Publisher's Synopsis
Recent decades have produced much research in artificial systems that exhibit important properties of mind. But what exactly is this dramatic new work and how does it change the way we think about the mind, or even about who or what has mind?;Stan Franklin guides the reader through the contemporary interdisciplinary matrix of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, artificial neural networks, artificial life, and robotics that is producing a new paradigm of mind.;Along the way, Franklin makes the case of a perspective that rejects a rigid distinction between mind and non-mind in favour of a continuum from less to more mind, and for the role of mind as a control structure with the essential task of choosing the next action. Selected stops include the best of the work in these different fields, with the key concepts and results explained in just enough detail to allow readers to decide for themselves why the work is significant.;The book includes animal minds, Allan Newell's SOAR, the three Artificial Intelligence debates, John Holland's genetic algorithms, Wilson's Animat, Brooks' subsumption architecture, Jackson's pandemonium theory, Ornstein's multimind, Marvin Minsky's society of mind, Patti Maes's behaviour networks, Gerald Edelman's neural Darwinism, Drescher's schema mechanisms, Pentti Kanerva's sparse distributed memory, Douglas Hofstadter and Melanie Mitchell's Copycat, and Agre and Chapman's deictic representations.
