A defense of a version of the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness with special attention to such topics as concepts and animal consciousness. 
Consciousness is arguably the most important area within contemporary philosophy of mind and perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the world. Despite an explosion of research from philosophers, psychologists, and scientists, attempts to explain consciousness in neurophysiological, or even cognitive, terms are often met with great resistance. In The Consciousness Paradox, Rocco Gennaro aims to solve an underlying paradox, namely, how it is possible to hold a number of seemingly inconsistent views, including higher-order thought (HOT) theory, conceptualism, infant and animal consciousness, concept acquisition, and what he calls the HOT-brain thesis. He defends and further develops a metapsychological reductive representational theory of consciousness and applies it to several importantly related problems. Gennaro proposes a version of the HOT theory of consciousness that he calls the "wide intrinsicality view" and shows why it is superior to various alternatives, such as self-representationalism and first-order representationalism. HOT theory says that what makes a mental state conscious is that a suitable higher-order thought is directed at that mental state.
Thus Gennaro argues for an overall philosophical theory of consciousness while applying it to other significant issues not usually addressed in the philosophical literature on consciousness. Most cognitive science and empirical works on such topics as concepts and animal consciousness do not address central philosophical theories of consciousness. Gennaro's integration of empirical and philosophical concerns will make his argument of interest to both philosophers and nonphilosophers.

The Consciousness Paradox: Consciousness, Concepts, and Higher-Order Thoughts (Representation and Mind series)

Politics & Social Sciences

Gennaro, Rocco J.

Philosophy

A Bradford Book

Mind design is the endeavor to understand mind (thinking, intellect) in terms of its design (how it is built, how it works). Unlike traditional empirical psychology, it is more oriented toward the "how" than the "what." An experiment in mind design is more likely to be an attempt to build something and make it work--as in artificial intelligence--than to observe or analyze what already exists. Mind design is psychology by reverse engineering.When Mind Design was first published in 1981, it became a classic in the then-nascent fields of cognitive science and AI. This second edition retains four landmark essays from the first, adding to them one earlier milestone (Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence") and eleven more recent articles about connectionism, dynamical systems, and symbolic versus nonsymbolic models. The contributors are divided about evenly between philosophers and scientists. Yet all are "philosophical" in that they address fundamental issues and concepts; and all are "scientific" in that they are technically sophisticated and concerned with concrete empirical research.Contributors : Rodney A. Brooks, Paul M. Churchland, Andy Clark, Daniel C. Dennett, Hubert L. Dreyfus, Jerry A. Fodor, Joseph Garon, John Haugeland, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, Zenon W. Pylyshyn, William Ramsey, Jay F. Rosenberg, David E. Rumelhart, John R. Searle, Herbert A. Simon, Paul Smolensky, Stephen Stich, A. M. Turing, Timothy van Gelder

Mind Design (A Bradford Book)

Science & Math

Behavioral Sciences

Cynthia Breazeal here presents her vision of the sociable robot of the future, a synthetic creature and not merely a sophisticated tool. A sociable robot will be able to understand us, to communicate and interact with us, to learn from us and grow with us. It will be socially intelligent in a humanlike way. Eventually sociable robots will assist us in our daily lives, as collaborators and companions. Because the most successful sociable robots will share our social characteristics, the effort to make sociable robots is also a means for exploring human social intelligence and even what it means to be human.
Breazeal defines the key components of social intelligence for these machines and offers a framework and set of design issues for their realization. Much of the book focuses on a nascent sociable robot she designed named Kismet. Breazeal offers a concrete implementation for Kismet, incorporating insights from the scientific study of animals and people, as well as from artistic disciplines such as classical animation. This blending of science, engineering, and art creates a lifelike quality that encourages people to treat Kismet as a social creature rather than just a machine. The book includes a CD-ROM that shows Kismet in action.

Designing Sociable Robots (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents series)

Computers & Technology

Cynthia L. Breazeal

Computer Science

Evolutionary Computation: A Unified Approach

De Jong, Kenneth A. de

The complex social behaviors of ants have been much studied by science, and computer scientists are now finding that these behavior patterns can provide models for solving difficult combinatorial optimization problems. The attempt to develop algorithms inspired by one aspect of ant behavior, the ability to find what computer scientists would call shortest paths, has become the field of ant colony optimization (ACO), the most successful and widely recognized algorithmic technique based on ant behavior. This book presents an overview of this rapidly growing field, from its theoretical inception to practical applications, including descriptions of many available ACO algorithms and their uses.
The book first describes the translation of observed ant behavior into working optimization algorithms. The ant colony metaheuristic is then introduced and viewed in the general context of combinatorial optimization. This is followed by a detailed description and guide to all major ACO algorithms and a report on current theoretical findings. The book surveys ACO applications now in use, including routing, assignment, scheduling, subset, machine learning, and bioinformatics problems. AntNet, an ACO algorithm designed for the network routing problem, is described in detail. The authors conclude by summarizing the progress in the field and outlining future research directions. Each chapter ends with bibliographic material, bullet points setting out important ideas covered in the chapter, and exercises. Ant Colony Optimization will be of interest to academic and industry researchers, graduate students, and practitioners who wish to learn how to implement ACO algorithms.

Ant Colony Optimization

Dorigo, Marco

Stützle, Thomas

Reasoning About Knowledge

Business & Money

Halpern, Joseph Y.

Fagin, Ronald

Moses, Yoram

Vardi, Moshe

Economics

The idea of intelligent machines has become part of popular culture. But tracing the history of the actual science of machine intelligence reveals a rich network of cross-disciplinary contributions--the unrecognized origins of ideas now central to artificial intelligence, artificial life, cognitive science, and neuroscience. In The Mechanization of Mind in History, scientists, artists, historians, and philosophers discuss the multidisciplinary quest to formalize and understand the generation of intelligent behavior in natural and artificial systems as a wholly mechanical process. The contributions illustrate the diverse and interacting notions that chart the evolution of the idea of the mechanical mind. They describe the mechanized mind as, among other things, an analogue system, an organized suite of chemical interactions, a self-organizing electromechanical device, an automated general-purpose information processor, and an integrated collection of symbol manipulating mechanisms. They investigate the views of pivotal figures that range from Descartes and Heidegger to Alan Turing and Charles Babbage, and they emphasize such frequently overlooked areas as British cybernetic and pre-cybernetic thinkers. The volume concludes with the personal insights of five highly influential figures in the field: John Maynard Smith, John Holland, Oliver Selfridge, Horace Barlow, and Jack Cowan.Philip Husbands is Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex and Codirector of the Sussex Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics. Owen Holland is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Essex. Michael Wheeler is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Reconstructing the Cognitive World: 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 Di Paolo, Hubert Dreyfus, Andrew Hodges, Owen Holland, Jana Horáková, Philip Husbands, Jozef Kelemen, John Maynard Smith, Donald Michie, Oliver Selfridge, Michael Wheeler

The Mechanical Mind in History

Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias

In Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, Peter Ludlow extends the approach he used so successfully in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier, offering a collection of writings that reflects the eclectic nature of the online world, as well as its tremendous energy and creativity. This time the subject is the emergence of governance structures within online communities and the visions of political sovereignty shaping some of those communities. Ludlow views virtual communities as laboratories for conducting experiments in the construction of new societies and governance structures. While many online experiments will fail, Ludlow argues that given the synergy of the online world, new and superior governance structures may emerge. Indeed, utopian visions are not out of place, provided that we understand the new utopias to be fleeting localized "islands in the Net" and not permanent institutions.The book is organized in five sections. The first section considers the sovereignty of the Internet. The second section asks how widespread access to resources such as Pretty Good Privacy and anonymous remailers allows the possibility of "Crypto Anarchy"--essentially carving out space for activities that lie outside the purview of nation states and other traditional powers. The third section shows how the growth of e-commerce is raising questions of legal jurisdiction and taxation for which the geographic boundaries of nation-states are obsolete. The fourth section looks at specific experimental governance structures evolved by online communities. The fifth section considers utopian and anti-utopian visions for cyberspace.Contributors Richard Barbrook, John Perry Barlow, William E. Baugh Jr., David S. Bennahum, Hakim Bey, David Brin, Andy Cameron, Dorothy E. Denning, Mark Dery, Kevin Doyle, Duncan Frissell, Eric Hughes, Karrie Jacobs, David Johnson, Peter Ludlow, Timothy C. May, Jennifer L. Mnookin, Nathan Newman, David G. Post, Jedediah S. Purdy, Charles J. Stivale.

"Manipulation" refers to a variety of physical changes made to the world around us. Mechanics of Robotic Manipulation addresses one form of robotic manipulation, moving objects, and the various processes involved -- grasping, carrying, pushing, dropping, throwing, and so on. Unlike most books on the subject, it focuses on manipulation rather than manipulators. This attention to processes rather than devices allows a more fundamental approach, leading to results that apply to a broad range of devices, not just robotic arms.
The book draws both on classical mechanics and on classical planning, which introduces the element of imperfect information. The book does not propose a specific solution to the problem of manipulation, but rather outlines a path of inquiry.

Mechanics of Robotic Manipulation (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents series)

Mason, Matthew T.

In Mind and Mechanism, Drew McDermott takes a computational approach to the mind-body problem (how it is that a purely physical entity, the brain, can have experiences). He begins by demonstrating the falseness of dualist approaches, which separate the physical and mental realms. He then surveys what has been accomplished in artificial intelligence, clearly differentiating what we know how to build from what we can imagine building. McDermott then details a computational theory of consciousness claiming that the mind can be modeled entirely in terms of computation -- and deals with various possible objections. He also discusses cultural consequences of the theory, including its impact on religion and ethics.

Mind and Mechanism

McDermott, Drew V.

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