Artificial Minds, Stan Franklin, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995, xi+449 pp., ISBN 0-262-06178-3 (HB), 0-262-56109-3 (PB)

Artificial Minds, Stan Franklin, MIT Press, Camuniversities giving it legitimacy even if most of us do bridge, MA, 1995, xi 1 449 pp., ISBN 0-262-06178not know how AI works. It is a little like our 3 (HB), 0-262-56109-3 (PB) accepting computers without knowing how they work. How many of us could build a computer from Stan Franklin’s book Artificial Minds explores difdelay lines and logic gates, from relays and switferent ways of understanding minds. It surveys ches? Is it even necessary to know computers at that philosophies of mind, signs of mind in the animal level of detail, unless you are an engineer? I believe kingdom, the use of computers for modeling life and that it is doubly so, if we are to understand artificial mind’s functions, brain activity that could underly minds: first because the computer is at the core of mind, robots as embodiments of minds, and the many models of mind, as shown in Franklin’s book, debate and controversy surrounding different points and then to drive home the idea that when we are of view; and it considers the possibility of building looking for an underlying mechanism of X, we are systems with artificial minds. The book is approlooking for something very unlike X; computers priate for an educated reader with an interest in such allow us to see and to reflect on complex and matters as well as the professional, thanks to its obscure behavior arising from mechanisms that we style, scope, and depth. After you have read it once fully understand. Such relating of behavior to mechaand absorbed the material, read it again for the nism is central to Franklin’s Artificial Minds. insight that comes from seeing the work as a whole. The study of the mind has historically been the It is well worth it. domain of philosophy and more recently of the Our popular notion has it that a mind is something humanities, which Webster (10th Collegiate) defines particularly human, exemplified by conscious thinkas ‘‘the branches of learning (as philosophy, laning, feeling, emotions, reasoning, intuition, rememguages) that investigate human constructs and conbering, communicating. Things relating to the mind cerns as opposed to natural processes (as physics or are called mental and are contrasted with the physchemistry). ’’ Again we see the mental contrasted ical; mind being contrasted with matter. Against this with the physical: mind as not resulting from natural picture the idea of artificial minds may seem radical, processes. However, early Western philosophy ineven heretical. Not only would bears and birds and cluded also physical and biological science — butterflies have minds, but we could build machines Aristotle felt qualified to do it all — that is, before with minds, which is more controversial than mathe mechanisms of astronomy, physics, chemistry, chines with intelligence. metabolism, and heredity, in roughly that order, were Perhaps artificial intelligence is more acceptable to known anything like how we know them now. us than artificial minds because we have more of a Western thought is marked by a passage from handle on intelligence — we measure it crudely with ignorance through philosophy into natural sciences, IQ tests, for example — and because the field of as more and more complex phenomena, in roughly Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has been around longer. the above order, have been explained in terms of For more than 30 years AI has been taught in leading underlying mechanisms. Franklin’s book follows this