Thinking about android epistemology - Kenneth M. Ford

For millennia, "from Aristotle to almost yesterday," the great problems
of philosophy have all been about people: questions of epistemology and philosophy
of mind have concerned human capacities and limitations. Still, say the editors of
Thinking about Android Epistemology, there should be theories about other sorts of
minds, other ways that physical systems can be organized to produce knowledge and
competence. The emergence of artificial intelligence in mid-twentieth century
provided a way to study the powers and limits of systems that learn, to theorize and
to make theories sufficiently concrete so that their properties and consequences can
be demonstrated. In this updated version of the 1995 MIT Press book Android
Epistemology, computer scientists and philosophers--among them Herbert Simon, Daniel
Dennett, and Paul Churchland--offer a gentle, unsystematic introduction to
alternative systems of cognition. They look at android epistemology from both
theoretical and practical points of view, offering not only speculative proposals
but applications--ideas for using computational systems to expand human capacities.
The accessible and entertaining essays include a comparison of 2001's HAL and
today's computers, a conversation among aliens who have a low opinion of human
cognition, an argument for the creativity of robots, and a short story illustrating
the power of algorithms for learning causal relations.Contributors:Neil Agnew,
Margaret Boden, Paul Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Ken M. Ford, Clark Glymour, Pat
Hayes, Henry Kyburg, Doug Lenat, Marvin Minsky, Joseph Nadeau, Anatol Rappoport,
Herbert Simon, Lynn Andrea Stein, Susan Sterrett