Genesis Redux

[Dave Monroe]

Riskin, Jessica, ed.  Genesis Redux:
   Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life.
   Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007.

Since antiquity, philosophers and engineers have tried to take life's
measure by reproducing it. Aiming to reenact Creation, at least in
part, these experimenters have hoped to understand the links between
body and spirit, matter and mind, mechanism and consciousness. Genesis
Redux examines moments from this centuries-long experimental
tradition: efforts to simulate life in machinery, to synthesize life
out of material parts, and to understand living beings by comparison
with inanimate mechanisms.

Jessica Riskin collects seventeen essays from distinguished scholars
in several fields. These studies offer an unexpected and far-reaching
result: attempts to create artificial life have rarely been driven by
an impulse to reduce life and mind to machinery.  On the contrary,
designers of synthetic creatures have generally assumed a role for
something nonmechanical. The history of artificial life is thus also a
history of theories of soul and intellect.

Taking a historical approach to a modern quandary, Genesis Redux is
essential reading for historians and philosophers of science and
technology, scientists and engineers working in artificial life and
intelligence, and anyone engaged in evaluating these world-changing
projects.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 Introduction: The Sistine Gap
Jessica Riskin

One Connections
2 The Imitation of Life in Ancient Greek Philosophy
Sylvia Berryman
3 The Devil as Automaton: Giovanni Fontana and the Meanings of a
Fifteenth-Century Machine
Anthony Grafton
4 Infinite Gesture: Automata and the Emotions in Descartes and Shakespeare
Scott Maisano
5 Abstracting from the Soul: The Mechanics of Locomotion
Dennis des Chene
6 The Anatomy of Artificial Life: An Eighteenth-Century Perspective
Joan B. Landes

Two Emergence
7 The Homunculus and the Mandrake: Art Aiding Nature versus Art Faking Nature
William R. Newman
8 Sex Ratio Theory, Ancient and Modern: An Eighteenth-Century Debate
about Intelligent Design and the Development of Models in Evolutionary
Biology
Elliott Sober
9 The Gender of Automata in Victorian Britain
M. Norton Wise
10 Techno-Humanism: Requiem for the Cyborg
Timothy Lenoir
11 Nanobots and Nanotubes: Two Alternative Biomimetic Paradigms of
Nanotechnology
Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent
12 Creating Insight: Gestalt Theory and the Early Computer
David Bates

Three Interactions
13 Perpetual Devotion: A Sixteenth-Century Machine That Prays
Elizabeth King
14 Motions and Passions: Music-Playing Women Automata and the Culture
of Affect in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany
Adelheid Voskuhl
15 An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater
Stefan Helmreich
16 Booting Up Baby
Evelyn Fox Keller
17 Body Language: Lessons from the Near-Human
Justine Cassell

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/217887.ctl

And recall ...

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/01/riskinprofile1024.html
http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0202&msg=65223

Thanks, John ...

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/DefecatingDuck.pdf
http://www.wbez.org/audio_library/od_radec03.asp
http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0505&msg=96119

Thanks, Ya Sam ...

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0203&msg=65454
http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0203&msg=65450
http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0405&msg=90787
http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0605&msg=101277