{"id":328,"date":"2010-09-27T19:36:15","date_gmt":"2010-09-28T02:36:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdhive.org\/glob\/?p=328"},"modified":"2010-09-27T19:36:15","modified_gmt":"2010-09-28T02:36:15","slug":"book-report-the-minds-i-by-hofstadter-and-dennett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/?p=328","title":{"rendered":"Book report: &#8220;The Mind&#8217;s I&#8221; by Hofstadter and Dennett"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The nature of the thing called &#8220;I&#8221; is something I frequently ponder. It&#8217;s an important question to me as someone interested in uploading, artificial intelligence and immortality in general. For these reasons I&#8217;m always eager to tackle a philosophy book on the subject of the nature of consciousness.<\/p>\n<p>This one is a collection of essays and excerpts from other works, followed by comments and analyses by Hofstadter and Dennett. Since publication, I&#8217;m given to understand that some of the essays have been soundly criticized by others in the field, but that doesn&#8217;t apply to all of them, and they still make an interesting read.<\/p>\n<p>There are some insightful stabs in various directions, some nice thought experiments, and some decent arguments that minds like ours do not necessarily have to be implemented in meat.There&#8217;s also an entertaining dialog with God by Raymond Smullyan that gesticulates at my feelings on determinism versus free will, perhaps better than I can.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t really gain any deeper insight into the core question of consciousness though. What I really gained from reading this is an appreciation that philosophers tend to pick a direction of argument and run with it a ways, and collectively they&#8217;re sketching out a big circle around the problem. In other words, there&#8217;s a lot of collective tail-chasing going on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The nature of the thing called &#8220;I&#8221; is something I frequently ponder. It&#8217;s an important question to me as someone interested in uploading, artificial intelligence and immortality in general. For these reasons I&#8217;m always eager to tackle a philosophy book on the subject of the nature of consciousness. This one is a collection of essays [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}