Abstract

While it is primarily a detailed, technical treatise on the principles of the technology of automata, this book does contain some philosophically interesting material. In Part II, devoted to the theoretical construction of robots with consciousness but which exhibit no behavior, Culbertson advances and develops the idea that we can analyze perceptual consciousness in terms of the four dimensional "world-lines" of the transmissions of impulses along neurons, or rather in terms of interconnecting networks of such world lines. In Part III, he argues that consciousness, defined in physical terms, cannot cause behavior. He presents, as an alternative, a doctrine of "historical causation" in which whole extended time periods in the past affect the present—K. P. F.