Stan Franklin is the perfect tour guide through the contemporary interdisciplinary matrix of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, artificial neural networks, artificial life, and robotics that is producing a new paradigm of mind.

Along the way, Franklin makes the case for a perspective that rejects a rigid distinction between mind and non-mind in favor of a continuum from less to more mind, and for the role of mind as a control structure with the essential task of choosing the next action. Selected stops include the best of the work in these different fields, with the key concepts and results explained in just enough detail to allow readers to decide for themselves why the work is significant.

Major attractions include animal minds, Newell's SOAR, the three Artificial Intelligence debates, Holland's genetic algorithms, Wilson's Animat, Brooks' subsumption architecture, Jackson's pandemonium architecture, Ornstein's multimind, Minsky's society of mind, Maes's behavior networks, Edelman's neural Darwinism, Drescher's schema mechanisms, Kanerva's sparse distributed memory, Hofstadter and Mitchell's Copycat, and Agre and Chapman's deictic representations.