Sunday, April 12, 2009

Introduction

The Minds of Robots (TMOR) will chronicle my attempt to build a conscious automaton based on the unified theories of James T. Culbertson as presented in his book "The Minds of Robots", and Marvin Minsky in his classic work "The Society of Mind".

Although these two scholarly works were written respectively nearly 50 and 25 years ago, the State of the Art of computer technology is just now at a point where Culbertson's concrete designs for conscious automata might be realized with Minsky's more abstract ideas providing further insight and explanation as to what is going on inside of the mind that we're building.

The blog's name gives a bit of precedence to Culbertson for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that his work on Robots and Automatons in the 1950's and 1960's was clearly seminal, and preceeded Minsky's by decades. When I first met his work in 1967 as a high school geek I literally fell in love with the book. It's pages were peppered with diagrams of mind circuits that looked to me like cave drawings made by aliens, hand drawn and absolutely unique.

The reason that Minsky's work is also included here is because it too is brilliantly simple and resonates in many places and in many ways with Culbertson's. Minsky often provides a useful illustration and alternative but harmonious perspective on a synthetic mind through his clear explanations and descriptions of how a real mind might work.

Finally, I'd like to make it clear that I'm doing this work in a very public forum with the hope that there are others who share my fascination with synthetic consciousness and would like to work along side me by either contributing their own ideas and content or offering constructive criticism of mine.