The Mechanical Mind in History

The idea of intelligent machines has become part of popular culture. But tracing thehistory of the actual science of machine intelligence reveals a rich network of cross-disciplinarycontributions--the unrecognized origins of ideas now central to artificial intelligence, artificiallife, cognitive science, and neuroscience. In The Mechanization of Mind in History, scientists,artists, historians, and philosophers discuss the multidisciplinary quest to formalize andunderstand the generation of intelligent behavior in natural and artificial systems as a whollymechanical process. The contributions illustrate the diverse and interacting notions that chart theevolution of the idea of the mechanical mind. They describe the mechanized mind as, among otherthings, an analogue system, an organized suite of chemical interactions, a self-organizingelectromechanical device, an automated general-purpose information processor, and an integratedcollection of symbol manipulating mechanisms. They investigate the views of pivotal figures thatrange from Descartes and Heidegger to Alan Turing and Charles Babbage, and they emphasize suchfrequently overlooked areas as British cybernetic and pre-cybernetic thinkers. The volume concludeswith the personal insights of five highly influential figures in the field: John Maynard Smith, JohnHolland, Oliver Selfridge, Horace Barlow, and Jack Cowan.Philip Husbands is Professor of ComputerScience and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex andCodirector of the Sussex Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics. Owen Holland isProfessor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Essex. Michael Wheeler isReader in Philosophy at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Reconstructing the CognitiveWorld: The Next Step (MIT Press, 2005).ContributorsPeter Asaro, Horace Barlow, Andy Beckett,Margaret Boden, Jon Bird, Paul Brown, Seth Bullock, Roberto Cordeschi, Jack Cowan, Ezequiel DiPaolo, Hubert Dreyfus, Andrew Hodges, Owen Holland, Jana Horáková, Philip Husbands, Jozef Kelemen,John Maynard Smith, Donald Michie, Oliver Selfridge, Michael Wheeler