Author: Douglas R Hofstadter
Daniel C Dennett/
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1981
Language: English
Pages: 501
ISBN/UPC (if available): 014006253X
Description
What is the mind?
Who am I?
Can machines think?
Anyone who confronts these questions runs headlong into perplexities. We conceived this book as an attempt to reveal those perplexities and make them vivid, This book, then, is designed to provoke, disturb and befuddle its readers, to make the obvious strange and, perhaps, to make the strange obvious-The Authors.
Here is their selection of strange thought-experiments, mind-stretching fantasies and humorous dialogues all designed to entice and tease the imagination into new and unexpected places. Like Godel, Escher, Bach, it is an extraordinary combination of science and art that will instruct and delight for years to come.
Is the soul, as Hofstadter asks, combining two puns with a spoonerism, greater than the hum of its parts? If this ancient and dark metaphysical mystery has ever troubled you, buy this superb collection, with its equally wondrous commentaries.
-Martin Gardner, author of Mathematical Circus
Contents
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
I. A SENSE OF SELF
Borges and I
Jorge Luis Borges
On Having No Head
D E Harding
Rediscovering the Mind
Harold J Morowitz
II. SOUL SEARCHING
Computing Machinery and Intelligence
A M Turning
The Turing Test: A Coffeehouse Conversation
Douglas R Hofstadter
The Princess Ineffabelle
Stanislaw Lem
The Soul of Martha, a Beast
Terrel Miedaner
The Soul of the Mark III Beast
Terrel Miedaner
Spirit
Allen Wheelis
Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes
Richard Dawkins
Prelude...Ant Fugure
Douglas R Hofstadter
The Story of a Brain
Arnold Zuboff
IV. MIND AS PROGRAM
Where Am I?
Daniel C Dennett
Where Was I?
David Hawley Sanford
Beyond Rejection
Justin Leiber
Software
Rudy Rucker
The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution
Christopher Cherniak
V. CREATED SELVES AND FREE WILL
The Seventh Sally or How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good
Stanislaw Lem
Non Serviam
Stanislaw Lem
Is God a Taoist?
Raymond M Smullyan
The Circular Ruins
Jorge Luis Borges
Minds, Brains, and Programs
John R Searle
An Unfortunate Dualist
Raymond M Smullyan
VI. THE INNER EYE
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Thomas Nagel
An Epistemological Nightmare
Raymond M Smullyan
A Conversation with Einstein's Brain
Douglas R Hofstadter
Fiction Robert Nozick
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Index