How to Build a Mind: Toward Machines with Imagination

Aleksander, Igor

ISBN 10: 0231120125 / ISBN 13: 9780231120128

Editore: U.S.A.: Columbia University Press, 2001

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Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: How to Build a Mind: Toward Machines with Imagination
• Editore: U.S.A.: Columbia University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2001
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0231120125
• ISBN 13: 9780231120128
• Rilegatura: Hardcover
• Edizione: 1st Edition.
• Condizione: Near Fine
• Condizione della sovraccoperta: Near Fine
• Cataloghi dei venditori:
  • non-fiction

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

Igor Aleksander heads a major British team that has applied engineering principles to the understanding of the human brain and has built several pioneering machines, culminating in MAGNUS, which he calls a machine with imagination. When he asks it (in words) to produce an image of a banana that is blue with red spots, the image appears on the screen in seconds.

The idea of such an apparently imaginative, even conscious machine seems heretical and its advocates are often accused of sensationalism, arrogance, or philosophical ignorance. Part of the problem, according to Aleksander, is that consciousness remains ill-defined.

Interweaving anecdotes from his own life and research with imagined dialogues between historical figures—including Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, Francis Crick, and Steven Pinker—Aleksander leads readers toward an understanding of consciousness. He shows not only how the latest work with artificial neural systems suggests that an artificial form of consciousness is possible but also that its design would clarify many of the puzzles surrounding the murky concept of consciousness itself. The book also looks at the presentation of "self" in robots, the learning of language, and the nature of emotion, will, instinct, and feelings.

Informazioni sull?autore

Igor Aleksander is professor of neural engineering systems at the Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine in London. He has studied artificial intelligence for more than thirty years and has published over 200 papers and ten books on the subject, including Reinventing Man, Impossible Minds: My Neurons, My Consciousness and Neurons and Symbols: The Stuff That Mind Is Made Of.