This is the first book-length presentation and defense of a new theory of human and machine cognition, according to which human persons are superminds . Superminds are capable of processing information not only at and below the level of Turing machines (standard computers), but above that level (the "Turing Limit"), as information processing devices that have not yet been (and perhaps can never be) built, but have been mathematically specified; these devices are known as super -Turing machines or hypercomputers. Superminds, as explained herein, also have properties no machine, whether above or below the Turing Limit, can have. The present book is the third and pivotal volume in Bringsjord's supermind quartet; the first two books were What Robots Can and Can't Be (Kluwer) and AI and Literary Creativity (Lawrence Erlbaum). The final chapter of this book offers eight prescriptions for the concrete practice of AI and cognitive science in light of the fact that we are superminds.

From the reviews:

"This book is part of a series that aims at exploring all kinds of knowledge, information and data processing systems. It is especially interesting because it deals with the often sharply discussed question of the relation of 'human' and 'Artificial Intelligence'. This book and the whole series will cause a lot of discussions, and this will make the book very interesting. A very interesting book that can be recommended to everybody who is interested in the relation between human mind and computer intelligence." (Christian Posthoff, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1046 (21), 2004)

Inhalt
1 What is Supermentalism.- 1.1 Computationalism is Dead.- 1.2 Are We Serious.- 1.3 What is Dead? Propositional Answer.- 1.4 The Centrality and Logic of Personhood and Cognition in the Present Project.- 1.5 The Turing Test.- 1.6 Pictorial Overview of Supermentalism.- 1.7 Propositional Overview of Supermentalism.- 1.8 A Primer on Hypercomputation.- 1.9 An Alternative Characterization of Supermentalism.- 1.10 Classifying Supermachines/Superminds.- 1.11 Previewing What's To Come.- 2 A Refutation of Penrose's Gödelian Case.- 2.1 Introduction.- 2.2 The Main Positions on AI.- 2.3 Why Weak AI is Invulnerable.- 2.4 Background for Penrose's New Gödelian Case.- 2.5 The Core Diagonal Argument.- 2.6 Formal Machinery.- 2.7 Formalizing Penrose's Diagonal Argument.- 2.8 Penrose's Dilemma: Either Way a Fallacy.- 2.9 Possible Replies.- 2.10 Given G, The Other Possibilities.- 2.11 Penrose's Last Chance.- 2.12 Conclusion; The Future.- 2.13 Distilling Penrose's Promising Intuitions.- 3 The Argument from Infinitary Reasoning.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.2 Discarding Some Initial Objections.- 3.3 The Need for Open-Mindedness.- 3.4 Plan of the Chapter.- 3.5 Reasoning as Computation in First-Order Logic.- 3.6 Sharpening Infinitary Reasoning.- 3.7 The Argument from Infinitary Reasoning.- 3.8 Dialectic.- 3.9 Simon's Dream and Mental Metalogic.- 3.10 Mental MetaLogic: A Glimpse.- 4 Supermentalism and the Fall of Church's Thesis.- 4.1 Background.- 4.2 Mendelson's Attack.- 4.3 Mendelson's Rebuttal.- 4.4 Attacking Church's Thesis.- 4.5 Objections.- 4.6 Our Arg3 in Context: Other Attacks on CT.- 5 The Zombie Attack on Computationalism.- 5.1 Introduction.- 5.2 Dennett's Dilemma.- 5.3 Targeting Computationalism.- 5.4 Can Dennett Dodge His Dilemma.- 5.5 Two Final Moves.-5.6 Conclusion.- 6 The Argument from Irreversibility.- 6.1 Introduction.- 6.2 The Computational Conception of Mind.- 6.3 Rudiments of Reversibility.- 6.4 The Argument from Irreversibility.- 6.5 Dialectic.- 7 What are We? Where'd We Come From.- 7.1 What, at Bottom, Are We.- 7.2 Perhaps Superminds are Simple Souls.- 7.3 How'd We Get Here.- 7.4 Toward the Second Argument for Doubting that Evolution Produced Us.- 8 Supermentalism and the Practice of AI.- 8.1 Toward the Final Stage of the Project.- 8.2 The Eight-fold Prescription for the Practice of AI.- 8.3 P1: Building Consciously Harnessable Hypercomputers is Hard, but Push Ahead Anyway.- 8.4 P2: Focus on Building Artificial Animals (Zombanimals).- 8.5 P3: Pursue What We have Dubbed Psychometric AI.- 8.6 P4: Take Experimental Psychology of Reasoning Seriously.- 8.7 P5: Be Brutally Honest about the Limitations of Standard Schemes for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.- 8.8 P6: Investigate Language Acquisition.- 8.9 P7: Pursue the Mathematical Modeling of Mentation, Independent of Even Future Implementation.- 8.10 P8: Put Connectionism in its Place.