Chapter 1 Big Ideas!

1) The physicalist assumption - The mind is what the brain does.

2) Rational for studying "mechanisms of mind" - Questions of the nature
of intelligence are inherently fascinating.  The study of artificial minds
may well throw light on this question.

3) Approaches to mind - Psychology is a top-down, analystic approach.
Artificial Intelligence is a top-down synthetic approach.  Neuroscience
is a bottom-up analytic approach.  mechanisms of Mind is a bottom-up 
synthetic approach.

4) Symbolic Artificial Intelligence - Programs which tend to be designed
and programmed, rather than trained or evolved, and which they typically
confine themselves to a narrow domain.  They generally feature a small number
of well-known knowledge representations.

5) Artificial Neural Networks - Computational models based roughly on the
structure of nervous systems.

6) Subsumption Architecture - "Subsumption architecture is a concept
originating from behavior based robotics.  It was invented by Rodney
Brooks and colleagues in the mid to late 1980's."

7) Society of mind - Theory proposed by Marvin Minsky that mind is best 
viewed as a commonwealth of more or less autonomous agents or competencies
that have some intercommunication.  They both compete for the right to act
and cooperate to serve common needs.

8) Artificial Life - The study of man-made systems that exhibit behaviors
characteristic to natural living systems.  Artificial life systems attempt
to synthesize lifelike behavior, focusing on the emergent behaviour.

9) State Transition Analogy - Interesting things happen at phase transition
boundaries.  Solid to liquid.  Liquid to Gas.  Nonexistence to existence.
Nonliving matter to living matter.  Physical to mental.

10) Definition of Artificial Intelligence - Artificial Intelligence is the
art of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done 
by a human.