Nonfiction Review: The Emperor’s New Mind, by Roger Penrose (1989)
There are some books so good that they’re worth reading even if you disagree with them. This is one of them.
Most of the book is dedicated to a tour de force through computing, mathematics, and physics. The book is intended to be read by laymen, though sometimes the “simplifications” seem to make things more complicated at first. I read every word, but I think I only understood around twenty percent of the book, and most of that was things I already knew.
Of course, I actually agree with Penrose’s main argument, but I know (and Penrose readily admits) it’s quite controversial. The argument? It is that theorems such as the Halting Problem and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem prevent a strong AI from ever being created, or, in short, that brains are not computers.
Penrose’s specific argument relies on a kind of mathematical Platonism, again, a controversial view. I’m not sure if I agree with the existence of numbers as some kinds of eternal, uncreated things. Did God create the integers, or are integers an aspect of God? Certainly mortal conceptions of logical systems are flawed, as shown by Godel’s incompleteness theorem. But from God’s perspective, knowing through Omniscience all true logical propositions, is He seeing the Creator or Creation?
The form of objective reduction of Quantum Mechanics that Penrose proposes does not actually rely on observer effects, which is relieving. Penrose has a point that a world requiring conscious beings to collapse waveforms is absurd in that most of the universe does not actually exist. This does bring the question of how free will interacts with the world, but Penrose does not claim to explain everything in Heaven and Earth, but only that the emperors of Strong AI are naked.
The Taste for Realism
I have seen, and admittedly indulged in that fan activity I will call the Fact Checking Game. It goes like this: First, you take some work of fiction, particularly a popular one, and you find some fascinating idea or claim it has. Then you deconstruct it with real world logic, checking all the facts and invariably coming up with an unrealistic or at least implausible conclusion. At this point, bemoaning that the creator did not think of this may commence. As a sequel, you can find some plausible counterpoint, and argue with the proponents of the former conclusion until the cows come home.
This is not, in itself, a bad thing.
Philosophical Diversity in Fiction
No, this is not a post about the culture war. Chill.
This post is about writing other cultures such that they are believable–not as middle-class Westerners wearing funny hats, but as fundamentally different worlds.
On Gratuitous Rape
This is not a happy-go-lucky post. If this subject matter disturbs you, I suggest reading something else, or perhaps waiting a few days–I plan to blog more frequently in the future.
The taste of the modern public has been, as of late, for dark and “gritty” fiction. Whether or not said fiction actually is is a subject for someone else’s post, but consider: The Hunger Games. Game of Thrones. The Malazan Book of the Fallen. The Witcher. Actually, I could rattle off a whole list of popular, dark, fiction, and invariably most of them are going to contain rape.
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