Paul Jorion
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Paul Jorion is by training an anthropologist and a sociologist, with a special interest in the cognitive sciences.
Paul was born and raised in Belgium[1]. In an article published in 1999, Jorion offered a new theory of consciousness which goes beyond the Freudian notion that some of our decisions have unconscious motives by suggesting that in fact all our decision-making has unconscious roots, revealing freewill to be an illusion. Consciousness is shown to be a consequence of a mechanism allowing us to perceive as simultaneous the sensations produced separately by our five senses, a necessary preliminary to creating memory traces, that is, also, the prerequisite to any learning process. Drawing the consequences of an observation made by Benjamin Libet, that intention is an artifact as it springs to consciousness half a second later than the action it is supposed to have generated, Jorion further suggested that consciousness errs when it assumes to be the cause of human actions while it is nothing more than an ancillary consequence of the registration process that allows memory to accrue.
In 1981, while lecturing at Cambridge University, he devised the P-Graph (a variety of a dual of a graph) which found its use in the analysis of networks, of genealogies in particular.
In 1989, Jorion participated in the work of the Artificial Intelligence unit of British Telecom. There he developed "ANELLA" (Associative Network with Emerging Logical and Learning Abilities) whose “intelligence” is guided by a dynamics of affect – acting at the same time as a dynamics of relevance. In his book entitled “Principes des systèmes intelligents” published the next year, he made a wager that psychoanalysis will turn out to offer Artificial Intelligence its genuine theoretical framework.
Paul Jorion has been a Professor at the universities of Brussels, Cambridge, Paris VIII and University of California at Irvine.
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[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Books
- Les pêcheurs de Houat:anthropologie économique (Collection Savoir, Hermann, Paris, 1983).
- La transmission des savoirs (with Geneviève Delbos), Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris, 1984, ISBN 2735101134
- Principes des systèmes intelligents. Dunod, 1997, ISBN 2225819386 (original ed. Masson, 1990).
- Investing in a Post-Enron World (McGraw-Hill, 2003), ISBN 0071409386.
[edit] Articles
- Hommes, femmes et « l'intérêt supérieur du ménage » à la petite pêche, Terrain April 12, 1989