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The idea of intelligent machines has become part of popular culture, and 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 Mechanical 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 mechanical 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).
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