Dimensions
130 x 198 x 18mm
Igor Aleksander is a world expert in artificial intelligence, a pioneer in the race to build modern computers that are more than glorified calculators. While even today's computers are still far from being conscious machines, he firmly believes that his efforts to make them so can offer a valuable addition to our knowledge of how our own consciousness works - or even more basically, to reach a satisfactory definition of what consciousness is.
Mixing working autobiography with imagined dialogues with philosophers from Miletus to Wittgenstein, Aleksander argues for a cross-disciplinary approach to the question of the thinking machine. By putting modern computing and neuroscience in a wider cultural and historical context, he offers a witty and thought-provoking new way of looking at the central question philosophers have been asking since thought began.