Vol. 1 of the World Scientific Series on Machine Consciousness
ARISTOTLE’S LAPTOP
The Discovery of our Informational Mind
by Igor Aleksander (Imperial College London, UK) & Helen Morton (Imperial College London, UK)
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 mind was information? This “mind is information” assertion is often heard in contemporary debates, and this book explores the verities and falsehoods of this proposition.
Contents:
Information: The New Kid on the Block
Shannon (19162001)
Little Boxes that Reason and Learn
Networks with Internal States
Information Integration: The Measure of Consciousness
Automata and Information Integration
The Philosophy of Information
The Structure of the Informational Mind
Language and Information
The Secret State: Freud and Automata
Detractors and Open Minds
Conclusion: Aristotle’s Laptop
Readership: Philosophers, scientists and those interested in consciousness and machine consciousness; readers of multidisciplinary books on machine analyses of consciousness.
