What swanky things are you reading?

[Ghoulish Delight]

Well, having finally finished reading Goedel, Escher, Bach (yeah it took like 8 months. In my defense I did read several other books long the way, but mostly I'm slow and it's a dense book), I wanted to stay in the realm of discussing AI/human though. I considered picking up a collection of writings by the same author, but a quick glance showed that, while updated by a few decades, it covered the same basic themes and would probably be pretty repetative.

So instead I grabbed The Cambridge Quintet by John Casti. It's a work of what he calls "scientific fiction." It's in the style of Plato's Symposium. It's an account of an imagined dinner party attended by very real scientists, mathemeticians, philosophers. A "what would happen if..." The 5 players are C.P. Snow (physcist who worked to unite the humanities and the sciences), J.B.S. Holdane (genetecist), Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosopher who within his lifetime fathered 2 completely conflicting philosophies regarding human thought), Alan Turing (father of computing as we know it and a pioneer in the theoretical side of AI), and Erwin Schrödinger (yes, that Schrödinger).

It's short, at seems to not probe particularly deeply, especially considering the thurough dismantling of many of these concepts I just got through with GEB. But it is entertaining so far.