Just started reading this one. Anyone familiar with it?
I’ll post a review when I’m done.
Hi Smears,
I thought it was a very good book. Part 1 is outstanding but Part 2 was boring for me.
Most people think the book is very good, including many people on this site. OBW offered a contrary opinion – thinking that the book was pretentious. Obviously the professional critics thought it was good as it won a Pulitzer Prize.
My personal copy of the book has been used so much that whole sections of it have fallen out of its bindings. I actually video taped one of the dialogs between Achilles and the tortoise; and a large part of my post Model – Meaning was based on part of the book.
I hope you will enjoy it.
Sincerely - Ed
It’s been a really long time since I read something that wasn’t strictly philosophy. I’m enjoying it alot.
I own it, bought it at 16 finished it before I was 17, thought it was brilliant. Re-read it again when I was 20 and I realized that yeah, it was brilliant, but plenty of the suggestions in the book, the whole theme of the book, is dead-wrong. Like, he goes on about tangled hiearchies within biological systems that don’t exist.
That book is a mind-twister, though. exposing the tangled hiearchy in that tune by Bach, I enjoy bach on more levels than I even thought possible, or at least that song.
I bought it a few years ago, read quite a bit, and then gave up. It got too hard.
The Gödel stuff early on is very good, better than most maths textbooks at that level, I imagine.
Didn’t Roger Penrose use some of the ideas (“Godel’s proposition of incompleteness”) from this book to claim hard AI was impossible due to the non-computability of some neurological functions…?
I was too stupid to really follow the argument in “shadows of the mind” - anyone care to give me a simple “yes-no” version…?
Tab, I’m not sure the exact answer to your question, but I’m interested in the subject you’re talking about. I read some david lewis article called “scriven on human impredictability” where he starts off with what appear to be opinions about whether or not certain things can be predicted,(theoretically of course), and he ends up with a couple pages of symbolic logic. It’s like putting a red hot coat hanger in your ear and burning your brain. I’ll email it to you if you’d like.
Yes please.
jonkoca@hotmail.com
It’s sent. Also, I noticed that I was incorrect about the formal logic part. This one isn’t that bad, but it does have a nasty graph in there someplace.
Thanks - got it, will read it over the weekend.
EDIT: Read it - actually listened to it - read by something with all the charisma of Hawking’s voice-simulator, but cool nontheless.
He seems to say that an essential universal unpredictability in behaviour cannot be proven logically (at least using scriven’s theory) because the final showdown between the predictor and the predicted, assuming both are sentient and mutually aware is recursive, ie. the degree of calculation on both sides dependent on itself as a variable.
It all sounded a bit abstract to me. Fair enough, absolute prediction is impossible - here we stroll happily into the land of quantum and Schrödinger’s equation (describes the probability we will obtain result X from quantum experiment Y) - but still a good fit wavefunction would provide enough predictability to invest resources with a decent cost-benefit ratio.
But essentially I suppose some situations are not-computable to a resoundingly apparant end-point. Our brains have a region - forgets which - that is dedicated to finally ending deadlocks of indecision. Lesioned, the individual becomes unable to make any decision upon which to act - revolving instead through endless possible plans of action and the pros and cons of each.
But I would have thought a fuzzy-logic ‘timekeeper’ sub-function on an aspiring AI, or at least intelligence-simulator, could chuck in a final veto on any recursive calculation to bring it to a conclusion that was ‘good enough’ by some previously ascribed criteria.
But hey. What do I know…?
Thanks again. You sending me stuff is dangerously approaching a habit. Give me a yell if you need any biologic/evolutionary researching done. I owe you a couple.