The biggest intellectual nothing burger of the last century?

By -
Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach contained some interesting musings on recursion, computation, self-reference, and so on. But of course is main "oomph" was that it was going to use all of these musings to explain consciousness. And the explanation?

"This is it -- this is what consciousness is. Consciousness is that property of a system that arises whenever there exists symbols in the system which obey triggering patterns somewhat like the ones described in the past several sections" (385).

Can you imagine someone in a real science, one that makes real discoveries, offering an "explanation" like that?

"Planets just are those celestial objects that move in the sky in that funny way."

"Atoms just are those things that cause chemicals to form in the patterns they do."

"Evolution just is the process of new species coming into being."

Such a phony would be laughed right out of the scientific community.

In a real science.





Comments

  1. Ken B4:17 PM

    My prof in proof theory and advanced logic forbade me to read that book.

    ReplyDelete
  2. BZ12:52 AM

    Hi gene. Are you making anymore posts?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more