The Mechanical Mind in History

by Husbands, Philip; Holland, Owen; Wheeler, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780262083775
• ISBN10: 0262083779
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-04-30
• Publisher: Bradford Books

Summary

The idea of intelligent machines has become part of popular culture, and t tracing the history of the actual science of machine intelligence reveals a rich network of cross-disciplinary contributions--the unrecognized origins of ideas now central to artificial intelligence, artificial life, cognitive science, and neuroscience. In The Mechanical Mind in History,scientists, artists, historians, and philosophers discuss the multidisciplinary quest to formalize and understand the generation of intelligent behavior in natural and artificial systems as a wholly mechanical process. The contributions illustrate the diverse and interacting notions that chart the evolution of the idea of the mechanical mind. They describe the mechanized mind as, among other things, an analogue system, an organized suite of chemical interactions, a self-organizing electromechanical device, an automated general-purpose information processor, and an integrated collection of symbol manipulating mechanisms. They investigate the views of pivotal figures that range from Descartes and Heidegger to Alan Turing and Charles Babbage, and they emphasize such frequently overlooked areas as British cybernetic and pre-cybernetic thinkers. The volume concludes with the personal insights of five highly influential figures in the field: John Maynard Smith, John Holland, Oliver Selfridge, Horace Barlow, and Jack Cowan. Contributors: Peter Asaro, Horace Barlow, Andy Beckett, Margaret Boden, Jon Bird, Paul Brown, Seth Bullock, Roberto Cordeschi, Jack Cowan, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Hubert Dreyfus, Andrew Hodges, Owen Holland, Jana Horáková, Philip Husbands, Jozef Kelemen, John Maynard Smith, Donald Michie, Oliver Selfridge, Michael Wheeler.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Introduction: The Mechanical Mind	p. 1
Charles Babbage and the Emergence of Automated Reason	p. 19
D'Arcy Thompson: A Grandfather of A-Life	p. 41
Alan Turing's Mind Machines	p. 61
What Did Alan Turing Mean by "Machine'"?	p. 75
The Ratio Club: A Hub of British Cybernetics	p. 91
From Mechanisms of Adaptation to Intelligence Amplifiers	p. 149
The Philosophy of W. Ross Ashby
Gordon Pask and His Maverick Machines	p. 185
Santiago Dreaming	p. 213
Steps Toward the Synthetic Method Symbolic Information Processing and Self-Organizing Systems in Early Artificial Intelligence Modeling	p. 219
The Mechanization of Art	p. 259
The Robot Story: Why Robots Were Born and How They Grew Up	p. 283
God's Machines: Descartes on the Mechanization of Mind	p. 307
Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing It Would Require Making It More Heideggerian	p. 331
An Interview	p. 373
An Interview	p. 383
An Interview	p. 397
An Interview	p. 409
An Interview	p. 431
About the Contributors	p. 447
Index	p. 449
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