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While culling my books, I came across various efforts from Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. Having lost interest in wasting time on their reductionist polemic, I placed them in the 'garage sale' pile. That pile, incidentally, being another embarrassing level down from the $1 clearance section of Half Price Books.
I still flipped through them, as with all my books, to see if there was anything that would make them worthy of retention. In the process, I came across a curious demonstration of intellectual hubris in a book called "The Mind's I" co-authored by Hofstadter and Dennett. Chapter four is an abridged reproduction of Alan Turing's prescient 1950 paper entitled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," with Hofstadter's and Dennett's "Reflections" afterward. First of all, Alan Turing was an authentic genius who left most "bright" persons murmuring in his wake. His genius was not a collection of misguided ruminations; it actually produced innovative and useful results, such as the electromechanical machine that was used to crack the German Enigma code in World War II. Hofstadter and Dennett are a couple of intelligent guys who spout some interesting philosophy if you prefer to think we're all an accident, but nothing of any practical use has come from their "reflections on self and soul." While correctly observing that Turing's article was "remarkable and lucid," these two stubborn bumblers couldn't resist their obsession with materialism, and felt compelled to comment on Turing's argument from extrasensory perception. Not content to simply disagree, they implied that Turing could possibly have been sharing an inside joke with his academic friends, as of course no reasonable intellectual could possibly consider anything real which doesn't yield to the five senses. They go on to observe that if the common constituents of extrasensory perception were found to actually exist, the result would not be a mere alteration to the laws of physics, but would instead require a major modification to "our" scientific world view. These self-imagined Einsteins then generated this sentence: "How could the science that had worked so well for so many things turn out to be so wrong?" The shoddy logic in their reasoning is evident; they are masters of exclusionary thinking, like the rest of the wishful babblers who believe that the entity known as God will one day become a handy traditional joke around future offices populated by sentient robots. |