The word “automaton” comes from the Latinization of the ancient Greek word αὐτόματος, which describes something that has its own spontaneous movement. It typically refers to machines that mimic the figure and movements of an animate being. Not surprisingly, the antiquity of these terms matches that of the devices to which they refer.
In both the East and the West, there is a long history of mechanisms imitating animals, men and even gods. At first rather rustic and mostly promissory, such as those detailed by Hero of Alexandria in his treatise on automata, they became more sophisticated over time, culminating in the celebrated mechanisms designed and constructed by Pierre Jaquet-Droz in the second half of the 18th century. Also worth mentioning is the famous Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing machine with a human operator hidden under a complex mechanism. As Clarke's third law has been warning for more than half a century, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But beyond the futuristic projection, the question remains: for how many witnesses and spectators of the ancient automata –like the medieval talking heads– were these indistinguishable from magic?
Currently, the boundaries between disciplines such as neuroscience, the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences are dynamic and sometimes blurry. Some are more based on physiological findings and others on phenomenology or experimental psychology. In any case, great advances have been made in brain mapping and in the understanding of the physico-chemistry of neuronal functioning and the neuropsychic mechanisms associated with behavior. Yet, for the time being, these disciplines, neither separately nor together, can produce anything more advanced than hypothetical models of what the mind or consciousness would be in its ultimate reality. Connectionist materialisms, emergentisms and non-Cartesian dualisms quarrel with other prevailing currents over the interpretation of the established partial facts about the processes of knowledge that result in that human capacity called intelligence. This discussion touches on such significant questions as the role of imagination and common sense, the foundational aspects of language, abstraction and its relationship with rational constructs such as truth, good and beauty. In addition, even if some agreement can be reached over a sophisticated definition of intelligence as a provisional working-title, its decoding will be different in a setting influenced by analytical schools of philosophy and their epistemology as theory of knowledge and beliefs, than in one influenced by continental hermeneutics and a philosophy of science grounded in metaphysically based gnoseologies.
