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October 1, 2007: It's All in Your Head. By Lisa A. Ennis. Library Journal. "The dynamic and rapidly expanding field of neuroscience traditionally has involved the study of the nervous system from a biological/medical standpoint. But in recent years the science has become multidisciplinary, attracting researchers from computer science, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and even the humanities. ... For public and college libraries, developing a well-rounded, balanced, and broadly accessible collection of books, periodicals, DVDs, and web sites on this highly technical and academic subject can be challenging. The following bibliography provides a general listing of recent titles, mostly nonmedical, that demonstrate neuroscience's breadth. ... Bennett, Maxwell & others. Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language. Columbia Univ. 2007. 232p. ISBN 978-0-231-14044-7. $25.50. To illustrate the philosophical issues surrounding cognitive neuroscience, this volume presents the conflicting views of three established philosophers and a prominent neuroscientist. While not light reading, it is a good introduction to this dynamic subfield. ... Bloom, Floyd E., M.D. Best of the Brain from Scientific American: Mind, Matter, and Tomorrow's Brain. Dana, dist. by Univ. of Chicago. 2007. 243p. illus. index. ISBN 978-1-932594-22-5. $25. This collection of essays drawn from Scientific American and Scientific American Mind offers an excellent, readable overview of the latest brain research since 1999. ... Minsky, Marvin. The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. S. & S. 2006. 400p. illus. ISBN 978-0-7432-7663-4. $26; pap. Nov. 2007. ISBN 978-0-7432-7664-1. $16. Artificial intelligence pioneer Minsky examines the human imagination and common sense in this provocative book that challenges current thinking about the way humans think." [Please see the article for the complete bibliography.] September / October 2007: Higher Games - On the 10th anniversary of Deep Blue's triumph over Garry Kasparov in chess, a prominent philosopher of mind asks, What did the match mean? By Daniel C. Dennett. Technology Review Magazine. "[F]or a decade, human beings have had to live with the fact that one of our species' most celebrated intellectual summits--the title of world chess champion--has to be shared with a machine, Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in a highly publicized match in 1997. How could this be? What lessons could be gleaned from this shocking upset? Did we learn that machines could actually think as well as the smartest of us, or had chess been exposed as not such a deep game after all? ... Silicon machines can now play chess better than any protein machines can. Big deal. This calm and reasonable reaction, however, is hard for most people to sustain. They don't like the idea that their brains are protein machines. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, many commentators were tempted to insist that its brute-force search methods were entirely unlike the exploratory processes that Kasparov used when he conjured up his chess moves. But that is simply not so. Kasparov's brain is made of organic materials and has an architecture notably unlike that of Deep Blue, but it is still, so far as we know, a massively parallel search engine that has an outstanding array of heuristic pruning techniques that keep it from wasting time on unlikely branches." August 18, 2007: Scientists race to create life - They can’t say exactly what it is, but that doesn’t stop researchers from tinkering with it. By Seth Borenstein. The Associated Press / available from TheChronicleHerald.ca / also available from USAToday.com (Scientists struggle to define life; August 19, 2007) and MSNBC.com (What exactly is life?; August 19, 2007). "Philosophers wrestling with the big questions of life are no longer alone. Now scientists are struggling to define life as they manipulate it, look for it on other planets, and even create it in test tubes. ... And some futurists are pondering the prospect of robots becoming so human they might be considered a form of life. So as scientists push the bounds of biology, astronomy and robotics, a big question looms: What exactly is life? ... Last month, the National Academy of Sciences issued a 'weird life' report cautioning NASA not to be so focused on water. ... That same report urged NASA to avoid being 'fixated on carbon' when it looks for life even though carbon is often called the backbone of life on Earth. But if carbon isn’t a requirement for life, how about silicon? In other words, what about machines? Ray Kurzweil, a renowned futurist who advises people such as Bill Gates, believes that by 2029 a machine will pass a prime test of artificial intelligence, offering the same kind of answers as a human. 'The key issue as to whether or not a non-biological entity deserves rights really comes down to whether or not it’s conscious,' he said. 'Does it have feelings?' This isn’t just a Kurzweil concept. 'A monumental shift could occur if robots continue to be developed to the point where they can at some point reproduce, improve themselves or if they gain artificial intelligence,' said a 2006 study commissioned by the British government." August 12, 2007: Letters to the Editor. The New York Times Sunday Magazine. "Robin Marantz Henig’s article (July 29) conveys the excitement of how much the new robotic generation can do -- or seem to do -- such as 'interact' with 'civility.' But it falls short of solving the puzzle of why the gap between mechanical 'understanding' on one hand and plain old human 'consciousness' on the other is actually growing rather than shrinking as our machines get more advanced. Berkeley’s John Searle has said...." - John Romano.
>>> Robots, Philosophy, Cognitive Science August 9, 2007: Three books about what it means to be human -- and maybe post-human. By Bill O'Driscoll. Pittsburgh City Paper. "Three new books address our provisional status as a distinct species. Thumbs, Toes and Tears is Chip Walter's engaging, nimbly written tour through the evolution of the body parts and bodily functions that make us human. ... Walter's tale, however, leads to a ghost: the ghost of evolution yet to come. Quoting the writings of such thinkers as visionary Carnegie Mellon robotics scientist Hans Moravec, Walter (himself a CMU adjunct professor as well as a journalist), prophesies our transformation into a new species he dubs 'Cyber sapien -- a creature part digital and part biological.' ... Moravec also cameos in Almost Human, Lee Gutkind's book [Almost Human - Making Robots Think] about CMU's famed Robotics Institute and the struggle to create an autonomous robot -- one that can function without human assistance. ... Meanwhile, Eliezer J. Sternberg weighs in on consciousness with a companionable little volume titled Are You a Machine? A key question for this Brandeis University student of neuroscience and philosophy is whether consciousness can emerge from physical structures. Are our minds merely patterns, replicable in labs? Daniel Dennett (who says yes) and John Searle (who says no) are among the philosophers Sternberg surveys, all while leavening with puckish humor his considerations of famous thought-experiments about the nature of consciousness, and of writings from Descartes to double-helix co-modeler Frances Crick. The artificial-intelligence guru whom Sternberg cites is not CMU's Moravec, but like-minded Ray Kurzweil." August 2, 2007: Can our brains understand themselves? They're tough nuts to crack even for the brainiest of scientists. By Jeanna Bryner. LiveScience via MSNBC.com. "Our brains can fathom the beginning of time and the end of the universe, but is any brain capable of understanding itself? ... Neurologists and cognitive scientists nowadays are probing how the mind gives rise to thoughts, actions, emotions and ultimately consciousness. ... 'Whether the human brain can understand itself is one of the oldest philosophical questions,' said Anders Garm of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.... Scientists have made some progress in taking an objective, direct 'look' at the human brain. In recent years, brain-imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have allowed scientists to observe the brain in action and determine how groups of neurons function." July 30, 2007: More Than Meets the Eye. The Leonard Lopate Show. WNYC, New York Public Radio. "Robots with artificial intelligence have been a science fiction staple for decades, but now some researchers might be close to making them a reality. New York Times contributing writer Robin Marantz Henig and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Rodney Brooks describe new machines that can make eye contact, read social cues, and even help out around the house. Are they too good to be true? Read Henig's article, 'The Real Transformers.' Weigh in: What would you like a robot to do?"
>>> See the referenced article below; AI Overview, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Robots, Machine Leaning, Nature of Intelligence, Emotion, Applications, Interviews July 29, 2007: The Real Transformers - Researchers are programming robots to learn in humanlike ways and show humanlike traits. Could this be the beginning of robot consciousness -- and of a better understanding of ourselves? By Robin Marantz Henig. The New York Times Sunday Magazine (cover story). "I was introduced to my first sociable robot on a sunny afternoon in June. The robot, developed by graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was named Mertz. ... At the moment, no single robot can do very much. The competencies have been cobbled together: one robot is able to grab a soup can when you tell it to put it on a shelf; another will look you in the eye and make babbling noises in keeping with the inflection of your voice. One robot might be able to learn some new words; another can take the perspective of a human collaborator; still another can recognize itself in a mirror. Taken together, each small accomplishment brings the field closer to a time when a robot with true intelligence -- and with perhaps other human qualities, too, like emotions and autonomy -- is at least a theoretical possibility. If that possibility comes to pass, what then? Will these new robots be capable of what we recognize as learning? Of what we recognize as consciousness? Will it know that it is a robot and that you are not? ... [Cynthia] Breazeal realized how complicated it was to try to figure out what, or even whether, Kismet was feeling. 'Robots are not human, but humans aren’t the only things that have emotions,' she said. 'The question for robots is not, Will they ever have human emotions? Dogs don't have human emotions, either, but we all agree they have genuine emotions. The question is, What are the emotions that are genuine for the robot?' ... Robot consciousness is a tricky thing, according to Daniel Dennett, a Tufts philosopher and author of 'Consciousness Explained,' who was part of a team of experts that Rodney Brooks assembled in the early 1990s to consult on the Cog project. In a 1994 article in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Dennett posed questions about whether it would ever be possible to build a conscious robot. His conclusion: 'Unlikely,' at least as long as we are talking about a robot that is 'conscious in just the way we human beings are.' But Dennett was willing to credit Cog with one piece of consciousness: the ability to be aware of its own internal states. ... Robot consciousness, it would seem, is related to two areas: robot learning (the ability to think, to reason, to create, to generalize, to improvise) and robot emotion (the ability to feel). Robot learning has already occurred, with baby steps, in robots like Cog and Leonardo, able to learn new skills that go beyond their initial capabilities. But what of emotion? ... Some believe that emotion is at least theoretically possible for robots too. Rodney Brooks goes so far as to say that robot emotions may already have occurred -- that Cog and Kismet not only displayed emotions but, in one way of looking at it, actually experienced them. 'We're all machines,' he told me when we talked in his office at M.I.T. 'Robots are made of different sorts of components than we are -- we are made of biomaterials; they are silicon and steel -- but in principle, even human emotions are mechanistic.' A robot's level of a feeling like sadness could be set as a number in computer code, he said. But isn't a human’s level of sadness basically a number, too, just a number of the amounts of various neurochemicals circulating in the brain? Why should a robot's numbers be any less authentic than a human's? ... 'I want to understand what it is that makes living things living,' Rodney Brooks told me. At their core, robots are not so very different from living things. 'It's all mechanistic,' Brooks said."
>>> AI Overview, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Robots, Machine Leaning, Nature of Intelligence, Emotion, Applications July/August 2007: Artificial Intelligence Is Lost in the Woods - A conscious mind will never be built out of software, argues a Yale University professor. By David Gelernter. Technology Review. "AI offers to figure out how thought works and to make that knowledge available to software designers. It even offers to deepen our understanding of the mind itself. Questions about software and the mind are central to cognitive science and philosophy. Few problems are more far-reaching or have more implications for our fundamental view of ourselves. The current debate centers on what I'll call a 'simulated conscious mind' versus a 'simulated unconscious intelligence.' We hope to learn whether computers make it possible to achieve one, both, or neither. ... To say that building a useful conscious mind is highly unlikely is not to say that AI has nothing worth doing. Consciousness has been a 'mystery' (as Turing called it) for thousands of years, but the mind holds other mysteries, too. Creativity is one of the most important; it's a brick wall that psychology and philosophy have been banging their heads against for a long time." May / June 2007: Human Futures. Editorial by Rick Lewis. Philosophy Now (Issue 61). [T]he future is shaped not just by blind chance and mechanical processes but also by the choices we make now. If things turn out badly, then generally the fault lies in ourselves, and not our stars. Picking this path or that is a matter of values and of reasoning, and those old friends are certainly rumoured to have some connection to philosophy. Therefore this issue is not so much about peering through the mists to see what will happen, but about what choices we should make, and what futures we could create if we want."
>>> Philosophy, The Future, Ethical & Social Implications, History May 20, 2007: This Week on Philosophy Talk - Artificial Intelligence (radio broadcast: audio available online). With Ken Taylor and John Perry of Stanford University. KALW, 91.7 FM, San Francisco. "At least some versions of artificial intelligence are attempts not merely to model human intelligence, but to make computers and robots that exhibit it: that have thoughts, use language, and even have free will. Does this make sense? What would it show us about human thinking and consciousness? Join John and Ken [and guest, Marvin Minsky] as they uncover the philosophical issues raised by artificial intelligence." May 19, 2007 [issue date]: Self-aware robot turns mirror on humankind. By Celeste Biever. New Scientist (Issue 2604: pages 30-31; subscription req'd). "Nico gazes into the mirror in front of him. Looking back is his reflected self, wearing a grey Yale University sweatshirt and a baseball cap cocked at a jaunty angle. When Nico raises an arm, he recognises the arm moving in the mirror as his own. It may not sound like much of a feat, but Nico is a humanoid robot. He has just become the first of his kind to recognise his own reflection in a mirror. The ability to recognise your reflection is considered an important milestone in infant development, and as a mark of self-awareness, sociability and intelligence in a non-human animal. Nico's ability to perform the same feat could pave the way for more sophisticated robots that can recognise their own bodies even if they are damaged or reconfigured. ... To endow Nico with the ability to recognise himself, Kevin Gold and his supervisor Brian Scassellati at Yale equipped Nico with a video camera behind one of his eyes, a jointed arm and an attached computer running some clever software. ... Meanwhile, a furry robot called Leonardo, built at MIT, recently reached another developmental milestone, the ability to grasp that someone else might believe something you know to be untrue. ... As well as helping to build better robots, such research could ultimately enhance our understanding of cognitive development in infants."
>>> Robots, AI Overview, Cognitive Science, Philosophy April 29, 2007: Hearts & Minds - Since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Now science suggests that our emotions are what make thought possible. By Jonah Lehrer. The Boston Globe (boston.com). "Just over 50 years ago, a group of brash young scholars at an MIT symposium introduced a series of ideas that would forever alter the way we think about how we think. In three groundbreaking papers, including one on grammar by a 27-year-old linguist named Noam Chomsky, the scholars ignited what is now known as the cognitive revolution, which was built on the radical notion that it is possible to study, with scientific precision, the actual processes of thought. The movement eventually freed psychology from the grip of behaviorism, a scientific movement popular in America that studied behavior as a proxy for understanding the mind. ... 'Because we subscribed to this false ideal of rational, logical thought, we diminished the importance of everything else,' said Marvin Minsky, a professor at MIT and pioneer of artificial intelligence. 'Seeing our emotions as distinct from thinking was really quite disastrous.' ... From its inception, the cognitive revolution was guided by a metaphor: the mind is like a computer. We are a set of software programs running on 3 pounds of neural hardware. And cognitive psychologists were interested in the software. The computer metaphor helped stimulate some crucial scientific breakthroughs. It led to the birth of artificial intelligence and helped make our inner life a subject suitable for science. For the first time, cognitive psychologists were able to simulate aspects of human thought. At the seminal MIT symposium, held on Sept. 11, 1956, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell announced that they had invented a 'thinking machine' -- basically a room full of vacuum tubes -- capable of solving difficult logical problems. (In one instance, the machine even improved on the work of Bertrand Russell.) ... But the computer metaphor was misleading, at least in one crucial respect. Computers don't have feelings. Feelings didn't fit into the preferred language of thought. Because our emotions weren't reducible to bits of information or logical structures, cognitive psychologists diminished their importance. ... This new science of emotion has brought a new conception of what it means to think, and, in some sense, a rediscovery of the unconscious." April 23, 2007 [issue date]: Know Thyself --- Man, Rat or Bot. By Sharon Begley. Newsweek / abailable from MSNBC.com. "Whether it is an eerily human bot in a virtual-reality game, an animal looking at you with soulful eyes or a patient in a vegetative state, the question nags and nags and won't go away: is there a thinking, self-aware, conscious mind in there? ... It's called metacognition --- the ability to think about your thoughts, to engage in self-reflection, to introspect. ... After decades in which metacognition was written off by many researchers in artificial intelligence, it is getting serious attention, says Michael Cox of BBN Technologies. There are now computer systems that can reason about what went wrong in a calculation and consider whether to continue on their current path to a solution or switch to a new strategy --- both of which, if a person did them, we would call introspection and self-awareness. Next month an AI conference in Hawaii will feature a dozen studies on introspective machines." April 5, 2007: The Turing Test. A Computerworld TechCast. Topics covered in this podcast include The Turing Test, consciousness, and Searle's Chinese Room. April 2007: Strange Ways - A weaving together of minds, machines, and mathematics. Book review by Stephen Cass. IEEE Spectrum Online. "[Douglas R.] Hofstadter has returned to one of the themes of his 1979 opus, believing it to have been somewhat overshadowed by the rest of the book. What is this overlooked gem? That we owe our self-awareness to the existence of 'strange loops.' In I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter develops the implications of this idea.... He further argues that any system capable of representing a sufficiently rich suite of symbols could develop self-awareness: it doesn’t matter if the microlevel of the strange loop is composed of neurons or transistors. When this idea was expressed in Gödel, Escher, Bach, most people latched onto it for its strong support of the possibility of true artificial intelligence."
>>> Philosophy, Cognitive Science |
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