Abstract of Workshop at Tucson VII - Towards a Science of Consciousness 2006, 4 April 2006, Tucson AZ.

Qualia, Nonlinear Dynamics and Improvisation:
Experiencing music and poetry

Joseph & Ryoko Goguen

This workshop will explore a notion of hierarchical qualia, featuring: (1) its experimental support, with live musical demos; (2) implications for consciousness, including the "hard problem"; and (3) underlying theory, including nonlinear dynamical systems and hierarchical information. Applications to music will be given, including live performances and improvisations by Ryoko Goguen, and recordings by classical and jazz masters; phase transitions will be analyzed in detail, including fractal dimension and self-similarity matrices (joint research with musicologist and saxophonist David Borgo of UCSD). Background on relevant music and math will be given, such as self-similarity, Takens theorem, and musical structure. As time permits, applications to blending in cognitive semantics will be given (extending work of Lakoff, Fauconnier & Turner) and illustrated with haiku (based on work of Hiraga) and classical art songs (work of Zbikowski), as well as applications to interactive multimedia art, with live demonstrations, including real time generation of novel metaphors and poems (joint work with Fox Harrell). This workshop should be both fun and informative!


By Joseph Goguen
To Qualia Project page
Last modified: Thu Aug 25 16:49:59 PDT 2005