Thinking Computers and Virtual Persons

Thinking Computers and Virtual Persons: Essays on the Intentionality of Machines explains how computations are meaningful and how computers can be cognitive agents like humans. This book focuses on the concept that cognition is computation.

Organized into four parts encompassing 13 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the analogy between intentionality and phlogiston, the 17th-century principle of burning. This text then examines the objection to computationalism that it cannot prevent arbitrary attributions of content to the various data structures and representations involved in a computational process. Other chapters consider that the notion of original intentionality is incoherent. This book argues as well that the only way to build an intelligent machine is to build a neural network. The final chapter claims that an entire theoretical framework in cognitive psychology is incompatible with the view that human brains are computers of some sort.

This book is a valuable resource for cognitive scientists.

Contributors

Preface

I. Introduction

1. Thinking Computers and the Problem of Intentionality

II. Intentionality and its Discontents

2. Intentionality Is Phlogiston

3. Real Machines and Virtual Intentionality

4. The Myth of Original Intentionality

5. Computationalism

III. The Natural Intentionality of Machines

6. The Causal Powers of CPUs

7. Could a Machine Think?

8. Intentionality and Computationalism

9. Putting One's Foot in One's Head—Part II: How?

10. Syntactic Semantics

IV. Intentionality and Beyond

11. Am I a Computer?

12. Using Representation to Explain

13. Human Reasoning About Artificial Intelligence

Author Index

Subject Index