| The Discovery of the Artificial: Behavior, Mind and Machines Before and Beyond Cybernetics 2002 Edition Contributor(s): Cordeschi, R. (Author) |
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ISBN: 1402006063 ISBN-13: 9781402006067 Publisher: Springer OUR PRICE: $161.49 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: July 2002 Annotation: During the second half of the twentieth century, researchers in cybernetics and AI, neural nets and connectionism, ALife, and new robotics have endeavored to build different machines that could simulate functions of living organisms, such as adaptation and development, intelligence, and learning. In this book these research programs are discussed, and their philosophical significance is stressed. One of the actual novelties in this book consists of the fact that certain projects involving the building of simulative machines before the advent of cybernetics are investigated for the first time, on the basis of little-known, and sometimes completely forgotten or unpublished, texts. These precybernetic projects can be considered as steps towards the discovery of a simulative methodology that has been fully developed by these research programs, and that shares some of their central goals and key methodological proposals. The book provides a valuable text for undergraduate and graduate courses on the historical and theoretical issues of Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence, Psychology, Neuroscience, and the Philosophy of Mind. The book should also be of interest for researchers in these fields, who will find in it analyses of certain crucial issues in both the earlier and more recent history of their disciplines, as well as interesting overall insights into the current debate on the nature of mind. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science - Medical - Computers | Intelligence (ai) & Semantics |
| Dewey: 153 |
| LCCN: 2002069494 |
| Series: Studies in Cognitive Systems |
| Physical Information: 0.76" H x 7" W x 9.34" (1.65 lbs) 314 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: This series will include monographs and collections of studies devoted to the investigation and exploration of knowledge, information, and data processing systems of all kinds, no matter whether human, (other) animal, or machine. Its scope is intended to span the full range of interests from classical problems in the philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology through issues in cognitive psychology and sociobiology (concerning the mental capabilities of other species) to ideas related to artificial intelligence and to computer science. While primary emphasis will be placed upon theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological aspects of these problems and domains, empirical, experimental, and methodological studies will also appear from time to time. The present volume offers a broad and imaginative approach to the study of the mind, which emphasizes several themes, namely: the importance of functional organization apart from the specific material by means of which it may be implemented; the use of modeling to simulate these functional processes and subject them to certain kinds of tests; the use of mentalistic language to describe and predict the behavior of artifacts; and the subsumption of processes of adaptation, learning, and intelligence by means of explanatory principles. The author has produced a rich and complex, lucid and readable discussion that clarifies and illuminates many of the most difficult problems arising within this difficult domain. |
