Mechanical Bodies Computational Minds

Researchers in artificial intelligence and scholars in the humanities consider the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence from a multidisciplinary perspective.

A fascinating exploration of the theories and arguments surrounding the notions of thought and representation. Now in its 2nd edition, Cranes's classic text has introduced thousands to some of the most important ideas in philosophy of mind.

This edition has been fully revised and updated, and includes a new chapter on consciousness and a new section on modularity. There are also guides for further reading, and a new glossary of terms such as mentalese, connectionism, and the homunculus fallacy.

Provides analytical theories offered by innovative artificial intelligence computing methods in the archaeological domain.

Can we make machines that think and act like humans or other natural intelligent agents? The answer to this question depends on how we see ourselves and how we see the machines in question. Classical AI and cognitive science had claimed that cognition is computation, and can thus be reproduced on other computing machines, possibly surpassing the abilities of human intelligence. This consensus has now come under threat and the agenda for the philosophy and theory of AI must be set anew, re-defining the relation between AI and Cognitive Science. We can re-claim the original vision of general AI from the technical AI disciplines; we can reject classical cognitive science and replace it with a new theory (e.g. embodied); or we can try to find new ways to approach AI, for example from neuroscience or from systems theory. To do this, we must go back to the basic questions on computing, cognition and ethics for AI. The 30 papers in this volume provide cutting-edge work from leading researchers that define where we stand and where we should go from here.

The book is interdisciplinary and focuses on the topic of artificial consciousness: from neuroscience to artificial intelligence, from bioengineering to robotics. It provides an overview on the current state of the art of research in the field of artificial consciousness and includes extended and revised versions of the papers presented at the International Workshop on ‘Artificial Consciousness', held in November 2005 at Agrigento (Italy).

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is. Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut The ?ow of academic ideas in the area of computational intelligence has penetrated industry with tremendous speed and persistence. Thousands of applications have proved the practical potential of fuzzy logic, neural networks, evolutionary com- tation, swarm intelligence, and intelligent agents even before their theoretical foundation is completely understood. And the popularity is rising. Some software vendors have pronounced the new machine learning gold rush to “Transfer Data into Gold”. New buzzwords like “data mining”, “genetic algorithms”, and “swarm optimization” have enriched the top executives’ vocabulary to make them look more “visionary” for the 21st century. The phrase “fuzzy math” became political jargon after being used by US President George W. Bush in one of the election debates in the campaign in 2000. Even process operators are discussing the perf- mance of neural networks with the same passion as the performance of the Dallas Cowboys. However, for most of the engineers and scientists introducing computational intelligence technologies into practice, looking at the growing number of new approaches, and understanding their theoretical principles and potential for value creation becomes a more and more dif?cult task.

Joshua S. Walden's Musical Portraits: The Composition of Identity in Contemporary and Experimental Music explores the wide-ranging but under-examined genre of musical portraiture. It focuses in particular on contemporary and experimental music created between 1945 and the present day, an era in which conceptions of identity have changed alongside increasing innovation in musical composition as well as in the uses of abstraction, mixed media, and other novel techniques in the field of visual portraiture. In the absence of physical likeness, an element typical of portraiture that cannot be depicted in sound, composers have experimented with methods of constructing other attributes of identity in music, such as character, biography, and profession. By studying musical portraits of painters, authors, and modern celebrities, in addition to composers' self-portraits, the book considers how representational and interpretive processes overlap and differ between music and other art forms, as well as how music is used in the depiction of human identities. Examining a range of musical portraits by composers including Peter Ablinger, Pierre Boulez, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Gy rgy Ligeti, and Virgil Thomson, and director Robert Wilson's on-going series of video portraits of modern-day celebrities and his "portrait opera" Einstein on the Beach, Musical Portraits contributes to the study of music since 1945 through a detailed examination of contemporary understandings of music's capacity to depict identity, and of the intersections between music, literature, theater, film, and the visual arts.