Mindware, by Andy Clark

Mindware is a book where very basic issues in cognition are investigated by examining the history of basic ideas within cognitive science. In that way, it's similar to Ontogeny and Phylogeny.I thought this book was excellent for the following things:

1. A fairly concise outline of basic ideas in cognitive science.
2. A philosophical investigation of if, and how, "folk psychology" and underlying biology (neural networks, brains, connectionist modelling) relate.
3. An analysis of the pitfalls of classical AI (physical symbol systems), and how those pitfalls are avoided with newer strategies (connectionism, genetic algorithms, artificial life)
4. A basic introduction into how complex behaviors can be derived from a finite set of simple, local rules.
5. The critical need for analyzing cognition not only at the individual level, but also at the level of systems (i.e. anthropology).

And it's all done in less than 200 pages.I would especially recommend the sections that cover how folk psychology is useful in its own right, can be validly applied to both engineered and non-engineered systems, and can stand on it's own, even if links between it and an underlying computational biology are still lacking.Overall, a solid introduction, and for this, I recommend it.Thanks!
BenThis message has been edited by Ben, Sunday, 2005/08/14 08:02 PMThis message has been edited by Admin, 08-15-2005 11:46 AM