Haugeland 1997

admin — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:49:53 +0000

Haugeland, John (Editor) Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, and Artificial Intelligence The MIT Press: Boston, MA

Searle’s Chinese Room: Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

McLuhan 1994

admin — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 16:17:44 +0000

McLuhan, Marshall Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man The MIT Press: Boston, MA, 1994 (Reprint Edition)

From the Back Cover: This reissue of Understanding Media marks the thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan’s classic expose on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media. Terms and phrases such as “the global village” and “the medium is the message” are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan’s theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.