Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

CHAPTER 42: DEEP ORDER

1. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996; Touchstone paperback, 1998, pages 253–254.

2. Ibid., pages 18–24.

3. Ibid., pages 23–24.

4. John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999, pages 92–119 passim; see also Hafner and Lyon, Op. cit., pages 34, 38, 53, 57.

5. Hafner and Lyon, Op. cit., pages 59 and 65.

6. Ibid., pages 143 and 151–154.

7. Naughton, Op. cit., pages 131–138; Hafner and Lyon, Op. cit., pages 124ff.

8. Hafner and Lyon, Op cit., pages 161ff.

9. Naughton, Op. cit., Chapter 9, pages 140ff. Hafner and Lyon, page 192.

10. Hafner and Lyon, Op. cit., pages 204 and 223— 227.

11. Ibid., pages 245ff

12. Ibid., pages 253 and 257–258.

13. Brian Winston, Media, Technology and Society: a history: from the telegraph to the Internet, London: Routledge, 1998.

14. See Lauren Ruth Wiener, Digital Woes, New York: Addison-Wesley, 1993 for a discussion of the pros and cons of the computer culture.

15. Michael White and John Gribbin, Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science, New York and London: Viking 1992; Penguin 1992, pages 223–231. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, London: Bantam, 1988.

16. White and Gribbin, Op. cit., page 227–229.

17. Ibid., pages 245 and 264ff.

18. Ibid., pages 60–61.

19. Paul Davies, The Mind of God, London: Simon & Schuster, 1992, Penguin 1993, pages 63ff; White and Gribbin, Op. cit., pages 149–151 and 209–213.

20. White and Gribbin, Op. cit., pages 137–138.

21. Ibid., pages 154–155.

22. Feynman himself published several highly popular science/philosophy books. See for example: The Meaning of It All, London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1998, especially chapter three, ‘This Unscientific Age’; see also White and Gribbin, Op. cit., pages 176ff.

23. White and Gribbin, Op. cit., pages 179 and 182–183.

24. Joel Davis, Alternate Realities: How Science Shapes Our View of the World, Op. cit., pages 159–162.

25. White and Gribbin, Op. cit., pages 208 and 274–275.

26. John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996; Broadway paperback, 1997, pages 7, 30–31, 126–127, 154. Some of these issues were first aired in what became a cult book published in 1979, Godei, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid (New York: Basic Books). Hofstadter started from a conceptual similarity he observed in the work of the mathematician, artist and musician for whom his book is named. This similarity arises, according to Hofstadter, because in certain fugues of Bach, and in paintings and drawings by Escher, where the rules of harmony or perspective, as the case may be, are followed, these works yet break out of the rules. In Escher’s art, for example, although no violence is done to perspective, water appears to flow up hill, and even in an impossible circle, or people going up and down the same stairs follow steps that bring them back together again, in other words they too are following an impossible circle. For Hofstadter, the paradoxes in these formal systems (ie, ones that follow a set of rules) were important, conceptually linking mathematics, biology and philosophy in ways that, he believed, would one day help explain life and intelligence. He followed Monod in believing that we could only understand life by understanding how a phenomenon transcended the rules of its existence. One of Hofstadter’s aims was to argue that if artificial intelligence was ever to develop, this aspect of formal systems had to be clarified. Was Godei right in claiming that a formal system cannot provide grounds for proving that system? And did that imply we can never wholly understand ourselves? Or is there something fundamentally flawed about Gödel’s idea? Godei, Escher, Bach is an idiosyncratic book, to which no summary can do justice. It is full of drawings and visual illusions, by Escher, René Magritte and the author, mathematical puzzles with a serious intent, musical notation and chemical diagrams. Though rewarding, and despite its author’s relentlessly chatty tone, it is not an easy read. The book contains a marvellous annotated bibliography, introducing many important works in the field of artificial intelligence.

27. White and Gribbin, Op. cit., pages 292–301.

28. See also: Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999; White and Gribbin, Op. cit., pages 216–217.

29. David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality, London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1997; Penguin paperback, 1998, pages 1–29 for an introduction; see also: Horgan, Op. cit., pages 222–223; and: P. C. W. Davies and J. Brown (editors), Superstrings: A Theory of Everything?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pages 1–5.

30. Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, London: Jonathan Cape, 1998, pages 174–176.

31. Apart from the works already quoted, see: Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All, New York: Addison Wesley Longman; London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1998; Paul Davies, The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning, New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 1992; Penguin paperback, 1993; Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice?, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989; Penguin paperback, 1990; Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Note the somewhat ambitious flavour of the tides.

32. Greene, Op. cit., passim.

33. Ibid., pages 10–13. See also: Davies and Brown, Op. cit., pages 26–29.

34. Greene, Op. cit., pages 136–137.

35. Davies and Brown, Op. cit., page 90, for an interview with Witten, and pages 170–191 for interviews with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow. See also: Greene, Op cit., pages 140–141.

36. Greene, Op. cit., pages 187ff.

37. Ibid., pages 329–331.

38. Ibid., page 362.

39. Ibid., page 379.

40. James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, New York: Penguin, 1987.

41. Horgan, Op. cit., pages 193–194.

42. George Johnson, Strange Beauty, London: Jonathan Cape, 1999. See also: Horgan, Op. cit., pages 211–215.

43. Horgan, Op. cit., pages 203–206 and 208.

44. Philip Anderson, ‘More is different,’ Science, August 4, 1972, page 393. Quoted in Horgan, Op. cit., pages 209–210.

45. Ian Stewart, Life’s Other Secret, New York: Wiley, 1998; Penguin paperback, 1999.

46. Stewart, Op. cit., page xiii. A certain amount of revisionism has set in with regard to computers and mathematics. See, for example: P.J. R. Millican and A. Clark (editors), Machines and Thought: The Legacy of Alan Turing, volume 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Though David Deutsch, in The Fabric of Reality, Op. cit., page 354, considers the Turing principle a fundamental of nature.

47. Ibid., page 22.

48. Ibid., page 66.

49. Ibid., pages 89–90.

50. See: Blay Whitby, ‘The Turing Test: AI’s Biggest Blind Alley?’, in Millican and Clark (editors). Op cit., pages 53ff; See also: Stewart, Op. cit., pages 95ff.

51. Stewart, Op. cit., pages 96ff.

52. Ibid., page 162.

53. Ibid.

54. See: Joseph Ford, ‘Chaos: Past, Present, and Future’, in Millican and Clark (editors), Op. cit., who takes the opposite view. ‘… order is totally dull; chaos is truly fascinating’ – page 259. ‘… in essence evolution is controlled chaos’ – page 260. In this book, Clark Glymour also considers whether there are ‘orders of order’ – page 278ff See also: Stewart, Op. cit., page 245.