Genesis redux [[electronic resource] ] : essays in the history and philosophy of artificial life / / edited by Jessica Riskin

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910456835903321
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 2007
• ISBN: 1-282-53748-2; 9786612537486; 0-226-72083-7
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (408 p.)
• Classificazione: ST 300
• Altri autori (Persone): RiskinJessica
• Disciplina: 113/.8
• Soggetti: Artificial life; Electronic books.
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- List of Contributors -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction: The Sistine Gap -- 2. The Imitation of Life in Ancient Greek Philosophy -- 3. The Devil as Automaton: Giovanni Fontana and the Meanings of a Fifteenth-Century Machine -- 4. Infinite Gesture: Automata and the Emotions in Descartes and Shakespeare -- 5. Abstracting from the Soul: The Mechanics of Locomotion -- 6. The Anatomy of Artificial Life: An Eighteenth-Century Perspective -- 7. The Homunculus and the Mandrake: Art Aiding Nature versus Art Faking Nature -- 8. Sex Ratio Theory, Ancient and Modern: An Eighteenth- Century Debate about Intelligent Design and the Development of Models in Evolutionary Biology -- 9. The Gender of Automata in Victorian Britain -- 10. Techno-Humanism: Requiem for the Cyborg -- 11. Nanobots and Nanotubes: Two Alternative Biomimetic Paradigms of Nanotechnology -- 12. Creating Insight: Gestalt Theory and the Early Computer -- 13. Perpetual Devotion: A Sixteenth-Century Machine That Prays -- 14. Motions and Passions: Music-Playing Women Automata and the Culture of Affect in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany -- 15. An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater -- 16. Booting Up Baby -- 17. Body Language: Lessons from the Near-Human -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: 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 i