The Animal as a Machine and a Prime Motor

The Animal as a Machine and a Prime Motor PDF Author: Robert Henry Thurston
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Animal mechanics
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description

The Animal as a Machine and a Prime Motor

The Animal as a Machine and a Prime Motor PDF Author: Robert Henry Thurston
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Animal mechanics
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description


Animal Machines

Animal Machines PDF Author: Ruth Harrison
Publisher: CABI
ISBN: 1780642849
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
First published in 1964, Ruth Harrison's book Animal Machines had a profound and lasting impact on world agriculture, public opinion and the quality of life of millions of farmed animals. Concerned with welfare standards at a time when animal production was increasing in scale and mechanization, Ruth Harrison set about investigating the situation in a fair and even-handed way. Reporting her findings in this book, Harrison alerted the public to the undeniable suffering of calves living in veal crates and birds in battery cages. Written at the beginning of the intensive farming movement, which promised progress but in reality worsened conditions for domesticated animals, Animal Machines provides a fascinating insight into the system we are living with today and must continue with as the global population increases. Harrison's work brought about legal reforms, a greater understanding of farm conditions for animals and increased public awareness. Animal Machines is reprinted here in its entirety, accompanied by new chapters by world-renowned experts in animal welfare discussing the legacy and impact of Animal Machines 50 years on.

Can Animals and Machines be Persons?

Can Animals and Machines be Persons? PDF Author: Justin Leiber
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 9780872200029
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
"Written in a lively and entertaining style, this little book, which deals with topics such as 'personhood,' animal rights, and artificial intelligence . . . makes some rather difficult philosophical points clear in an unpedantic fashion." -- M E Winston, Trenton State College

Humans, Animals, Machines

Humans, Animals, Machines PDF Author: Glen A. Mazis
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791475560
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Examines the overlap and blurring of boundaries among humans, animals, and machines.

God, Human, Animal, Machine

God, Human, Animal, Machine PDF Author: Meghan O'Gieblyn
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0525562710
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
A strikingly original exploration of what it might mean to be authentically human in the age of artificial intelligence, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Interior States. • "At times personal, at times philosophical, with a bracing mixture of openness and skepticism, it speaks thoughtfully and articulately to the most crucial issues awaiting our future." —Phillip Lopate “[A] truly fantastic book.”—Ezra Klein For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes's division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking. Meghan O'Gieblyn tackles this challenge with philosophical rigor, intellectual reach, essayistic verve, refreshing originality, and an ironic sense of contradiction. She draws deeply and sometimes humorously from her own personal experience as a formerly religious believer still haunted by questions of faith, and she serves as the best possible guide to navigating the territory we are all entering.

The Animal as a Machine and a Prime Motor :

The Animal as a Machine and a Prime Motor : PDF Author: Robert Henry Thurston
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783337610838
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description


Ways of Being

Ways of Being PDF Author: James Bridle
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374601127
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle’s Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence—plant, animal, human, artificial—and how they transform our understanding of humans’ place in the cosmos. What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans or shared with other beings— beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in “artificial” intelligence. But rather than a friend or companion, AI increasingly appears to be something stranger than we ever imagined, an alien invention that threatens to decenter and supplant us. At the same time, we’re only just becoming aware of the other intelligences that have been with us all along, even if we’ve failed to recognize or acknowledge them. These others—the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us—are slowly revealing their complexity, agency, and knowledge, just as the technologies we’ve built to sustain ourselves are threatening to cause their extinction and ours. What can we learn from them, and how can we change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and our politics to live better and more equitably with one another and the nonhuman world? The artist and maverick thinker James Bridle draws on biology and physics, computation, literature, art, and philosophy to answer these unsettling questions. Startling and bold, Ways of Being explores the fascinating, strange, and multitudinous forms of knowing, doing, and being that make up the world, and that are essential for our survival. Includes illustrations

Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov PDF Author: Daniel Todes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195105141
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
Hailed as the "Prince of World Physiology," Ivan Pavlov continues to influence scientists today. His pioneering research on digestion, the brain, and behavior still provides important insights into the minds of animals--including humans--and is an inspiring example of imaginative experimental technique. Pavlov graduated from the theological seminary in his native Ryazan, Russia, in 1869 but almost immediately switched to medicine and enrolled at St. Petersburg University. He became interested in the physiology of circulation and digestion, which led him to the study of conditional and unconditional reflexes. He conducted thousands of experiments with dogs, developing a way to use a dogs salivary glands as a window through which to observe the workings of its brain.Pavlov lived through the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed it. Lenin himself recognized his genius and provided financial backing for his research; the new Soviet government built a research complex dedicated exclusively to his experiments. Pavlov was honored for his contributions to science with the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1904.Oxford Portraits in Science is an ongoing series of scientific biographies for young adults. Written by top scholars and writers, each biography examines the personality of its subject as well as the thought process leading to his or her discoveries. These illustrated biographies combine accessible technical information with compelling personal stories to portray the scientists whose work has shaped our understanding of the natural world.

Bots and Beasts

Bots and Beasts PDF Author: Paul Thagard
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026236588X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
An expert on mind considers how animals and smart machines measure up to human intelligence. Octopuses can open jars to get food, and chimpanzees can plan for the future. An IBM computer named Watson won on Jeopardy! and Alexa knows our favorite songs. But do animals and smart machines really have intelligence comparable to that of humans? In Bots and Beasts, Paul Thagard looks at how computers ("bots") and animals measure up to the minds of people, offering the first systematic comparison of intelligence across machines, animals, and humans. Thagard explains that human intelligence is more than IQ and encompasses such features as problem solving, decision making, and creativity. He uses a checklist of twenty characteristics of human intelligence to evaluate the smartest machines--including Watson, AlphaZero, virtual assistants, and self-driving cars--and the most intelligent animals--including octopuses, dogs, dolphins, bees, and chimpanzees. Neither a romantic enthusiast for nonhuman intelligence nor a skeptical killjoy, Thagard offers a clear assessment. He discusses hotly debated issues about animal intelligence concerning bacterial consciousness, fish pain, and dog jealousy. He evaluates the plausibility of achieving human-level artificial intelligence and considers ethical and policy issues. A full appreciation of human minds reveals that current bots and beasts fall far short of human capabilities.

The Animal that Therefore I Am

The Animal that Therefore I Am PDF Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823227901
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The Animal That Therefore I Am is the long-awaited translation of the complete text of Jacques Derrida's ten-hour address to the 1997 Cérisy conference entitled "The Autobiographical Animal," the third of four such colloquia on his work. The book was assembled posthumously on the basis of two published sections, one written and recorded session, and one informal recorded session. The book is at once an affectionate look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida's work and a profound philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction--dating from Descartes--between man as thinking animal and every other living species. That starts with the very fact of the line of separation drawn between the human and the millions of other species that are reduced to a single "the animal." Derrida finds that distinction, or versions of it, surfacing in thinkers as far apart as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, and he dedicates extended analyses to the question in the work of each of them. The book's autobiographical theme intersects with its philosophical analysis through the figures of looking and nakedness, staged in terms of Derrida's experience when his cat follows him into the bathroom in the morning. In a classic deconstructive reversal, Derrida asks what this animal sees and thinks when it sees this naked man. Yet the experiences of nakedness and shame also lead all the way back into the mythologies of "man's dominion over the beasts" and trace a history of how man has systematically displaced onto the animal his own failings or bêtises. The Animal That Therefore I Am is at times a militant plea and indictment regarding, especially, the modern industrialized treatment of animals. However, Derrida cannot subscribe to a simplistic version of animal rights that fails to follow through, in all its implications, the questions and definitions of "life" to which he returned in much of his later work.