Artificial Minds

Recent decades have produced a blossoming of research in artificial systems thatexhibit important properties of mind. But what exactly is this dramatic new work and how does itchange the way we think about the mind, or even about who or what has mind?Stan Franklin is theperfect tour guide through the contemporary interdisciplinary matrix of artificial intelligence,cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, artificial neural networks, artificial life, and roboticsthat is producing a new paradigm of mind. Leisurely and informal, but always informed, his tourtouches on all of the major facets of mechanisms of mind.Along the way, Franklin makes the case fora perspective that rejects a rigid distinction between mind and non-mind in favor of a continuumfrom less to more mind, and for the role of mind as a control structure with the essential task ofchoosing 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 forthemselves why the work is significant.Major attractions include 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, MarvinMinsky's society of mind, Pattie Maes's behavior networks, Gerald Edelman's neural Darwinism,Drescher's schema mechanisms, Pentti Kanerva's sparse distributed memory, Douglas Hofstadter andMelanie Mitchell's Copycat, and Agre and Chapman's deictic representations.A Bradford Book