Eschewing research in favor of literature and Freud, Gelernter delivers a personal, reasonable, nonscientific analysis of...
Everyone agrees that computers do not employ reason; they compute. This harmony dissolves when the discussion turns to the future, where vastly more powerful machines will develop sentience and feelings—or not.
In this dense but imaginative meditation on how humans think, Gelernter (Computer Science/Yale Univ.; America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture and Ushered in the Obamacrats, 2012, etc.) marshals philosophers, poets, and authors (J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K provides one illuminating exploration), but few scientists, in support of his mildly quirky view of human consciousness. According to the author, the mind is a “room with a view” that combines inner thoughts with events in the outside world. He downplays the popular view that thought relates to the brain as software relates to hardware, maintaining that the mind is never in a steady state. All thought processes—e.g., memory, emotion, reason, and self-reflection—vary along a spectrum that depends on one’s physical state and the time of day. At the top, where the computer analogy works, focus is intense, reason rules, and memory is subordinate: a source of data. Focus, but not memory, dims as the mind moves down-spectrum to fatigue, drowsiness, and finally sleep. Along the way, memory takes over, but it’s pliable human memory, not hard-wired silicon. Perception becomes unreliable; we dream. “Up-spectrum, the mind pursues meaning by using logic,” writes the author. “Moving down-spectrum, it tends to pursue meaning by inventing stories—as we do when we dream. A logical argument and a story are two ways of putting fragments in proper relationship and guessing where the whole sequence leads and how it gets there.”
Eschewing research in favor of literature and Freud, Gelernter delivers a personal, reasonable, nonscientific analysis of the mind.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-87140-380-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
A scientific argument that foresees the evolution of computer intelligence into an equivalent of God is likely to be greeted with skepticism by the majority of readers, and those who wade through this densely argued text are likely to emerge more puzzled than enlightened. Tipler (Mathematical Physics/Tulane) offers a cosmological theory he calls the Omega Point, based on the expansion of intelligent life to fill the known universe. Since the distances between habitable planets are so great, only spacegoing computers can ever hope to colonize the universe, he argues. The constant increase of computer intelligence will allow future computers not only to equal human accomplishments, but to recreate in exact detail all human beings who have ever lived. Tipler's insistence on calling this recreation a ``resurrection'' seems to be overstating his case. Similarly, a universal computer intelligence may be the sort of deity suitable to science fiction, but not one that many church-goers would find satisfactory. As tests of his theory, Tipler makes several predictions, one of which, involving the mass of the top quark, is in agreement with recently obtained experimental data, but most of which the average reader has no way to evaluate. He devotes the concluding chapters to consideration of such traditional theological questions as the problem of evil, the nature of heaven and hell, and a comparison of the Omega Point theory to the views of the world's great religions. An ``Appendix for Scientists'' provides more rigorous presentation of his arguments for those capable of following advanced mathematics. Tipler is wrestling with issues of enormous importance, but in the end his answers seem highly idiosyncratic and unlikely either to convert the skeptics or to satisfy the religious. (20 line drawings) (Quality Paperback Book Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 5, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-46798-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
A book that describes what kangaroos do and offers unusually beautiful pictures of them doing it. One old male bending forward while scratching his back looks like nothing else found in nature- -except maybe a curmudgeonly old baseball manager with arthritis in the late innings of another losing game (in fact, baseball players would appear to be the only animals who scratch themselves as much as kangaroos do—bellies, underarms, Iwago captures every permutation of scratching). At other times, they look preternaturally graceful and serene. Some of Iwago's (Mitsuaki Iwago's Whales, not reviewed) photographic compositions flirt with anthropomorphism and slyly play to our urge to see ourselves in the animals. But kangaroos are so singular that there's always something about the cant of a head or the drape of a limb that makes you think you flatter yourself that there is any kinship. They remain wondrously different.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8118-0785-1
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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