Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction

Front Cover
John Wiley & Sons, Dec 8, 1993 - Philosophy - 336 pages
Presupposing no familiarity with the technical concepts of either philosophy or computing, this clear introduction reviews the progress made in AI since the inception of the field in 1956. Copeland goes on to analyze what those working in AI must achieve before they can claim to have built a thinking machine and appraises their prospects of succeeding.

There are clear introductions to connectionism and to the language of thought hypothesis which weave together material from philosophy, artificial intelligence and neuroscience. John Searle's attacks on AI and cognitive science are countered and close attention is given to foundational issues, including the nature of computation, Turing Machines, the Church-Turing Thesis and the difference between classical symbol processing and parallel distributed processing. The book also explores the possibility of machines having free will and consciousness and concludes with a discussion of in what sense the human brain may be a computer.

 

Contents

a historical sketch
4
Some dazzling exhibits
11
Can a machine think?
33
The symbol system hypothesis 58 88 GB1898
58
A hard look at the facts
83
The curious case of the Chinese room
121
Freedom
140
Consciousness
163
parallel distributed processing
207
Epilogue
249
Bibliography
283
Index
299
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1993)

Jack Copeland is Senior Lecturer in philosophy and logic at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He has published widely on logic, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, and is editor of Logic and Reality (1993).

Bibliographic information