The nature and plausibility of mind-brain reductionism depends upon the underlying account of reduction adopted. There have been at least four distinct stages in the development of mind-brain reductionism over its first half-century, and only two of these stages made any real use of actual neuroscientific discoveries. This chapter briefly articulates each stage in the development of mind-brain reductionism. It explores to what extent proponents at that stage appealed explicitly to then current neuroscience in order to defend the truth of mind-brain reductionism and to what extent did the neuroscience of the time affect the account that philosophical reductionists adopted of what reduction is. The initial stage of mind-brain reductionism rested on mid-twentieth-century philosophy's emphasis on linguistic analysis and on a view of contingent identity that are no longer prominent. By the mid 1990s consciousness had made a serious comeback in both philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences.

This chapter reviews the history of artificial intelligence (AI) and its major subfields, and illustrates AI as a science and as a technology. Critics of AI from psychology sometimes view AI programs as being psychologically implausible. The chapter explains some dimensions in designing AI agents as well as describes some issues in putting multiple capabilities into an AI agent. It discusses the problems of the measurement of intelligence in AIs. When measuring the intelligence of human beings, the test need not have questions representing every kind of intelligent thing a person could do. Rather, the test result measures the general intelligence of the test taker. A lesson from the history of AI is that cognitive tasks that seem difficult for humans to solve are relatively easy to make programs solve, and those cognitive tasks that are apparently easy for humans to address are extraordinarily difficult to make computers solve.