The book is interdisciplinary and focuses on the topic of artificial consciousness: from neuroscience to artificial intelligence, from bioengineering to robotics. It provides an overview on the current state of the art of research in the field of artificial consciousness and includes extended and revised versions of the papers presented at the International Workshop on ‘Artificial Consciousness’, held in November 2005 at Agrigento (Italy).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen rapid advancements in recent years, particularly in the areas of deep learning and the ability to generalize from concrete objects to abstract concepts. Meanwhile, in the study of machine consciousness, a universally agreed definition among scientists and philosophers is still lacking.This book raises a number of issues surrounding the nature and implications of conscious artificial intelligence:This edited volume consists of 10 chapter...

Our understanding of how the human brain performs mathematical calculations is far from complete, but in recent years there have been many exciting breakthroughs by scientists all over the world. Now, in The Number Sense, Stanislas Dehaene offers a fascinating look at this recent research, in an enlightening exploration of the mathematical mind. Dehaene begins with the eye-opening discovery that animals--including rats, pigeons, raccoons, and chimpanzees--can perform simple mathem...

How is it that thoroughly physical material beings such as ourselves can think, dream, feel, create and understand ideas, theories and concepts? How does mere matter give rise to all these non-material mental states, including consciousness itself? An answer to this central question of our existence is emerging at the busy intersection of neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. In this groundbreaking work, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores exc...

What is consciousness and how can a brain, a mere collection of neurons, create it? In Consciousness and the Social Brain, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano lays out an audacious new theory to account for the deepest mystery of them all. The human brain has evolved a complex circuitry that allows it to be socially intelligent. This social machinery has only just begun to be studied in detail. One function of this circuitry is to attribute awareness to others: to compute that person...

When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross t...

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a cross-disciplinary approach to understanding, modeling, and creating intelligence of various forms. It is a critical branch of cognitive science, and its influence is increasingly being felt in other areas, including the humanities. AI applications are transforming the way we interact with each other and with our environment, and work in artificially modeling intelligence is offering new insights into the human mind and revealing new forms mentality can...

In From Molecule to Metaphor, Jerome Feldman proposes a theory of language and thought that treats language not as an abstract symbol system but as a human biological ability that can be studied as a function of the brain, as vision and motor control are studied. This theory, he writes, is a "bridging theory" that works from extensive knowledge at two ends of a causal chain to explicate the links between. Although the cognitive sciences are revealing much about how our brains prod...

Cognitive science arose in the 1950s when it became apparent that a number of disciplines, including psychology, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy, were fragmenting. Perhaps owing to the field’s immediate origins in cybernetics, as well as to the foundational assumption that cognition is information processing, cognitive science initially seemed more unified than psychology. However, as a result of differing interpretations of the foundational assumption and dramatically diverg...

To define better techniques of mathematics education, this book combines a knowledge of cognitive science with mathematics curriculum theory and research. The concept of the human reasoning process has been changed fundamentally by cognitive science in the last two decades. The role of memory retrieval, domain-specific and domain-general skills, analogy, and mental models is better understood now than previously. The authors believe that cognitive science provides the most accurate account...

Behavioral scientists – including those in psychology, infant and child development, education, animal behavior, marketing and usability studies – use many methods to measure behavior. Systematic observation is used to study relatively natural, spontaneous behavior as it unfolds sequentially in time. This book emphasizes digital means to record and code such behavior; while observational methods do not require them, they work better with them. Key topics include devising coding schemes, tr...

Aristotle's convincing philosophy is likely to have shaped (even indirectly) many of our current beliefs, prejudices and attitudes to life. This includes the way in which our mind (that is, our capacity to have private thoughts) appears to elude a scientific description. This book is about a scientific ingredient that was not available to Aristotle: the science of information. Would the course of the philosophy of the mind have been different had Aristotle pronounced that the matter of min...