β Scribed by Stephen W. Smoliar
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
This book is a prolegomenon to the enterprise of building a person. It is a defense of three theses: token physicalism, agent materialism, and strong AI. Token physicalism is the thesis that mental events are physical events. In human beings, they are presumably neurological events. Agent materialism is the thesis that persons are physical objects having a suitable structure. Strong AI is the thesis that one can construct a person (a thing that literally thinks, feels, and is conscious) by building a physical system endowed with appropriate "artificial intelligence". It is argued that what is required for the construction of a person is a physical system that mimics human rationality in a sense made precise in the book. The project of building such a system is actually underway in the OSCAR project, and this book discusses the theoretical underpinnings of the OSCAR project at some length. The precise objective of the OSCAR project is a formulation of a general theory of rationality and its implementation in a computer program. It follows from the theses of the book that a system running this program and appropriately connected to the world will literally be a person. [p. ix] * (MIT Press,
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
**One young woman's journey to find her place in the world as the carefully separated strands of her life -- family, money, school, and love -- begin to overlap and tangle. ** All sixteen-year-old Izzy Crawford wants is to feel like she really belongs somewhere. Her father, a marine, died in Iraq
HARPER'S DAD IS getting a divorce from her beloved stepmother, Jane. Even worse, Harper has lost her stepsister, Tess; the divorce divides them. Harper decides to escape by joining a volunteer program to build a house for a family in Tennessee who lost their home in a tornado. Not that she knows a t