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From: wcalvin@well.UUCP (William Calvin)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: The Emperor's New Mind (Book Review)
Message-ID: <14975@well.UUCP>
Date: 13 Dec 89 12:09:58 GMT
References: <14242@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Lines: 45




Roger Penrose's book THE EMPEROR'S NEW MIND (Oxford UP 1989) was reviewed by
the philosopher Daniel Dennett (he of THE MIND'S I) in the Times Literary
Supplement at the end of September.  I'll quote a bit:
      The idea that a computer could be conscious -- or equivalently,
      that human consciousness is the effect of some complex computation
      mechanically performed by our brains -- strikes some scientists
      and philosophers as beautiful.  They find it initially surprising
      and unsettling, as all beautiful ideas are, but the inevitable
      culmination of the scientific advances that have gradually
      demystified and unified the material world.  The ideologues of
      artificial intelligence (AI) have been its most articulate
      supporters.  To others, this idea is deeply repellent: 
      philistine, reductionistic (in some bad sense), as incredible as
      it is offensive.  John Searle's attack on "strong AI" is the best-
      known expression of this view, but others in the same camp would
      dearly love to see a principled, scientific argument showing that
      strong AI is impossible.  Roger Penrose has set out to provide
      just such an argument.
            It is a huge project.  In order to build his case, Professor
      Penrose must lead his reader through detailed discussions of many
      topics....  Many of these topics have been given excellent popular
      presentations in recent years -- in Hofstadter's Goedel Escher
      Bach (1979), Hawking's A Brief History of Time (1989), Gleick's
      Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) -- but Penrose believes that he
      must go over this material again in his own way, digging deeper,
      explaining in more detail.  The result is bracing reading, to say
      the least, and the topics for hundreds of pages apparently have
      nothing to do with the mind at all.
            The inevitable first impression, then, is that the book is
      the ultimate academic shaggy-dog story, a tale whose fascinating
      digressions outweigh the punch-line by a large factor.....
            What minds can do, Penrose claims, is to see or judge that
      certain mathematical propositions are true by "insight" rather
      than mechanical proof.  And Penrose then goes on to some length to
      argue that there could be no algorithm, or at any rate no
      practical algorithm [like a computer's performance], for insight.
            In the meantime I would say that whether or not the Penrose
      revolution in physics is coming, he has not yet shown the need for
      the revolution in order to explain facts of human cognitive
      competence.
It's quite a long and refreshing book review (headlined " Murmurs in the
Cathedral" for some reason), if you can find the TLS for 29 September 1989.