A kind of "new-age" look at ideas that are at the heart of embodied cognition. This book is fun to read, but hard to summarize. Primarily written from a biological perspective by an anthropologist.
This book uses results from studies of child development to explain some aspects of how human thinking works. His main argument is that quite a bit about the human mind can be understood by looking at how the ability to think develops in children. One important idea is that children seem to be natural dualists separating and distinguishing ideas about the body and the physical world from ideas about thoughts and mental/imaginary worlds.
This is the book about Kismet. It comes with a CD containing lots of videos of Kismet that we sometimes watch in class. It discusses the computational and psychological ideas that are embodied in Kismet, as well as Breazeal's general approach to robotics research.
Seeks to explain the human experience of consciousness. This book explores many of the ideas that have been considered in this area. Chalmers is not happy with only neural or biological explanations. He wants an explanation for why things feel the way they do.
Christian was a "human" in the 2009 Loebner Turing Test Competition. He set out to try to be the "most human human" in that year's contest, meaning the human who was most frequently recognized as human by the judges. In this book he explores lots of issues related to the Turing Test and to what it means to be human. He refers to what he calls The Sentence, which is something like: The one thing that humans can do that nothing else can (or that machines can't do) (or that animals can't do) is ____________. He doesn't try to find a phrase for that blank, but he explores the issue quite a bit.
Churchland is a philosopher, writing for a general audience about the philosophy of mind. A brief but dense introduction to ideas such as reductive materialism, functionalism, intentionality, and how philosophy relates to neuroscience.
Clark is a philosopher who writes very well about cutting edge scientific and technological ideas. This book focuses on recent work in artificial intelligence, neuroscience and psychology that emphasizes the centrality of embodiment in studies of intelligence.
This is the book where the Biological Constraints reading comes from. Clark is most interested here in the neural network approach, especially why it is biologically plausible, as well as practically useful. Among other things, he worries about why our folk psychology ideas about doing symbolic reasoning might be wrong and an underlying neural network perspective might better match the way our brains really work.
Damasio is a neurologist who is particularly interested in brain disorders and their effects on human behavior. He argues effectively that the parts of the brain most involved in human emotions and feelings are central to our ability to think and reason effectively.
This book extends the work in Descartes' Error to look at how (and perhaps why) consciousness exists in humans. Again emotion and feelings are seen as playing a critical role. This book comes from the embodied cognition perspective.
This book picks up where Descartes' Error leaves off and looks at more recent studies of how emotions and feelings are central to human life. In a (somewhat) interdisciplinary way it looks at how Spinoza (a 17th century philosopher) anticipated some of these ideas. This book provides the clearest picture of how emotions lead to feelings, which trigger memories and start the thinking process.
Deacon is a professor of biological anthropology who argues that what makes human intelligence distinctive is our ability to reason symbolically. His heavily biological arguments focus on brain structures that support symbolic reasoning and how the evolution of those structures seems to have lead to our language abilities.
Dehaene has previously studied the human number sense and reading in the brain. In this book he mostly is attempting to study the biological basis for consciousness. One of his techniques is to look at subliminal messages and how the brain processes them without conscious awareness, using that to draw the line between where conscious activity happens in the brain and where unconscious activity happens. For him consciousness mostly seems to boil down to long distance networks in the brain that make information globally available to allow us to reflect, imagine, plan ahead and express our thoughts.
A collection of papers from various obscure journals that investigate cognitive science issues. Dennett is a philosopher who is very supportive of work in artificial intelligence. This is worth browsing to see if Dennett addresses a topic that you are interested in.
This is Dennett's fully worked out philosophical theory of how consciousness works. Anyone interested in consciousness should at least be aware of Dennett's fairly reductionist arguments. This book does not seem to be widely agreed with by philosophers.
A brief, readable summary of Dennett's work on intentionality and consciousness. Dennett is very good at looking at AI issues in a philosophical way.
Arguably the work that started the field of cognitive science. Descartes' classic cogito ergo sum ("I think therefore I am") argument that shaped everything that followed by suggesting that mind and body are completely separate things.
This book (by one of Truman's Distinguished Visiting Scholars back when we had that program) argues that the existing techniques of logic and mathematics are inadequate for understanding the mind. Devlin is a mathematician who writes about mathematics in a very clear and understandable way for a non-mathematical audience.
Also Neural Darwinism (Truman Library: QP 376 E32 1987) by the same author. Discusses an elaborate theory of how the brain thinks, based on a notion of competing groups of neurons. The theory is called neural Darwinism, because groups of neurons are thought to compete in a way that is very much like evolution to produce intelligent behavior. Edelman is a Nobel Prize winning biologist.
Fernyhough is a psychologist who summaries recent research about how human memory works, which turns out to be quite different from how we usually think it works. In particular, each recalling of a memory appears to rewrite the memory, meaning that it is impossible to distinguish actual past events from our recalling of past events. This book is fairly scientific, but it also looks at aesthetics and how our identities are tied to what we remember and how we remember it. It also include personal anecdotes that are interesting.
Android epistemology is the editors' term for exploring the whole area of intelligent machines. The essays in this book tend to come from the symbolic AI tradition, but display some openness to the Embodied perspective. Authors include Herbert Simon, Margaret Boden, Paul Churchland and Marvin Minsky. The Simon and Boden papers from this book are in your coursepack.
Attempts to provide a complete model of how the brain works. The big idea is that everything is based on a hierarchical pattern-matching memory that both matches things we encounter and predicts what will come next. This memory is able to recognize "invariant" items (meaning it will recognize your face regardless of how big or small it is or what angle it is seen from . . .). There is a lot of handwaving in the details, but the ideas are certainly interesting. Jeff Hawkins is the man who invented the Palm Pilot.
This is a collection of writings by others, edited and commented on by Hofstadter and Dennett. Many interesting pieces including some by science fiction authors. The primary focus is on issues of consciousness and self-awareness.
Holland is one of the founders of the field of genetic algorithms and this book is an introduction intended for a general audience. Pickler has Emergence: From Chaos to Order by the same author.
Looks at the cultural nature of cognition by examining in detail how groups of sailors perform complex navigation tasks. Hutchins is a trained anthropologist who gets at cognitive ideas that can be studied outside of an individual brain as groups of people perform a task. This is very non-mainstream anthropology, but very interesting.
Summarizes a large amount of research looking at two different ways that humans think and solve problems, quickly in a subconscious, intuitive, immediate kind of way, and slowly in a contemplative, conscious, logical kind of way. Both kinds are important and a big part of who we are and how we work. Understanding the differences helps explain a lot of human behavior and decision making.
Presents the idea of a paradigm as a way of describing a set of unifying principles, methods and problems that group together scientists (and other academics) doing research. Argues that significant changes happen in science through paradigm shifts where one paradigm is abandoned and a new one is adopted. His examples have almost nothing to do with the topics of this class, but the main ideas are directly relevant.
Kurzweil discusses his ideas about "the Singularity" which is "a future period when the pace of technological change will be so fast and far-reaching that human existence on this planet will be irreversibly altered." This is definitely provocative.
Lakoff (a linguist by training) and Johnson (a philosopher) argue that most of our fundamental abstract concepts are grounded in basic metaphors derived from bodily experience. This book presents a strong argument for the embodiment of intelligence, meaning that not just our brains but our entire bodies are essential to our understanding of the world. These two authors also wrote Metaphors We Live By (Truman library: P106 L235 1980) which elaborates more of the kinds of metaphors they are interested in.
A brief summary of work by Lenat and his colleagues on CYC, which is attempting to capture all of human commonsense knowledge in logical rules.
Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher who originally argued for many of the ideas that now fall under the heading of embodiment. This book is probably only understandable if you have a significant background in philosophy.
Mithen is an archaeologist and this book looks at how (and why) the modern human mind has evolved over time. This is "prehistory" in the sense that it attempts to document the development of the mind in our biological ancestors who lived long before "history" came to be recognized. Some of his ideas are provocative and clearly difficult to prove, but he is quite persuasive in many of his main points.
A textbook introduction to artificial intelligence. It has a particularly good introduction to neural nets and genetic algorithms.
This is intended to be a textbook for embodied Artificial Intelligence. It spends a little time distinguishing this new field from more traditional AI, but focuses primarily on how to do embodied AI. Since this is such a young field, this is sometimes difficult to describe.
This is one of our textbooks. Pinker studies cognitive neuroscience, but he writes for a very general audience. This book looks at how the human mind has evolved through natural selection. He also focusses on machines and how they might think. He argues that the mind is a "system of organs of computation designed by natural selection". Chapters after those we are reading for class focus on the evolution of aspects of thought such as perception, reasoning, emotion, social relations and "higher" reasoning, including art, music, humor, etc. . . Pinker has also written The Language Instinct (Truman Library: P106 P476 1994) which is a very readable introduction to his ideas on the evolution of language.
Dr. Ramachandran is a neurologist who works with patients who have neurological damage or display odd neurological behaviors. This is a popular book aimed at a general audience that looks at what we can learn about how the mind works by looking carefully at minds that behave abnormally. For example, he offers an explanation for why amputees sometimes experience phantom limbs, and describes experiments to change their perceptions. He also discusses human visual processing at length, and spends time looking at religious experience and our conscious experience of qualia. He also has a shorter book that focuses primarily on consciousness called A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness.
This is probably the most popular introductory artificial intelligence textbook. It provides a thorough introduction to most areas of the field, with a particular emphasis on more traditional symbolic AI. It is a good first source for many AI topics.
This is a popular (rather than deeply academic) book that looks at many of the recent claims about neuroscience, such as the idea that biology can explain all of our actions. They explain (without pictures) how various brain scanning technologies work and look at what they are, and are not, capable of explaining about brains and minds.
One of the clearest and best books on symbolic Artificial Intelligence. Simon won a Nobel Prize in Economics, as well as the Turing Award in computer science. This books basic argument is that a physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for intelligent action.
This is a collection of essays put together around the 25th anniversary of the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey. The essays are written by famous people like Ray Kurzweil, Roger Schank, Doug Lenat, Don Norman and Rosiland Picard, as well as not so famous people, and discuss where current technology is relative to where it was depicted in the movie. It is particularly good on emotions (Picard), common sense (Lenat), language (both Kurzweil and Schank) and lip reading (Stork).
Turner is a literary scholar who makes much the same argument as Lakoff and Johnson about the centrality of metaphor and stories in human cognition. He ends up arguing that language arose in response to the human need to tell stories.
This is the book that got much of the work in cognitive science on embodiment started. It argues that some aspects of the mind are best studied using methods of cognitive science, especially the more recent neural work, but that other aspects of the mind are best studied through the meditative contemplation provided by some forms of Buddhism.
This is a collection of recent essays from the embodied intelligence perspective, including an essay providing a good summary by Johnson of the Lakoff and Johnson work.