Talking Heads … A Review of Speaking Minds: Interviews with Twenty Eminent Cognitive Scientists

They thought that the Chinese Room argument showed that computationalism could never fully account for the first-person perspective, that the "computer metaphor for the mind" might lead to some vital social questions being ignored, that passing the Turing Test They conducted 20 interviews with a rather idiosyncratic collection of people, largely on the east and west coasts, to find out what the consensus was in the field. One of their happy discoveries was that connectionism (about which they initially knew little) was expected to overcome many of these obstacles. Each interview begins with a brief personal history of why the interviewee became involved with the subject and what they take it to be, and then moves into a discussion of contemporary issues which the editors find interesting. While the interviews do not conform to a set pattern, they return regularly to a few favorite themes: the Chinese Room, the importance of the Turing Test, why "symbolic AI" has failed (a claim that is made repeatedly throughout the book), and the significance of connectionism as a replacement for it Wilensky, and Winograd could possibly be said to be active in mainstream AI; on the other hand there are seven or eight philosophers, of whom only Dennett has a sympathetic interest in AI; all the others have rejected its premises, and Dreyfus, Searle and Weizenbaum are notorious for their passionate and sustained attacks on the subject. This would be less important but for the fact that AI is the main subject matter of several of the interviews.