Dr Rakesh Sengupta, Assistant Professor, Psychology, SIAS), has authored a book titled Mind, Model and Complexity, with River Publishers (2026), as part of the River Publishers Rapids Series in Computer Engineering and Information Science and Technology. The book provides a compact, integrated toolkit for understanding mind, language, and cognition through the lens of complexity.
It weaves together four complementary threads:
Historical Trajectory: Tracing dominant metaphors of the mind from early mechanical analogies and behaviorism to computation, connectionism, and contemporary complexity perspectives.
Philosophical Foundations: Surfacing core conceptual motifs – such as mechanism vs. emergence, formalization and its limits, historicity, lived experience, and power/knowledge production – that act as constraint-sets on scientific explanation.
Formal Frameworks: Presenting accessible, practical mathematical toolkits across dynamical systems, network science, and algorithmic/information theory, complete with computational recipes in Python.
Applied Case Studies: Demonstrating multilevel modeling across language acquisition (including a neurosymbolic syntax-phonology interface), decision-making, social/cultural dynamics, and psychopathology, alongside ethical and causal considerations for policy and intervention.
