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A passionate, highly accessible clarion call to a world dangerously
threatened by irrational superstitions of all kinds. 'Truly a book
for our time' Steven Pinker 'In Sweden's public square, Christer
Sturmark has done as much as anyone to uphold reason and humane
critical thinking' Richard Dawkins 'As lucid and illuminating as it
is warm and inspiring' Rebecca Goldstein In country after country,
conspiracy theories and religious dogmas that once seemed to have
been overtaken by enlightened thought are helping to lift
authoritarian leaders into power. The effects are being felt by
women, ethnic minorities, teachers, scientists and students - and
by the environment, the ultimate victim of climate change denial.
We need clear thinking now more than ever. Christer Sturmark is a
crusading secular humanist as well as a Swedish publisher and
entrepreneur, and The Flame of Reason is his manifesto for a better
world. It provides a set of simple tools for clear thinking in the
face of populist dogmas, anti-science attitudes and
pseudo-philosophy, and suggestions for how we can move towards a
new enlightenment. From truth to Quantum Physics, moral philosophy
to the Myers-Briggs test, Sturmark offers a passionate defence of
rational thought, science, tolerance and pluralism; a warm and
engaging guide for anyone who wants to better navigate the modern
world. Translated by and co-written with Douglas Hofstadter,
celebrated cognitive scientist, physicist and author of Godel,
Escher, Bach.
A passionate, highly accessible clarion call to a world dangerously
threatened by irrational superstitions of all kinds. 'Truly a book
for our time' Steven Pinker 'In Sweden's public square, Christer
Sturmark has done as much as anyone to uphold reason and humane
critical thinking' Richard Dawkins 'As lucid and illuminating as it
is warm and inspiring' Rebecca Goldstein In country after country,
conspiracy theories and religious dogmas that once seemed to have
been overtaken by enlightened thought are helping to lift
authoritarian leaders into power. The effects are being felt by
women, ethnic minorities, teachers, scientists and students - and
by the environment, the ultimate victim of climate change denial.
We need clear thinking now more than ever. Christer Sturmark is a
crusading secular humanist as well as a Swedish publisher and
entrepreneur, and The Flame of Reason is his manifesto for a better
world. It provides a set of simple tools for clear thinking in the
face of populist dogmas, anti-science attitudes and
pseudo-philosophy, and suggestions for how we can move towards a
new enlightenment. From truth to Quantum Physics, moral philosophy
to the Myers-Briggs test, Sturmark offers a passionate defence of
rational thought, science, tolerance and pluralism; a warm and
engaging guide for anyone who wants to better navigate the modern
world. Translated by and co-written with Douglas Hofstadter,
celebrated cognitive scientist, physicist and author of Godel,
Escher, Bach.
One of our greatest philosophers and scientists of the mind asks,
where does the self come from -- and how our selves can exist in
the minds of others. Can thought arise out of matter? Can self,
soul, consciousness, "I" arise out of mere matter? If it cannot,
then how can you or I be here? I Am a Strange Loop argues that the
key to understanding selves and consciousness is the "strange
loop"-a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our
brains. The most central and complex symbol in your brain is the
one called "I." The "I" is the nexus in our brain, one of many
symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the
paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the
reverse. How can a mysterious abstraction be real-or is our "I"
merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over
the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by
the laws of physics? These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a
Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter's first book-length journey into
philosophy since Goedel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and
endlessly thought-provoking, this is a moving and profound inquiry
into the nature of mind.
To Light the Flame of Reason is all about the art of clear
thinking, an art that is needed now more than ever in the world we
now live in. Written for anyone who wants to navigate better in
this world filled with populist dogmas, anti-science attitudes, and
pseudo-philosophy, authors Christer Sturmark and Douglas Hofstadter
provide a set of simple tools for clear thinking, as well as a
deeper understanding of science, truth, naturalism, and morality.
It also offers insights into the rampant problems of extremism and
fundamentalism - and suggestions for how the world can move towards
a new enlightenment. The book argues that we need to reawaken the
basic values and ideals that defined the original age of
enlightenment. We need to accept the idea that the world we inhabit
is part of nature, and that it has no trace of supernatural or
magical forces. Ethical questions should be detached from religion.
This doesn't mean that the questions become any easier - just that
ideas are tested and judged without being profoundly tainted and
constrained by religious dogmas. Such a form of secular humanism
builds on the power of free thought - the power to investigate and
understand the natural world. Although not everything can be
investigated or understood, the sincere quest for knowledge and
understanding establishes a flexible, nondogmatic attitude toward
the world. Curiosity and openness lie at the core of such an
attitude. The scientific method of careful and open- minded
testing, as well as science's creative and reflective ways of
thinking, provides key tools. What clear, science-inspired thinking
helps us to understand, among many other things, is that a person
can be good and can be motivated to carry out morally good actions
without ever bowing to, or being limited by, supposedly divine
forces. To Light the Flame of Reason will appeal to adults who are
trying to figure out how to deal with the ever-increasing daily
bombardment of conflicting messages about what is right, true,
sensible, or good, and it should appeal even more to teenagers and
university students who are struggling to find a believable and
reliable philosophy of life that can help guide them in their
choices of what and whom to trust, and how to act, both on the
personal and the social level. Today, more people have greater
access to information and knowledge than ever was dreamt of before,
and more people are concerned about the world situation. More
people have the chance, through their own actions, to make a
difference. Each one of us, as an individual, matters. It is thus
vitally important that each of us should choose, in a conscious and
reflective manner, our own views of reality, of the world, and of
humanity. And this means that it is crucial for us all to train
ourselves in the art of thinking clearly. Christer Sturmark along
with Pulizer Prize winning author Douglas Hofstdter argue that we
must refocus our efforts on cultivting a secular society, and in
doing so, we will rediscover the values and ethics that are so
foreign in today's society.
Hofstadter's bestselling collection of brilliant and quirky essays
has been reissued to coincide with the paperback release of Fluid
Concepts and Creative Analogies. "Reading Metamagical Themas is
perhaps the closest thing imaginable to taking a voyage through a
mind".--San Francisco Chronicle. 124 line drawings.
From some of the 20th century's greatest thinkers, this work
contains essays on topics as diverse as artificial intelligence,
evolution, science fiction, philosophy, reductionism, and
consciousness. With contributions from Jorge Luis Borges, Richard
Dawkins, John Searle, and Robert Nozick, The Mind's I explores the
meaning of self and consciousness through the perspectives of
literature, artificial intelligence, psychology, and other
disciplines. In selections that range from fiction to scientific
speculations about thinking machines, artificial intelligence, and
the nature of the brain, Hofstadter and Dennett present a variety
of conflicting visions of the self and the soul as explored through
the writings of some of the 20th century's most renowned thinkers.
"Analogy is the core of all thinking."
This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist
Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been
grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over thirty
years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making
complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a
highly novel perspective on cognition.
We are constantly faced with a swirling and intermingling multitude
of ill-defined situations. Our brain's job is to try to make sense
of this unpredictable, swarming chaos of stimuli. How does it do
so? The ceaseless hail of input triggers analogies galore, helping
us to pinpoint the essence of what is going on. Often this means
the spontaneous evocation of words, sometimes idioms, sometimes the
triggering of nameless, long-buried memories.
Why did two-year-old Camille proudly exclaim, "I undressed the
banana "? Why do people who hear a story often blurt out, "Exactly
the same thing happened to me " when it was a completely different
event? How do we recognize an aggressive driver from a split-second
glance in our rearview mirror? What in a friend's remark triggers
the offhand reply, "That's just sour grapes"? What did Albert
Einstein see that made him suspect that light consists of particles
when a century of research had driven the final nail in the coffin
of that long-dead idea?
The answer to all these questions, of course, is
"analogy-making"--the meat and potatoes, the heart and soul, the
fuel and fire, the gist and the crux, the lifeblood and the
wellsprings of thought. Analogy-making, far from happening at rare
intervals, occurs at all moments, defining thinking from top to
toe, from the tiniest and most fleeting thoughts to the most
creative scientific insights.
Like "Godel, Escher, Bach" before it, "Surfaces and Essences" will
profoundly enrich our understanding of our own minds. By plunging
the reader into an extraordinary variety of colorful situations
involving language, thought, and memory, by revealing bit by bit
the constantly churning cognitive mechanisms normally completely
hidden from view, and by discovering in them one central, invariant
core--the incessant, unconscious quest for strong analogical links
to past experiences--this book puts forth a radical and deeply
surprising new vision of the act of thinking.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The official book behind the Academy
Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict
Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley It is only a slight exaggeration to
say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved
the Allies from the Nazis, invented the computer and artificial
intelligence, and anticipated gay liberation by decades--all before
his suicide at age forty-one. This New York Times-bestselling
biography of the founder of computer science, with a new preface by
the author that addresses Turing's royal pardon in 2013, is the
definitive account of an extraordinary mind and life. Capturing
both the inner and outer drama of Turing's life, Andrew Hodges
tells how Turing's revolutionary idea of 1936--the concept of a
universal machine--laid the foundation for the modern computer and
how Turing brought the idea to practical realization in 1945 with
his electronic design. The book also tells how this work was
directly related to Turing's leading role in breaking the German
Enigma ciphers during World War II, a scientific triumph that was
critical to Allied victory in the Atlantic. At the same time, this
is the tragic account of a man who, despite his wartime service,
was eventually arrested, stripped of his security clearance, and
forced to undergo a humiliating treatment program--all for trying
to live honestly in a society that defined homosexuality as a
crime. The inspiration for a major motion picture starring Benedict
Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, Alan Turing: The Enigma is a
gripping story of mathematics, computers, cryptography, and
homosexual persecution.
Butterfly in the Quantum World by Indu Satija, with contributions
by Douglas Hofstadter, is the first book ever to tell the story of
the "Hofstadter butterfly", a beautiful and fascinating graph lying
at the heart of the quantum theory of matter. The butterfly came
out of a simple-sounding question: What happens if you immerse a
crystal in a magnetic field? What energies can the electrons take
on? From 1930 onwards, physicists struggled to answer this
question, until 1974, when graduate student Douglas Hofstadter
discovered that the answer was a graph consisting of nothing but
copies of itself nested down infinitely many times. This wild
mathematical object caught the physics world totally by surprise,
and it continues to mesmerize physicists and mathematicians today.
The butterfly plot is intimately related to many other important
phenomena in number theory and physics, including Apollonian
gaskets, the Foucault pendulum, quasicrystals, the quantum Hall
effect, and many more. Its story reflects the magic, the mystery,
and the simplicity of the laws of nature, and Indu Satija, in a
wonderfully personal style, relates this story, enriching it with a
vast number of lively historical anecdotes, many photographs,
beautiful visual images, and even poems, making her book a great
feast, for the eyes, for the mind and for the soul.
Martin Gardner, the "Mathematical Games" columnist for Scientific
American from 1956 to 1981, was also a philosopher, polymath,
magician, religious thinker, and the author of more than 70 books,
including The Annotated Alice, The Ambidextrous Universe, and
Visitors from Oz. Here his life and works are celebrated in a
bouquet of essays about him or in his honor. Introduced by his son
Jim, the book includes reminiscences by Douglas Hofstadter, Morton
N. Cohen, Scott Kim, David Singmaster, Michael Patrick Hearn, and
many others; a festschrift contains essays by such writers as
Raymond Smullyan and Robin Wilson. This volume also contains the
final annotations Gardner made to the Alice books post-"Definitive
Edition," and a definitive bibliography of his Carroll-related
writings. While put together under the aegis of the Lewis Carroll
Society of North America, it takes a far broader look at this
remarkable man and his many interests and accomplishments.
Since 1977, Hofstadter, the author of Godel, Escher, Bach, and his
students have been developing computer models of discovery,
creation, and analogical thought. What has emerged is a
sophisticated and unorthodox vision of the mind in which
perception, at an abstract level, is the key: perception of
situations, of patterns, of patterns among patterns. This book
conveys this bold vision to a broad public. Illustrations.
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Artificial Music - DNA #13 (Paperback)
Detlef Diederichsen, Arno Raffeiner; Text written by Laura Aha, Douglas Hofstadter, George E. Lewis
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R322
R267
Discovery Miles 2 670
Save R55 (17%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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That Mad Ache - A Novel (Paperback)
Douglas Hofstadter, Francoise Sagan; Translated by Douglas Hofstadter, Francoise Sagan
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R693
Discovery Miles 6 930
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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That Mad Ache , set in high-society Paris in the mid-1960's,
recounts the emotional battle unleashed in the heart of Lucile, a
sensitive but rootless young woman who finds herself caught between
her carefree, tranquil love for 50-year-old Charles, a gentle,
reflective, and well-off businessman, and her sudden wild passion
for 30-year-old Antoine, a hot-blooded, impulsive, and struggling
editor. As Lucile explores these two versions of love, she
vacillates in confusion, but in the end she must choose, and her
heart's instinct is surprising and poignant. Originally published
under the title La Chamade , this new translation by Douglas
Hofstadter returns a forgotten classic to English. In Translator,
Trader , Douglas Hofstadter reflects on his personal act of
devotion in rewriting Françoise Sagan's novel La Chamade
in English, and on the paradoxes that constantly plague any
literary translator on all scales, ranging from the humblest of
commas to entire chapters. Flatly rejecting the common wisdom that
translators are inevitably traitors, Hofstadter proposes instead
that translators are traders, and that translation, like musical
performance, deserves high respect as a creative act. In his view,
literary translation is the art of making subtle trades in which
one sometimes loses and sometimes gains, often both losing and
gaining at the same time. This view implies that there is no reason
a translation cannot be as good as the original work, and that the
result inevitably bears the stamp of the translator, much as a
musical performance inevitably bears the stamp of its artists. Both
a companion to the beloved Sagan novel and a singular meditation on
translation, Translator, Trader is a witty and intimate exploration
of words, ideas, communication, creation, and faithfulness.
Inspired by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and Bertrand
Russell and David Hilbert's pursuit of the fundamental rules of
mathematics, some of the most brilliant minds of the generation
came together in post-World War I Vienna to present the latest
theories in mathematics, science, and philosophy and to build a
strong foundation for scientific investigation. Composed of such
luminaries as Kurt Goedel and Rudolf Carnap, and stimulated by the
works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, the Vienna Circle
left an indelible mark on science. Exact Thinking in Demented Times
tells the often outrageous, sometimes tragic, and never boring
stories of the men who transformed scientific thought. A revealing
work of history, this landmark book pays tribute to those who dared
to reinvent knowledge from the ground up.
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