The phenomenon of consciousness has always been a central question for philosophers and scientists. Emerging in the past decade are new approaches to the understanding of consciousness in a scientific light. This book presents a series of essays by leading thinkers giving an account of the current ideas prevalent in the scientific study of consciousness. The value of the book lies in the discussion of this interesting though complex subject from different points of view ranging from physics and computer science to the cognitive sciences. Reviews of controversial ideas related to the philosophy of mind from western and eastern sources including classical Indian first person methodologies provide a breadth of coverage that has seldom been attempted in a book before. Additionally, chapters relating to the new approaches in computational modeling of higher order cognitive function and consciousness are included. The book is of great value for established as well as young researchers from a wide cross-section of interdisciplinary scientific backgrounds, aiming to pursue research in this field, as well as an informed public.
* Presents the latest developments in the scientific study of consciousness
* Critically reviews different theoretical and philosophical explanations related to the subject
* An important book for both students and researchers in designing research projects on consciousness

This book presents the latest perspectives and challenges within the interrelated fields of econophysics and sociophysics, which have emerged from the application of statistical physics to economics and sociology. Economic and financial markets appear to be in a permanent state of flux. Billions of agents interact with each other, giving rise to complex dynamics of economic quantities at the micro and macro levels. With the availability of huge data sets, researchers can address questions at a much more granular level than was previously possible. Fundamental questions regarding the aggregation of actions and information and the coordination, complexity, and evolution of economic and financial networks are currently receiving much attention in the econophysics research agenda. In parallel, the sociophysics literature has focused on large-scale social data and their interrelations. In this book, leading researchers from different communities - economists, sociologists, financial analysts, mathematicians, physicists, statisticians, and others - report on their recent work and their analyses of economic and social behavior.

This book presents the proceedings from ECONOPHYS-2015, an international workshop held in New Delhi, India, on the interrelated fields of "econophysics" and "sociophysics", which have emerged from the application of statistical physics to economics and sociology. Leading researchers from varied communities, including economists, sociologists, financial analysts, mathematicians, physicists, statisticians, and others, report on their recent work, discuss topical issues, and review the relevant contemporary literature. A society can be described as a group of people who inhabit the same geographical or social territory and are mutually involved through their shared participation in different aspects of life. It is possible to observe and characterize average behaviors of members of a society, an example being voting behavior. Moreover, the dynamic nature of interaction within any economic sector comprising numerous cooperatively interacting agents has many features in common with the interacting systems of statistical physics. It is on these bases that interest has grown in the application within sociology and economics of the tools of statistical mechanics. This book will be of value for all with an interest in this flourishing field.

This book provides the first comprehensive introduction to multi-agent, multi-choice repetitive games, such as the Kolkata Restaurant Problem and the Minority Game. It explains how the tangible formulations of these games, using stochastic strategies developed by statistical physicists employing both classical and quantum physics, have led to very efficient solutions to the problems posed. Further, it includes sufficient introductory notes on information-processing strategies employing both classical statistical physics and quantum mechanics. Games of this nature, in which agents are presented with choices, from among which their goal is to make the minority choice, offer effective means of modeling herd behavior and market dynamics and are highly relevant to assessing systemic risk. Accordingly, this book will be of interest to economists, physicists, and computer scientists alike.

This book presents the proceedings from ECONOPHYS-2015, an international workshop held in New Delhi, India, on the interrelated fields of "econophysics" and "sociophysics", which have emerged from the application of statistical physics to economics and sociology. Leading researchers from varied communities, including economists, sociologists, financial analysts, mathematicians, physicists, statisticians, and others, report on their recent work, discuss topical issues, and review the relevant contemporary literature. A society can be described as a group of people who inhabit the same geographical or social territory and are mutually involved through their shared participation in different aspects of life. It is possible to observe and characterize average behaviors of members of a society, an example being voting behavior. Moreover, the dynamic nature of interaction within any economic sector comprising numerous cooperatively interacting agents has many features in common with the interacting systems of statistical physics. It is on these bases that interest has grown in the application within sociology and economics of the tools of statistical mechanics. This book will be of value for all with an interest in this flourishing field.

This book presents the works and research findings of physicists, economists, mathematicians, statisticians, and financial engineers who have undertaken data-driven modelling of market dynamics and other empirical studies in the field of Econophysics. During recent decades, the financial market landscape has changed dramatically with the deregulation of markets and the growing complexity of products. The ever-increasing speed and decreasing costs of computational power and networks have led to the emergence of huge databases. The availability of these data should permit the development of models that are better founded empirically, and econophysicists have accordingly been advocating that one should rely primarily on the empirical observations in order to construct models and validate them. The recent turmoil in financial markets and the 2008 crash appear to offer a strong rationale for new models and approaches. The Econophysics community accordingly has an important future role to play in market modelling. The Econophys-Kolkata VIII conference proceedings are devoted to the presentation of many such modelling efforts and address recent developments. A number of leading researchers from across the globe report on their recent work, comment on the latest issues, and review the contemporary literature.

The primary goal of the book is to present the ideas and research findings of active researchers from various communities (physicists, economists, mathematicians, financial engineers) working in the field of "Econophysics", who have undertaken the task of modelling and analyzing order-driven markets. Of primary interest in these studies are the mechanisms leading to the statistical regularities ("stylized facts") of price statistics. Results pertaining to other important issues such as market impact, the profitability of trading strategies, or mathematical models for microstructure effects, are also presented. Several leading researchers in these fields report on their recent work and also review the contemporary literature. Some historical perspectives, comments and debates on recent issues in Econophysics research are also included.

Econophysics of Games and Social Choices.- Kolkata Paise Restaurant Problem in Some Uniform Learning Strategy Limits.- Cycle Monotonicity in Scheduling Models.- Reinforced Learning in Market Games.- Mechanisms Supporting Cooperation for the Evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma Games.- Economic Applications of Quantum Information Processing.- Using Many-Body Entanglement for Coordinated Action in Game Theory Problems.- Condensation Phenomena and Pareto Distribution in Disordered Urn Models.- Economic Interactions and the Distribution of Wealth.- Wealth Redistribution in Boltzmann-like Models of Conservative Economies.- Multi-species Models in Econo- and Sociophysics.- The Morphology of Urban Agglomerations for Developing Countries: A Case Study with China.- A Mean-Field Model of Financial Markets: Reproducing Long Tailed Distributions and Volatility Correlations.- Statistical Properties of Fluctuations: A Method to Check Market Behavior.- Modeling Saturation in Industrial Growth.- The Kuznets Curve and the Inequality Process.- Monitoring the Teaching - Learning Process via an Entropy Based Index.- Technology Level in the Industrial Supply Chain: Thermodynamic Concept.- Discussions and Comments in Econophys Kolkata IV.- Contributions to Quantitative Economics.- On Multi-Utility Representation of Equitable Intergenerational Preferences.- Variable Populations and Inequality-Sensitive Ethical Judgments.- A Model of Income Distribution.- Statistical Database of the Indian Economy: Need for New Directions.- Does Parental Education Protect Child Health? Some Evidence from Rural Udaipur.- Food Security and Crop Diversification: Can West Bengal Achieve Both?.- Estimating Equivalence Scales Through Engel Curve Analysis.- Testing for Absolute Convergence: A Panel Data Approach.- Goodwin's Growth Cycles: A Reconsideration.- Human Capital Accumulation, Economic Growth and Educational Subsidy Policy in a Dual Economy.- Arms Trade and Conflict Resolution: A Trade-Theoretic Analysis.- Trade andWage Inequality with Endogenous Skill Formation.- Dominant Strategy Implementation in Multi-unit Allocation Problems.- Allocation through Reduction on Minimum Cost Spanning Tree Games.- Unmediated and Mediated Communication Equilibria of Battle of the Sexes with Incomplete Information.- A Characterization Result on the Coincidence of the Prenucleolus and the Shapley Value.- The Ordinal Equivalence of the Johnston Index and the Established Notions of Power.- Reflecting on Market Size and Entry under Oligopoly.

Successful or not, we all (have to?) go to various markets and participate in their activities. Yet, solittle is understoodabout their functionings. E orts to model various markets are now substantial. Econophysicists have also come up recently with several innovative models and their analyses. This book is a proceedings of the International Workshop on \Eco- physics of StockMarkets and Minority Games,"heldinKolkataduringFeb- ary 14-17, 2006, under the auspices of the Centre for Applied Mathem- ics and Computational Science, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata. This is the second event in the Econophys-Kolkata series of meetings; the Econophys-Kolkata I was held in March 2005 (Proceedings: Econophysics of Wealth Distributions, published in the same New Economic Windows series by Springer, Milan in 2005). We understand from the enthusiastic response of the participants that the one-day trip to the Sunderbans (Tiger Reserve; a world heritage point) along with the lecture-sessions on the vessel had been hugely enjoyable and successful. The concluding session had again very lively discussions on the workshop topics as well as on econophysics in general, i- tiated by J. Barkley Rosser, Matteo Marsili, Rosario Mantegna and Robin Stinchcombe (Chair). We plan to hold the next meeting in this series, on \Econophysics and Sociophysics: Debates on Complexity Issues in Economics and Sociology" early next year. We are very happy that several leading economists and physicists engaged intheserecentdevelopmentsintheeconophysicsofmarkets, theiranalysisand modellingcouldcomeandparticipate.

The primary goal of this book is to present the research findings and conclusions of physicists, economists, mathematicians and financial engineers working in the field of "Econophysics" who have undertaken agent-based modelling, comparison with empirical studies and related investigations. Most standard economic models assume the existence of the representative agent, who is "perfectly rational" and applies the utility maximization principle when taking action. One reason for this is the desire to keep models mathematically tractable: no tools are available to economists for solving non-linear models of heterogeneous adaptive agents without explicit optimization. In contrast, multi-agent models, which originated from statistical physics considerations, allow us to go beyond the prototype theories of traditional economics involving the representative agent. This book is based on the Econophys-Kolkata VII Workshop, at which many such modelling efforts were presented. In the book, leading researchers in their fields report on their latest work, consider recent developments and review the contemporary literature.

This book presents the works and research findings of physicists, economists, mathematicians, statisticians, and financial engineers who have undertaken data-driven modelling of market dynamics and other empirical studies in the field of Econophysics. During recent decades, the financial market landscape has changed dramatically with the deregulation of markets and the growing complexity of products. The ever-increasing speed and decreasing costs of computational power and networks have led to the emergence of huge databases. The availability of these data should permit the development of models that are better founded empirically, and econophysicists have accordingly been advocating that one should rely primarily on the empirical observations in order to construct models and validate them. The recent turmoil in financial markets and the 2008 crash appear to offer a strong rationale for new models and approaches. The Econophysics community accordingly has an important future role to play in market modelling. The Econophys-Kolkata VIII conference proceedings are devoted to the presentation of many such modelling efforts and address recent developments. A number of leading researchers from across the globe report on their recent work, comment on the latest issues, and review the contemporary literature.

The primary goal of the book is to present the ideas and research findings of active researchers such as physicists, economists, mathematicians and financial engineers working in the field of "Econophysics," who have undertaken the task of modeling and analyzing systemic risk, network dynamics and other topics. Of primary interest in these studies is the aspect of systemic risk, which has long been identified as a potential scenario in which financial institutions trigger a dangerous contagion mechanism, spreading from the financial economy to the real economy. This type of risk, long confined to the monetary market, has spread considerably in the recent past, culminating in the subprime crisis of 2008. As such, understanding and controlling systemic risk has become an extremely important societal and economic challenge. The Econophys-Kolkata VI conference proceedings are dedicated to addressing a number of key issues involved. Several leading researchers in these fields report on their recent work and also review contemporary literature on the subject.

We all know the hard fact: neither wealth nor income is ever uniform for us all. Justified or not, they are unevenly distributed; few are rich and many are poor! Investigations for more than hundred years and the recent availability of the income distribution data in the internet (made available by the finance ministries of various countries; from the tax return data of the income tax departments) have revealed some remarkable features. Irrespective of many differences in culture, history, language and, to some extent, the economic policies followed in different countries, the income distribution is seen to fol low a particular universal pattern. So does the wealth distribution. Barring an initial rise in population with income (or wealth; for the destitutes), the population decreases either exponentially or in a log-normal way for the ma jority of 'middle income' group, and it eventually decreases following a power law (Pareto law, following Vilfredo Pareto's observation in 1896) for the rich est 5-10 % of the population! This seems to be an universal feature - valid for most of the countries and civilizations; may be in ancient Egypt as well! Econophysicists tried to view this as a natural law for a statistical ma- body-dynamical market system, analogous to gases, liquids or solids: classical or quantum.

Econophysics research studies, which apply methods developed by physicists to solve problems in economics, enable you to deepen your understanding of what financial systems are and how they operate. Articles in this book identify and explain the statistical behavior of the underlying networks in trading, banking, and stock markets as well as other financial systems. Authors also debate the latest issues arising from these econophysics studies.

There have been considerable advances in recent times in understanding many common material processes that are of practical importance, such as nonlinear response, fracture, breakdown, earthquakes, packing, and granular flow, that are of immense practical importance. This has been mainly due to new applications of statistical physics, including percolation theory, fractal concepts and self-organized criticality. This collection of articles brings together research in those closely allied fields. It deals with problems in material science involving random geometries and nonlinearity at a mesoscopic scale, where local disorder and nonlinearity influence the global behaviour of cracks, for example, and problems where randomness in time evolution is as crucial as the geometry itself.

The primary goal of this book is to present the research findings and conclusions of physicists, economists, mathematicians and financial engineers working in the field of "Econophysics" who have undertaken agent-based modelling, comparison with empirical studies and related investigations.
Most standard economic models assume the existence of the representative agent, who is "perfectly rational" and applies the utility maximization principle when taking action. One reason for this is the desire to keep models mathematically tractable: no tools are available to economists for solving non-linear models of heterogeneous adaptive agents without explicit optimization. In contrast, multi-agent models, which originated from statistical physics considerations, allow us to go beyond the prototype theories of traditional economics involving the representative agent. This book is based on the Econophys-Kolkata VII Workshop, at which many such modelling efforts were presented. In the book, leading researchers in their fields report on their latest work, consider recent developments and review the contemporary literature.

The primary goal of the book is to present the ideas and research findings of active researchers such as physicists, economists, mathematicians and financial engineers working in the field of "Econophysics," who have undertaken the task of modeling and analyzing systemic risk, network dynamics and other topics.

Of primary interest in these studies is the aspect of systemic risk, which has long been identified as a potential scenario in which financial institutions trigger a dangerous contagion mechanism, spreading from the financial economy to the real economy.

This type of risk, long confined to the monetary market, has spread considerably in the recent past, culminating in the subprime crisis of 2008. As such, understanding and controlling systemic risk has become an extremely important societal and economic challenge. The Econophys-Kolkata VI conference proceedings are dedicated to addressing a number of key issues involved. Several leading researchers in these fields report on their recent work and also review contemporary literature on the subject.

Quantum phase transitions, driven by quantum fluctuations, exhibit intriguing features offering the possibility of potentially new applications, e.g. in quantum information sciences. Major advances have been made in both theoretical and experimental investigations of the nature and behavior of quantum phases and transitions in cooperatively interacting many-body quantum systems.

For modeling purposes, most of the current innovative and successful research in this field has been obtained by either directly or indirectly using the insights provided by quantum (or transverse field) Ising models because of the separability of the cooperative interaction from the tunable transverse field or tunneling term in the relevant Hamiltonian. Also, a number of condensed matter systems can be modeled accurately in this approach, hence granting the possibility to compare advanced models with actual experimental results.

This work introduces these quantum Ising models and analyses them both theoretically and numerically in great detail. With its tutorial approach the book addresses above all young researchers who wish to enter the field and are in search of a suitable and self-contained text, yet it will also serve as a valuable reference work for all active researchers in this area.

"

The primary goal of the book is to present the ideas and research findings of active researchers from various communities (physicists, economists, mathematicians, financial engineers) working in the field of "Econophysics," who have undertaken the task of modelling and analyzing order-driven markets. Of primary interest in these studies are the mechanisms leading to the statistical regularities ("stylized facts") of price statistics. Results pertaining to other important issues such as market impact, the profitability of trading strategies, or mathematical models for microstructure effects, are also presented. Several leading researchers in these fields report on their recent work and also review the contemporary literature. Some historical perspectives, comments and debates on recent issues in Econophysics research are also included.

This lecture notes in physics volume mainly focuses on the semi classical and qu- tum aspects of percolation and breakdown in disordered, composite or granular s- tems. The main reason for this undertaking has been the fact that, of late, there have been a lot of (theoretical) work on quantum percolation, but there is not even a (single) published review on the topic (and, of course, no book). Also, there are many theoretical and experimental studies on the nonlinear current-voltage characteristics both away from, as well as one approaches, an electrical breakdown in composite materials. Some of the results are quite intriguing and may broadly be explained utilising a semi classical (if not, fully quantum mechanical) tunnelling between - cron or nano-sized metallic islands dispersed separated by thin insulating layers, or in other words, between the dangling ends of small percolation clusters. There have also been several (theoretical) studies of Zener breakdown in Mott or Anderson in- lators. Again, there is no review available, connecting them in any coherent fashion. A compendium volume connecting these experimental and theoretical studies should be unique and very timely, and hence this volume. The book is organised as follows. For completeness, we have started with a short and concise introduction on classical percolation. In the ?rst chapter, D. Stauffer reviews the scaling theory of classical percolation emphasizing (biased) diffusion, without any quantum effects. The next chapter by A. K.

Geophysics, or physics modelling of geological phenomena, is as old and as - tablished as geoscience itself. The statistical physics modelling of various g- physical phenomena, earthquake in particular, is comparatively recent. This bookintendstocovertheserecentdevelopmentsinmodellingvariousgeoph- ical phenomena, including the imposing classic phenomenon of earthquakes, employing various statistical physical ideas and techniques. This ?rst book on statistical physics modelling of geophysical phenomena contains extensive - viewsbyalmostalltheleadingexpertsinthe?eldandshouldbewidelyuseful to the graduate students and researchers in geoscience and statistical physics. It grew out of the lecture notes from a workshop on "Models of Earthquakes: Physics Approaches," held in Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, - der the auspices of its Centre for Applied Mathematics and Computational Science in December 2005. The book is divided in four parts. In the ?rst part, tutorial materials are introduced. Chakrabarti introduces the fracture nucleation processes, their (extreme) statistics in disordered solids, in ?bre bundle models and in the two fractal overlap models of earthquakes. In the next two chapters, Hemmer et al. and Kun et al. review the avalanche or quake statistics and the bre- ing dynamics in simple (mean-?eld like) ?bre bundle models and in their extended versions, respectively. Hansen and Mathiesen discuss the scale - variance properties of the random and fractured surfaces.

physics

The combined efforts of the Physicists and the Economists in recent years in a- lyzing and modeling various dynamic phenomena in monetary and social systems have led to encouragingdevelopments,generally classi?ed under the title of Eco- physics. These developmentsshare a commonambitionwith the alreadyestablished ?eld of Quantitative Economics. This volume intends to offer the reader a glimpse of these two parallel initiatives by collecting review papers written by well-known experts in the respective research frontiers in one cover. This massive book presents a unique combination of research papers contributed almost equally by Physicists and Economists. Additional contributions from C- puter Scientists and Mathematicians are also included in this volume. It consists of two parts: The ?rst part concentrates on econophysics of games and social choices and is the proceedings of the Econophys-Kolkata IV workshop held at the Indian Statistical Institute and the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, both in Kolkata, d- ing March 9-13, 2009. The second part consists of contributionsto quantitative e- nomics by experts in connection with the Platinum Jubilee celebration of the Indian Statistical Institute. In this connectiona Forewordfor the volume, written by Sankar K. Pal, Director of the Indian Statistical Institute, is put forth. Both parts specialize mostly on frontier problems in games and social choices. The?rst partofthebookdealswith severalrecentdevelopmentsineconophysics. Game theory is integral to the formulation of modern economic analysis. Often games display a situation where the social optimal could not be reached as a - sult of non co-operation between different agents.

Econophysics research studies, which apply methods developed by physicists to solve problems in economics, enable you to deepen your understanding of what financial systems are and how they operate. Articles in this book identify and explain the statistical behavior of the underlying networks in trading, banking, and stock markets as well as other financial systems. Authors also debate the latest issues arising from these econophysics studies.

This book presents a broad survey of models for critical and catastrophic phenomena in the geosciences, with strong emphasis on earthquakes. It assumes the perspective of statistical physics, which provides the theoretical frame for dealing with complex systems in general. This volume addresses graduate students wishing to specialize in the field and researchers working or interested in the field having a background in the physics, geosciences or applied mathematics.