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Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology 58042nd Edition

by Valentino Braitenberg (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 66 ratings
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These imaginative thought experiments are the inventions of one of the world's eminent brain researchers.

These imaginative thought experiments are the inventions of one of the world's eminent brain researchers. They are "vehicles," a series of hypothetical, self-operating machines that exhibit increasingly intricate if not always successful or civilized "behavior." Each of the vehicles in the series incorporates the essential features of all the earlier models and along the way they come to embody aggression, love, logic, manifestations of foresight, concept formation, creative thinking, personality, and free will. In a section of extensive biological notes, Braitenberg locates many elements of his fantasy in current brain research.

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  1. ISBN-10
    0262521121
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0262521123
  3. Edition
    58042nd
  4. Publisher
    Bradford Books
  5. Publication date
    February 7, 1986
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    5.28 x 0.47 x 8.02 inches
  8. Print length
    168 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

The small and cheerful book at hand, by a well-known researcher on the brain from Tübingen, has exploited the virtues of the style with unprecedented consistency, originality and aptness. His thought experiments are not analytic efforts to extract what principles lie behind an imagined observation but are instead synthetic constructions. They are little toys of the mind, devised out of simple if fictional components, entirely functionally described...[A] crisp, cogent book full of intellectual delights.—Philip Morrison, Scientific American—

About the Author

Valentino Braitenberg was a director of the Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics and Honorary Professor of Information Science at the University of Tübingen, Germany.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bradford Books; 58042nd edition (February 7, 1986)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 168 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0262521121
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262521123
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.28 x 0.47 x 8.02 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 66 ratings

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Valentino Braitenberg

Valentino Braitenberg

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Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
66 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Antfriend
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book on the spectrum and functional elements of autonomous robotics
Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2011
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Technology agnostic, the principles described could be implemented in your preferred development language or even in entirely analog, transistor driven circuits. But this isn't a how-to book, well, maybe it is, but it is funny and brilliant and great just to read.
I've built many robots, which would fall into the book's early chapters in terms of complexity of autonomous behavior. I bought this to learn about methods for advanced autonomous behavior. And this book delivers on that goal, but it is also so much more! The first chapter is so concise and lovely, it is almost poetic. The humor and creativity remind me of Stanislaw Lem. The rich, elegant, density and brevity remind me of The Old Man and the sea. This book covers the workings of autonomous robotics for the novice to the advanced roboticist, but it is also sophisticated literature for anyone. The author is actually a Neurologist!
4 people found this helpful
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Dr. Croom
5.0 out of 5 stars Building is Easy; Deconstruction is Hard
Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2001
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Braitenburg could not be more obvious in the subtext of this book. His message is that synthesis is always easier than analysis. Creating something that, on the surface, acts complex is easier than analyzing what, on the surface, looks like a complex system. If we see X, what do we assume are the mechanisms behind what will happen next? The clarity with which the author illustrates the assumptive traps in which we can fall is not only wonderfully insightful, but cautionary. Add this reading to the writings of Braitenberg's contemperary James Gleik ("Chaos") and one can get the AHA! experience that speaks to the richness of simple rules creating bafflingly sophisticated behaviors. "Vehicles" is an amazing book, and in my opinion, one of those that rate up there with those works that not only focus our experience, but are true to it, and take us beyond it. I smack my forehead with my palm, and thank him that he makes it so easy.
9 people found this helpful
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AJP
5.0 out of 5 stars an oldie but goodie
Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2018
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I remember this from the first edition maybe 40 years ago. It's a purposely-oversimplified, step-by-step explanation of behavior, starting from a simple, single, on/off switch. Very entertaining. At least the first half of the book is entertaining. The second half is just some sample doodles of "vehicles."
Loved it the first time, and loved (secretly rereading) then giving to an computer nerd friend.
3 people found this helpful
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J. Shaevitz
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2017
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A cute book that describes a series of thought experiments looking into our interpretation of simple automata.
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M. Schippling
5.0 out of 5 stars a classic
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2013
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This is a wonderful set of thought experiments leading the reader thorough the process of building a seemingly intelligent little car out of simple sensors and logic elements. However many if not all of the experiments are just-so sorts of things that depend on (sometimes) hidden variables like the exact time delays between the elements. I suspect that it would be somewhat more difficult to build real-world examples of many of them.

Still, it's an excellent book for getting your brain in gear.
One person found this helpful
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Ryan Davis
5.0 out of 5 stars Reads like a Ph
Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2017
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Very well thought out, so the concepts and explanations are all remarkably lucid for this type of material. Reads like a Ph.D. thesis, but if Ph.D. theses were actually readable by everyone else. The only trouble I had with Vehicles was that there were fewer crazy machine illustrations, eg: the cover; but that's not a real complaint. Highly recommended!
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A. J. Sutter
3.0 out of 5 stars Psychology without minds
Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2017
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This book is a charming set of thought experiments about behaviors and the motives we impute to them. In the first part of the book, the late author (VB) describes how one might construct 14 different mobile automata that would exhibit behaviors of escalating complexity. In the latter part of the book, he describes the biological systems that inspired each of these automata. VB was a true cyberneticist in Wiener’s original spirit: seeking after the common principles of systems, be they biological or artificial, that do things on their own. And quite unlike many scientists who dismiss philosophy as vague nonsense, VB continually reflects on the philosophical implications of his creations.

Yet despite VB’s defense of philosophy and frequent recourse to it, I felt nonetheless that the book has an excessively reductionist streak. The formula “uphill analysis and downhill synthesis” is repeated often: here uphill and downhill refer to ease of doing something. VB is suggesting that it’s easier to build something that exhibits certain organism-like behaviors (synthesis) than to figure out what structures and circuits cause those behaviors in the organism (analysis). He seems to infer from this, though, that nothing more than this behavioristic approach is needed to explain consciousness.

E.g., in Vehicle 12 he likens the automaton’s behavior to a logistic map, an example of deterministic chaos (albeit without using this terminology). He then claims that this vehicle exhibits free will, because an observer isn’t able to predict its behavior. Anticipating a philosophical objection that this isn’t really free will even though it may look like it, VB replies:

“[W]hoever made animals and men may have been satisfied, like myself, a creator of vehicles, with something that for all intents and purposes looks like free will to anyone who deals with his creatures. This at least rules out the possibility of petty exploitation of individuals by means of observation and prediction of their behavior. Furthermore, the individuals themselves will be unable to predict quite what happens in their brains in the next moment. No doubt this will add to their pride, and they will derive from this the feeling that their actions are without causal determination. [@69].”

This response, and the entire vehicle program, seem not to account for internal experience. Even if I can't see your inner life, where does my inner mental life come from? Is it reasonable for an individual to assume that no one but himself or herself has such an inner life, i.e. that he or she is uniquely situated among humans? Another objection is that inner experience for each of us generally doesn’t consist in making predictions about what our brains will do, but rather to consider what *we* will do.

Question also whether free will and unpredictability are really the same. We often associate free will not only with simple actions like moving our limbs, but with actions based on moral and ethical principles that we feel we have freely chosen. In that context, my own feeling of free will might be tied to my ability to predict that in certain range of circumstances I will behave in a consistent manner. Suppose I continually find myself in situations where I am being offered bribes, or money in exchange for betraying someone: it certainly wouldn’t be a source of pride if I felt my actions in those circumstances were unpredictable from one moment to the next. I don’t mean here to analyze the free will/determinism controversy in all its glory, much less to resolve it: but simply to suggest that it’s treated too glibly in this book, as is the book’s inherent behaviorism.

Braitenberg vehicles realized as actual devices seem like good way to promote discussion about these more philosophical topics, especially in a college classroom. But the book neither describes physical realizations of vehicles, nor treats the philosophy in more than a summary way. Despite the author’s obvious imagination and wit, I was more disappointed with this clever book than I’d expected.
7 people found this helpful
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nikhil
5.0 out of 5 stars amazing read
Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2012
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It is an epitome of "how a complex idea can be conveyed with the most ease". I read this book as my mentor suggested me once and have become a big fan of it ever since. The first thing I did after reading this book was to go to google and search for other books by Braitenberg, the author. A must read by every scientist. The concept of "uphill analysis, downhill invention" is fabulously amazing and thought provoking!
2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Um exercício delicioso
Reviewed in Spain on September 20, 2021
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Apesar de agora, provavelmente, estar parcialmente ultrapassado no que refere aos conhecimentos em neurociência, o exercício metal e o rigor do pensamento do autor continuam deliciosos, e foi, para mim, inesperada a possibilidade de "sintetização" plausível das condições psicológicas da Vida.
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Vahid Bokharaie
5.0 out of 5 stars A truly ingenous book by one of the greatest neurosceintists who has ever lived.
Reviewed in Germany on March 12, 2021
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If you want to read only one book about neuroscience, read this one. Written by one of the based neuroscientists who has ever lived, present a series of thought experiments. The basic idea is that we can have systems built on simples rules that can have extremely complicated behaviours, to the extent that you might see behaviours resembling love, hate, and even planned decisions.
One person found this helpful
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Dr Alan Hearsum
5.0 out of 5 stars Lost
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 26, 2017
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Cant remember reading this book
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S. McGillivray
5.0 out of 5 stars A fun one for anyone interested in logic
Reviewed in Canada on March 2, 2015
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I have two copies! Fun book. Really makes me think about my pets and if they have emotions or are some pre-wired circuit simply responding to stimuli.
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CHAIRI KIOURT
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 28, 2016
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Good book
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