56 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
56 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
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The following review of "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden
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Braid," Douglas R. Hofstadter, New York: Basic Books, appeared in
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"Fusion", Magazine of the Fusion Energy Foundation, Oct. 1979, pp. 61.
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"Douglas Hofstadter, author of "Godel, Escher, Bach," has not had
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such a vaired experience with the antiscience movement as Bateson
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[Bateson, Gregory, "Mind and Nature--A Necessary Unity", preceding
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review in Fusion], but his brief career, nevertheless, is a clue to
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the message of his book.
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Hofstadter is a computer expert in the field of artificial
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intelligence. This dismal discipline, which emanates from the
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Bertrand Russell-Karl Korsch networks, has been used primarily to
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develop brainwashing programs. Hofstadter claims to be part of his
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network through his close association with Marvin Minsky who, in
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turn, works closely with linguistician Noam Chomsky at the
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Politically these "artificial
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intelligence" academics link up to the Bateson circles through the
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various radical groups they mutually support.
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Artificial intelligence is as nasty a discipline as its use in
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brainwashing implies. It is based on the premise that the operations
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of the human mind are essentially compatible with formal Aristotelian
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logic and thus can be replicated by a sufficiently complex computer.
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......
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Douglas Hofstadter's interminable driveling (777 pages) reiterates
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Bateson's point from the perspective on an attack on Kurt Godel's
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1931 proof that any system determined by a fixed lawfulness
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(axiomatic login) is necessarily incomplete, hence incapable of
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solving problems that can be posed within its limits. The obvious
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conclusion to be reached from this proof is that there is a higher
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order of lawfulness (reason) that determines successive,
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reason-determined locally lawful systems. The British oligarchy
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never forgave Godel for this insight, which negate Bertrand Russell's
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attempted destruction of Georg Cantor's introduction of the concept
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of the transfinite into mathematics.
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Hofstadter simultaneously slanders Godel and the musical genius
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Johann Sebasian Bach--whose recognition of the same principle in
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musical composition made Beethoven's subsequent breakthroughs
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possible--by lumping them with the psychotic Dutch draftsman M.C.
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Escher.
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The paradoxes of formal logic, Hofstadter contends--for example,
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Epimenides's statement that all Cretans are liars--are really Zen
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koans. There is nothing new here that the eastern mystics and their
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systematized irrationality did not discover in bygone millennia. In
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fact, he says, the solution is to imbed simple axiomatic systems in
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more complex ones in regress. Once this is accomplished, presto,
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mind and the universe can be programmed into a computer.
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(Reviewed by: John Schoonover)
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