Qualia, Nonlinear Dynamics and Improvisation: Experiencing music and poetry

Joseph A. 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! 

Joseph Goguen has been a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, since January 1996. He is Director of the Meaning and Computation Lab, and was previously Director of the Program in Advanced Manufacturing. From 1988 to 1996, he was the Professor of Computing Science in the Programming Research Group at Oxford University, Director of the Centre for Requirements and Foundations, and a Fellow of St. Anne's College. Prior to that, he was at SRI International (formerly called Stanford Research Institute) in Menlo Park, California, holding the position of Senior Staff Scientist as well as being a Senior Member of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University and head of the Programming Languages Area.  Professor Goguen's research interests include software engineering (especially specification, modularization, architecture, requirements and evolution); database integration and ontologies; user interface design; new media art; logic and theorem proving; discourse analysis; sociology of technology and science; object oriented, relational and functional programming and their combinations; semiotics; and fuzzy logic. He is also Editor in Chief of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. His article, Musical Qualia: Context, Time and Emotion, (2004, JCS, 11, No. 3/4) and related publications are available online.