From: Michael Straight <straight@email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) Is Jonas a Man?
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 09:30:53 

On Wed, 16 Jun 1999, Peter Stephenson wrote:

> There are plenty of people arguing for one extreme or another, i.e. either
> for a religious fundamentalist form of strong dualism, or that by next
> Friday someone will have invented a machine which has all (and the strong
> AI people do seem to mean all) the characteristics of a human being (plus a
> whole lot of others just to show how clever the inventor is).  Plus there
> are plenty of possibilities in the middle depending on your attitude to
> emergent phenomena and what constitutes duality, humanity, `attitude',
> `what', `the' and every other word in the dictionary; 
[...]
> Brief bibliography (I shall be posting a test on this next week -- not):
> 
> A. Asimov, The Bicentennial Man
> R. Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind; Shadows of the Mind

A few other good ones:

Hofstadter, Douglas R.
The mind's I : fantasies and reflections on self and soul / composed and
arranged by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett.

Egan, Greg : _Permutation City_ and _Diaspora_

-Rostrum


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