Problem Solving with C with CDROM or Shadows of the Mind

Problem Solving with C++ with CDROM

Author: Walter Savitch

Now featuring new Video Notes, the Seventh Edition of Problem Solving with C++ continues to be the most widely used textbook by students and instructors in the introduction to programming and C++ language course. Through each edition, hundreds and thousands of students have valued Walt Savitch’s approach to programming, which emphasizes active reading through the use of well-placed examples and self-test examples. Created for the beginner, this book focuses on cultivating strong problem-solving and programming techniques while introducing students to the C++ programming language.  For all readers interested in the C++ programming language.

New interesting textbook: Die Führungserfahrung (mit InfoTrac?)

Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness

Author: Roger Penros

A New York Times bestseller when it appeared in 1989, Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind was universally hailed as a marvelous survey of modern physics as well as a brilliant reflection on the human mind, offering a new perspective on the scientific landscape and a visionary glimpse of the possible future of science. Now, in Shadows of the Mind, Penrose offers another exhilarating look at modern science as he mounts an even more powerful attack on artificial intelligence. But perhaps more important, in this volume he points the way to a new science, one that may eventually explain the physical basis of the human mind.
Penrose contends that some aspects of the human mind lie beyond computation. This is not a religious argument (that the mind is something other than physical) nor is it based on the brain's vast complexity (the weather is immensely complex, says Penrose, but it is still a computable thing, at least in theory). Instead, he provides powerful arguments to support his conclusion that there is something in the conscious activity of the brain that transcends computation--and will find no explanation in terms of present-day science. To illuminate what he believes this "something" might be, and to suggest where a new physics must proceed so that we may understand it, Penrose cuts a wide swathe through modern science, providing penetrating looks at everything from Turing machines (computers programmed from artificial intelligence) to the implications of Godel's theorem maintaining that conscious thinking must indeed involve ingredients that cannot adequately be stimulated by mere computation. Of particular interest is Penrose's extensive examination of quantummechanics, which introduces some new ideas that differ markedly from those advanced in The Emperor's New Mind, especially concerning the mysterious interface where classical and quantum physics meet. But perhaps the most interesting wrinkle in Shadows of the Mind is Penrose's excursion into microbiology, where he examines cytoskeletons and microtubules, minute substructures lying deep within the brain's neurons. (He argues that microtubules--not neurons--may indeed be the basic units of the brain, which, if nothing else, would dramatically increase the brain's computational power.) Furthermore, he contends that in consciousness some kind of global quantum state must take place across large areas of the brain, and that it within microtubules that these collective quantum effects are most likely to reside.
For physics to accommodate something that is as foreign to our current physical picture as is the phenomenon of consciousness, we must expect a profound change--one that alters the very underpinnings of our philosophical viewpoint as to the nature of reality. Shadows of the Mind provides an illuminating look at where these profound changes may take place and what our future understanding of the world may be.

Table of Contents:

	Notes to the reader
	Prologue	1
Pt. I	Why We Need New Physics to Understand the Mind: The Non-Computability of Conscious Thought
1	Consciousness and computation	7
2	The Godelian case	64
3	The case for non-computability in mathematical thought	127
Pt. II	What New Physics We Need to Understand the Mind: The Quest for a Non-Computational Physics of Mind
4	Does mind have a place in classical physics?	213
5	Structure of the quantum world	237
6	Quantum theory and reality	307
7	Quantum theory and the brain	348
8	Implications?	393
	Epilogue	423
	Bibliography	425
	Index	447