Ihor Lubashevsky – författare

This book presents a novel account of the human temporal dimension called the “human temporality” and develops a special mathematical formalism for describing such an object as the human mind. One of the characteristic features of the human mind is its temporal extent. For objects of physical reality, only the present exists, which may be conceived as a point-like moment in time. In the human temporality, the past retained in the memory, the imaginary future, and the present coexist and are closely intertwined and impact one another.

This book focuses on one of the fragments of the human temporality called the complex present. A detailed analysis of the classical and modern concepts has enabled the authors to put forward the idea of the multi-component structure of the present.  For the concept of the complex present, the authors proposed a novel account that involves a qualitative description and a special mathematical formalism. This formalism takes into account human goal-oriented behavior and uncertainty in human perception.

The present book can be interesting for theoreticians, physicists dealing with modeling systems where the human factor plays a crucial role, philosophers who are interested in applying philosophical concepts to constructing mathematical models, and psychologists whose research is related to modeling mental processes.

This book tackles the challenging question which mathematical formalisms and possibly new physical notions should be developed for quantitatively describing human cognition and behavior, in addition to the ones already developed in the physical and cognitive sciences.

Indeed, physics is widely used in modeling social systems, where, in particular, new branches of science such as sociophysics and econophysics have arisen. However, many if not most characteristic features of humans like willingness, emotions, memory, future prediction, and moral norms, to name but a few, are not yet properly reflected in the paradigms of physical thought and theory.

The choice of a relevant formalism for modeling mental phenomena requires the comprehension of the general philosophical questions related to the mind-body problem. Plausible answers to these questions are investigated and reviewed, notions and concepts to be used or to be taken into account are developed and some challenging questions are posed as open problems. 

This text addresses theoretical physicists and neuroscientists modeling any systems and processes where human factors play a crucial role, philosophers interested in applying philosophical concepts to the construction of mathematical models, and the mathematically oriented psychologists and sociologists, whose research is fundamentally related to modeling mental processes.