The Development of Autobiographical Memory, Autobiographical Narratives, and Autobiographical Consciousness

In this article, we expand on aspects of autobiographical memory initially laid out in our earlier exposition of the sociocultural developmental model. We present a developmental account of the integration of an extended subjective perspective within an extended narrative framework both of which are mediated through language and shared cultural narratives that culminate in autobiographical consciousness. Autobiographical consciousness goes beyond simple memories of past events to create a sense of extended self through time that has experienced and reflexively evaluated events. We argue from philosophical, evolutionary, and developmental psychological perspectives that narratives are a critical form of human consciousness, and that this form is learned through everyday social interactions that are linguistically mediated. Language has “double-duality” in that it is both outward facing, allowing more explicit, organized and differentiated communication to and with others, and language is also inward facing, in that language provides tools for organizing and differentiating internal consciousness. Although consciousness itself is multifaceted, we argue that language is the mechanism without which this particular form of human autobiographical consciousness would not develop.

Mass gap in Yang's theory of gravity

The quantization of a curvature-squared model of gravity, in the affine form proposed by Yang, is reconsidered in the path integral formulation. Due to its inherent Weyl invariance, sharing this with internal Yang–Mills fields, it or some of its topological generalizations are still a possible route to quantum gravity. Instanton type solutions with double duality properties exhibit a "vacuum degeneracy", i.e. a bifurcation into distinct classical Einsteinian backgrounds. For linearized fields, this conclusively induces a mass gap in the graviton spectrum, a feature which is an open problem in the quantization of internal Yang–Mills fields.

Ideals of generalized invariants, local cohomology and Macaulay's double duality theorem

We show how to compute a Macaulay dual class in local cohomology