new book: ‘Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs: The Question of Alien Minds’
Written on March 9, 2008
Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs: The Question of Alien Minds by David McFarland (Oxford University Press, 2008).
from the book description:
When we interact with animals, we intuitively read thoughts and feelings into their expressions and actions. …
But is our natural tendency to humanize other beings philosophically or scientifically justifiable? Can we ever know what non-human minds are really like? How different are human minds from the minds of animals or robots? In Guilty Robots and Happy Dogs , David McFarland offers an accessible exploration of these and many other intriguing questions, questions that illuminate our understanding the human mind and its limits in knowing and imagining other minds. In exploring these issues, McFarland looks not only at philosophy, but also examines new evidence from the science of animal behavior, plus the latest developments in robotics and artificial intelligence, to show how many different–and often quite surprising–conclusions we can draw about the nature of minds “alien” to our own. Can robots ever feel guilty? Can dogs feel happy? Answering these questions is not simply an abstract exercise but has real implications for such increasingly relevant topics as animal welfare, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics.
Filed in: mind,new books,philosophy of mind.
