CHASING THE ENTERPRISE:
ACHIEVING STAR TREK'S
VISION OF THE HUMAN FUTURE
When Gene Roddenberry conceived Star Trek, he imagined a future very different from what was typically put forth in science fiction - a future where humanity has overcome greed, bigotry, misogyny, materialism, conflict and war.Star Trek's fans embraced that vision. But many consider it unattainable, if admirable, even those who wrote and produced Star Trek after Roddenberry. Is Star Trek's vision of the human future achievable? Can humanity overcome its darkest impulses and attain a new level of social cooperation and progress? The answer, per "Chasing the Enterprise", is Yes - we can do it, because the evidence of our Paleolithic past says we already have...
A CONVERSATION WITH HOFSTADTER'S BRAIN
The Tortoise and Achilles, of Gödel Escher Bach fame, meet to discuss the ideas of their creator Douglas Hofstadter - specifically, his concept of "strange loops," fragments of shared consciousness that accumulate to form the "I" in each of us. The two carry out their animated dialog in the context of Borges' Library of Babel - the Library of Possible Books - positing the ultimate strange loop repository: the Community of All Possible Minds. Along the way, they encounter Searle's Chinese Room, Nagel's bats, and HAL 9000, propagating a stimulating exchange that raises as many new questions as it attempts to answer. A must for any fan of any of the above.
DOUGLAS, DANIEL, JOHN:
AN INFERNAL CHINESE ROOM
These essays, culled from the author's lengthier volume, The Children of Babel, explore some of the inherent aspects of consciousness that might one day be embodied in artificial intelligence."Douglas, Daniel, John: An Infernal Chinese Room" revisits John Searle's famous thought experiment, as well as the reply of Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett (among others), 40 years on and in light of technology that has since emerged; "What Is It Like to Be Batman?" presents a new spin on Thomas Nagel's famous essay concerning the mind-body problem; and "Analogica: This and That and Strange Loops, Too" considers Hofstadter's more recent contributions to the nature of consciousness.Together, these pieces (and several others) form a profile of the study of consciousness today, against the backdrop of recent progress in AI and machine learning - with some provocative implications about whether truly conscious machines might be waiting in the near future.
