Aristotle's Laptop: The Discovery of the Informational Mind is the first volume in the Series on Machine Consciousness. The book is organized in 10 chapters which can be read individually, but, when read as a whole, provide an overview of the evolution of how we have come to think about the informational mind. Early ideas about the mind did not include the modern idea of information theory as envisioned by Claude Shannon.
Aristotle believed that the heart was responsible for movement and sensation even though Alcmaeon of Croton and Aristotle's contemporaries believed that the brain was responsible for movement and sensation. Nevertheless, Aristotle had a tremendous influence on philosophy and science, and, while he did not have the understanding of the concept of information that we have today, the authors suggest that “had Aristotle had a laptop, he might have bridged the gap”. In the last chapter the authors present their imaginary visit across time and space to visit Aristotle. Aristotle is suffering from stomach pains in 322 BC, and the authors wish him well in this imaginary visit and present him with a laptop.
Aristotle's Laptop provides the context for automata studies as well as an introduction to phenomenology as it relates to the study of consciousness. The inner workings of mental states and consciousness have largely eluded scientific study. For the authors, Donald Hebb connected the mind to the brain, and his “work challenged the behaviourism of Skinner positing the centrality of the mental state as the basis of behaviour”. These developments are important but invisible to the psychology undergraduate, who studies Skinner and not Hebb. Iconic learning is the subject of a chapter that explores how an image with some noise or which appears incomplete persists or expands in the mind of the viewer. Most recently information integration as theorised by Giulio Tononi is a useful way to think about mental states.
The book includes an appendix called “The Informational Mind: A Formal Portrait” as well as author and subject indices. Individual chapters of this book might be used to introduce postgraduates to information theory, and this book is recommended for a university that offers courses in consciousness studies and/or in the history of science. In particular “Shannon: The Reluctant Hero of the Information Age” provides some interesting information about several people from different areas of expertise who worked at Bell Labs and MIT.
