According to Stan Franklin in his book Artificial Minds, evidence of self-recognition in a mirror can be taken as sufficient to conclude self-awareness. Some great apes have passed this test, while baboons, gibbons and some monkeys can't be shown to be self aware in this way. But doesn't it demonstrate intelligence to ignore oneself, and instead concentrate on the images of more interesting individuals in the mirror?
I came across this book recently as I considered these questions in Mirror tests, self awareness, and cats:
"Can cats have their own mind? Are they conscious? Are cats self aware?"
Book Description
This 1997 book examines artificial systems that demonstrate important properties of mind. The interesting issue about development of artificial thinking systems is the light that they cast on our thinking about the mind, and even about what creatures other than ourselves may have a mind.
The author, Stan Franklin, gives a tour of the contemporary interdisciplinary combination of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, artificial neural networks, artificial life, and robotics. This book covers the work in these different fields in a way that lets the reader understand why each of these areas and works are significant:
- 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
- Pattie Maes's behavior 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.
This cross discipline research is causing us to develop a new paradigm of mind. Franklin's contribution is a cogent argument that the question is not "to have a mind, or not have a mind", but instead, how much of a mind. He views the mind as a control structure most concerned with choosing actions.
Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1. Mechanisms of Mind
- 2. The Nature of Midn and the mind-body problem
- 3. Animal minds
- 4. Symbolic AI
- 5. The First AI Debate
- 6. Connectionism
- 7. The Second AI Debate
- 8. Evolution, Natural and Artificial
- 9. Artificial Life
- 10. Multiplicity of Mind
- 11. What Do I Do Now?
- 12. What's Out There?
- 13. Remembering and Creating
- 14. Representation and the third AI Debate
- 15. Into the Future
- 16. An Emerging New Paradigm of Mind?
- References
- Index
Reviewer Comments
- "As delighful as it is informative, proof once again that it is possible to write a serious scholarly work that is thoroughly entertaining." - Lucy Horwitz, Boston Book Review
About the author
Stan Franklin is Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Co-director of the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis.
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Labels related to "Artificial Minds"
- Mind, artificial intelligence, cognition, biology, computing