How To Build a Mind

Of all genres of science book, none has generated so many works whose titles promise so much but which deliver so little as those devoted to consciousness. In recent years, scholars from disciplines from philosophy to neuropharmacology have hit the bestseller lists with books bearing such peremptory titles as Consciousness Explained--despite the fact they do no such thing. Now Igor Aleksander, Professor of Neural Engineering Systems at Imperial College London, has offered his own take on the subject with How to Build a Mind. And with an international reputation for actually building "intelligent" machines rather than idly talking about them, Aleksander would seem ideally qualified to write a book with something new to say on consciousness. Indeed, in the opening chapter he states that he wants to "avoid the yawns and the pointless late-night conversations" the subject usually engenders. Alas, How to Build a Mind is yet another case of too much bun and too little beef. A mishmash of autobiography, historical overview and disjointed opinion, interspersed with imagined conversations with philosophers, it adds very little to the consciousness debate. This is all the more disappointing given that Aleksander has arguably come closer to achieving the goal of his book's title than anyone else through Magnus, a computer program he devised which--in some sense at least--is aware of its existence, its surroundings and shows signs of exercising free will. Readers will find only a lacklustre discussion of this fascinating work in this book, which--perhaps uniquely in this field - radically undersells the author's expertise and achievements. --Robert Matthews

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How to build a mind ?....well not quite. - Rated
I am an I.T. specialist by trade, and I found this book to be a very thought-provoking read. The author conveys his ideas by relating numerous ficticious conversations with historical figures down through the ages. He also discusses many of the key considerations that have to be addressed before an artificial brain can become a reality. I didn't agree with a number of his conclusions about how an artificial brain could be created and how it would function, which in my opinion were overly pessimistic. In the last two chapters the author tries to summarise the previous chapters, and while this is the best part of the book, it is also an anti-climax because as the author puts it : "...there is no grand formula, no glittering prize, no startling revelation.". In spite of this, I believe that thinking, learning machines are a real possibility, and we're closer to achieving this goal than perhaps anybody realises. Whether these artificial intelligences live up to people's expectations (especially in the early days) remains to be seen.

A catching book title but the content is rather dull. - Rated
The book contains some brief technical details that attempts to confuse and mislead the casual reader. Experts in the fields of artificial intelligence, neural networks, or intelligent systems will be fustrated by the inaccuracies or misleading descriptions in this book. To its credit, the book is rather clever in that it attempts to confuse/mislead even the experts in various fields of study. Since, experts in individual fields are rarely experts in many other major fields of study, the author cleverly mixes (misleading or poorly explained) information about neural biology and artificial intelligence together so that experts in either field are confused and easily mislead. Some of the claims made in the book are somewhat far fetched (at best controversial) and not backed up by any solid theory. The catchy title of the book will probably convince some people to buy it but its not one of the best books I have seen.