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Minds and Computers: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence

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If you are looking for a comprehensive interdisciplinary overview of the core concepts of cognitive science lucidly presented in a couple of hundred pages, seek no more. Matt Carter accomplishes just that by examining the relation between minds and computers, a goal which takes him beyond the bounds of conventional artificial intelligence. In addition to classical AI, Carter ably discusses the fundamental ideas of philosophy of mind, psychology and behaviorism, neuroscience, computational intelligence, and linguistics: the fields constituting cognitive science. The aim of this grand tour is to facilitate development of a philosophically sound computational theory of mind.

The tour begins, quite properly, in the very beginning with a review of Cartesian dualism followed by concise discussions of behaviorism, neuroanatomy, Australian (or reductive) materialism, and functionalism. The classical symbolic computational architecture thesis of AI is then examined in some detail. Subsequent chapters delve into particular issues of interest, including computationalism, standard AI search techniques, machine and human reasoning, machine and human language, and artificial neural networks. Even automated game playing, a perennial AI favorite, gets a little chapter of its own. Classic AI icons are, of course, showcased: the Turing test, expert systems, the Chinese room. Alas, 200-odd pages impose severe limits; thus Minsky and Simon and Newell and McCarthy and many other legendary heavyweights don't even make it into the footnotes. Actually, there are no footnotes. Nor endnotes. But there are excellent suggestions for further reading and a very helpful glossary in the appendices.

This book is simply wonderful. It's everything you wanted to know about cog sci delivered under the label of AI. That is fine. It was, after all, good old fashioned AI that got the ball rolling in the first place. Think of the book as a broad-based introduction to AI sans the messy programming requirements. Naturally, possession of an alert brain is de rigueur.