experience before. So they just sat there, waiting, yearning, hoping, for that next "seizure."

Anyway, just a few more interesting things to consider relating to our knowledge of the mind and brain. The above facts amply illustrate and further support Searle's theory that the mind is a function of the brain and that the classical mind/brain dichotomy is false.

Despite the controversial and critical reviews of this book, I found it useful in learning about some of the history and background of grandmaster Cabales, and also the techniques of Cabales Escrima. I can't comment on the criticisms posted here on Wiley's book, as I'm not primarily an escrimador, being mainly a karate, kobudo, and iaido practitioner. However, I've trained in the Philippine stick arts too and I was just looking for a book that could provide some basic history on the art in addition to what I already knew.

The first few chapters are a brief bio of master Cabales, from his boyhood in the Philippines to his eventual arrival in the states, and his opening up the first Escrima school in the U.S. It was interesting to read about master Cabales's early training experiences and his teacher, F. Dizon, the origins of the first Doce Pares organization (which Wiley claims precedes by over a hundred years the current organization under the Canete family), and other interesting bits of history. After many years of working odd jobs everywhere from the Tondo docks in Manila to Alaska, master Cabales finally settled in Stockton, where he stayed the rest his life, founded the first Escrima school, and saw his art spread from a small inland valley school in California to dozens of countries and thousands of students around the world.

The following chapters are written by students and instructors who were close to master Cabales and who relate their training experiences with him, and the last half of the book is devoted to actual techniques. These show the basic strikes, blocks, disarms, and wrist and armlocks. I enjoyed these chapters too, although the problem with books on the martial arts these days is that you can get video tapes that are excellent on literally hundreds of martial arts which show the art far better than the static photos in books. I myself have dozens of tapes by a number of masters on various styles of Escrima and other Pacific Rim arts that are far better than the photos in any book. Nevertheless, since the book basically combines a brief history and biography of the master, a number of personal memoirs of the master, and a presentation of the basic technical aspects of the art, I didn't mind that too much.

Now not only is Cabales Escrima well established in the U.S. but a number of other Pacific Rim arts as well, including Filipino and Indonesian Kuntao, Indonesian Pekiti Tersia and a number of styles of Indonesian Pentjak-Silat. I've studied Kali Ilustrisimo, Inayan Escrima, and Pekiti Tersia myself, and enjoy them very much although they're not my main focus as a martial artist, as I said. But I've certainly learned to appreciate the Philippine and Indonesian arts more, which are truly great martial arts themselves, and I think it's great they're finally getting the recognition they deserve, although it looks like the Escrima world has the same political problems as the rest of the martial arts. It's interesting to consider that a once obscure art only about 20 years ago is now an international phenomenon with hundreds of instructors in the U.S. and many more overseas. Angel Cabales's Serrada Escrima has perhaps had the greatest influence of all and I hope his and the many other fine Filipino stick arts continue to grow and prosper.

I just had a few comments to make.

Malkiel is famous for his position that no-one can beat the stock market over the long term. The evidence for this is so sobering that I won't repeat much of it here, since it's now so well known--such as 90% of the mutual fund managers failing to beat the indexes year after year. Also, managed funds vs. index funds have higher expense ratios, which further lessons their performance since those costs are passed on to the customer. This is certainly a potent argument in favor of investing in index funds that track various things, such as growth stocks, high tech, or the broad market.

However, there is one major problem with Burton's argument which he doesn't discuss in the book that I could recall. Burton's data refers to mutual funds, which typically buy many stocks. At its height, for example, the big Magellan fund owned 1400 stocks. The average mutual fund owns about 100 stocks, and many own more. The turnover can be as high as 75% a year or more, which further increases costs because of all the commissions.

The problem with needing to own that many stocks is that mutual funds often run out of top-quality picks, and then are forced to buy second or even third-tier stocks, which degrades their performance. This almost guarantees that there will be a regression to the mean in terms of overall performance of the sort Malkiel talks about. However, the small investor has no such limitation. He can cherry pick and create a top-quality portfolio without having to buy the less steller (or worse) stocks that would make your typical mutual fund manager green with envy.

The problem here, of course, is being able to ferret out the top quality stocks. Malkiel would point out that this approach isn't without its risks, either, since such a portfolio with a small number of stocks could lack diversification. However, there's a way to deal with that. If you had, say, $100,000 to devote to a portfolio of stocks, you would be adequately diversified if you bought 15-20 stocks and picked the best stock in different sectors, ranging from high-tech to low-tech such as retail. Some people find that this is too many stocks to track, and that 10-12 in different sectors is a good compromise that still offers good diversification without having to track so many stocks. This has been proven to be almost as effective a way to diversify as buying the overall market (the economist who developed this asset allocation theory won the Nobel Prize in econ some years back), but has the major advantage of not diluting the strength and quality of the portfolio with poorer stocks.

Since Burton is a financial economist I'm surprised he doesn't seem to be aware of this. If you didn't want to devote all your money to this strategy, you could still put half of it in index funds and then use the other half for this. Whichever way you decide to go, good luck and happy investing!

In an age of cheap video you have to wonder why people are even still doing martial arts books with static photos that don't really convey the art very well, and this is especially problematic for the weapons arts. Furthermore, when you consider that most martial arts videos cost about $30 new and the price for this book is about the same, and that all this material would easily fit on a 60-minute video tape, the purpose of such a book becomes even more moot.

That having been said, I still found this a useful book on the art of Shintaido. The photos are quite clear and the demonstrators seem to show excellent form, although there are subtle differences from the Okinawan kobudo that I'm more familiar with. This is a relatively new art founded in the 60s when the author found himself disatisfied with traditional bo training and decided to develop his own methods, which he says encourage more natural movement. This is hard to glean, as I said, from photos in books, but I was still able to get some idea about the style from the photos.

The book covers basic positions, strikes, blocks, several kata, kumibo (sparring) techniques, and nagewaza, or throwing techniques, which was the most interesting to me. The author says the system has about 50 but he only shows 15 in the book. I would be up for a more advanced book showing these techniques, but I suppose that would be a stretch. The author should really consider doing a video instead.

One final point is, as someone remarked earlier from the author's comment in the book, the style seems to be mostly focused on the art of handling the bo and getting intimate with its special capabilities and properties rather than practical combat, and the author encourages non-traditional types of activities such as throwing the bow in the air, playing catch with someone, and so on, in order to develop this sort of feel for the weapon. For someone already skilled in the bo arts or a Shintaido practitioner, this is fine, but if you're a non-expert looking for truly practical and combative stick art, there are better books out there. This book should be seen as a contribution to the bujutsu arts and culture rather than as a combative art per se, and in that regard it serves very well.

This is another very funny and spot-on book from Adams. Some of the characters like Ratbert and Dogbert don't appear as much, but Wally comes on strong and new characters are introduced like ConsulTick.

What's funny is the resonant note that Dilbert has struck with so much of corporate America. Having been an employee at a major Fortune 500 company for many years myself, I was convinced that Adams was talking about my company, and so did everyone else, although the resemblances at times could be almost eerie.

Adams's cartoons of the more absurd and ridiculous aspects of corporate culture (which at times seems to be about 99% of it) continue to provide much needed comic relief for hapless cubicle dwellers everywhere, and this is another funny book from Adams that shouldn't disappoint his fans.