Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Further Reading 473er Reading 473The explicitly antireductionistic sentiment has been put forward vehemently by aninternational group whose most outspoken member is the novelist and philosopher ArthurKoestler. Together with J.R. Smythies, he has edited a volume called BeyondReductionism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) and has stated his own position eloquently inJanus: A Summing Up (New York: Vintage, 1979), particularly the chapter entitled "FreeWill in a Hierarchic Context."join tjoin The quotations in the Reflections on "Prelude, Ant Fugue" are from Richard D.Mattuck, A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-Body Problem (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1976), and Inside the Brain (New York: Mentor, 1980), by William H.Calvin and George A. Ojemann. Aaron Sloman, who was probably the first persontrained as a philosopher to he field of artificial intelligence, is the author of TheComputer Revolution in Philosophy (Brighton, England: Harvester, 1979). Like manyrevolutionary manifestos, Sloman's book vacillates between declaring victory, declaringthat victory is inevitable, and exhorting the reader to a difficult and uncertain campaign.Sloman's vision of the accomplishments and prospects of the movement is rose-tinted,but insightful. Other landmark work on systems of knowledge representation can befound in Lee W. Gregg, ed., Knowledge and Cognition (New York: Academic Press,1974); Daniel G. Bobrow and Allan Collins, eds., Representation and Understanding(New York: Academic Press, 1975); Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson, Scripts,Plans, Goals and Understanding (Hillsdale, NJ.: Erlbaum, 1977); Nicholas V. Findler,ed., Foundations of Semantic Networks (New York: Academic Press); Donald A.Norman and David Rumelhart, eds. Explorations in Cognition (San Francisco: W. H.Freeman, 1975); Patrick Henry Winston, The Psychology of Computer Vision (NewYork: McGraw-Hill, 1975); and the other books and articles on artificial intelligencementioned in this chapter.The strategy of speaking figuratively of homunculi, little people in the brain whose jointactivity composes the activity of a single mind, is explored in detail in Daniel C.Dennett's Brainstorms (Montgomery, Vt.: Bradford Books, 1978). An early article in thisvein was F. Attneave's "In Defense of Homunculi," in W. Rosenblith, ed., SensoryCommunication,(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960, pp. 777-782). William Lycan advances the cause ofhomunculi in "Form, Function, and Feel," in the Journal of Philosophy (vol. 78, (1),1981, pp. 24-50). See also Ronald deSousa's "Rational Homunculi" in Rorty's The Identities of Persons.Disembodied brains have long been a favorite philosophical fantasy.In his Meditations (1641), Descartes presents the famous thought experiment of the evil demon or evil genius. "How do I know," he asks himselfin effect, "that I am not being tricked by an infinitely powerful evil demon