A mixed bag dominated by H & D's reductionist nonsense. This is a follow up to Hofstadter´s famous (or infamous as I would now say, considering its unrelenting nonsense) Godel, Escher, Bach (1980). Like its predecessor, it is concerned largely with the foundations of artificial intelligence, but it is composed mostly of stories, essays and extracts from a wide range of people, with a few essays by DH and DD and comments to all of the contributions by one or the other of them. For my views on the attempts of D and H to understand behavior see my review of D's " I am a Strange Loop. " Much of it is very reductionistic in tone (i.e., " explains " everything in terms of physics/math and denies " reality " of psychology) but as Hofstadter notes, the quantum field equations of a water molecule are too complex to solve (and so is a vacuum)and nobody has a clue about how to explain the way properties emerge(e.g., water properties from H2 and 02) as you go up the scale from the vacuum to the brain, so reductionism, like holism, requires a great deal of faith and in fact is incoherent as one cannot even frame it's arguments without presupposing the coherence of higher order thought. Additional problems for reductionism are the uncertainty principle, chaos (e.g., no way to predict how a pile of sand will fall) and the logically necessary incompleteness of math (and all thought). In sum, though there are many interesting comments, like nearly all writing on behavior this work lacks any coherent account of the logical structure of rationality which I give in my more recent writings. Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my article The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language as Revealed in Wittgenstein and Searle 59p(2016). For all my articles on Wittgenstein and Searle see my e-book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Wittgenstein and Searle 367p (2016). Those interested in all my writings in their most recent versions may consult my e-book Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 662p (2016). All of my papers and books have now been published in revised versions both in ebooks and in printed books. Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071HVC7YP. The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle--Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071P1RP1B. Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711R5LGX Suicide by Democracy: an Obituary for America and the World (2018) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQVWV9C

What can Kurt Godel a mathematician, M.C. Escher a graphic artist and Johann Sebastian Bach the famous composer have in common? Intending to write an essay about Godel's theorem, Hofstadter gradually expanded to include Bach and Escher until finally he realized that the works of these men were in essence "shadows cast in different directions by some central theme". The book tries to reconstruct this central theme.

A mixed bag dominated by H & D's reductionist nonsense. This is a follow-up to Hofstadter´s famous (or infamous as I would now say, considering its unrelenting nonsense) Godel, Escher, Bach (1980). Like its predecessor, it is concerned largely with the foundations of artificial intelligence, but it is composed mostly of stories, essays and extracts from a wide range of people, with a few essays by DH and DD and comments to all of the contributions by one or the other of them. For my views on the attempts of D and H to understand behavior see my review of Hofstadter's ‘I am a Strange Loop’ and other writings. Much of it is very reductionistic in tone (i.e., " explains " everything in terms of physics/math and denies " reality " of psychology) but as Hofstadter notes, the quantum field equations of a water molecule are too complex to solve (and so is a vacuum)and nobody has a clue about how to explain the way properties emerge (e.g., water properties from H2 and 02) as you go up the scale from the vacuum to the brain, so reductionism, like holism, requires a great deal of faith and in fact is incoherent as one cannot even frame it's arguments without presupposing the coherence of higher order thought. Additional problems for reductionism are the uncertainty principle, chaos (e.g., no way to predict how a pile of sand will fall), the logically necessary incompleteness of math (and all thought) and the impossibility of matching higher order behaviors (e.g., language) with lower order phenomena (e.g., biochemistry), i.e., the combinatorial explosion or underdetermination. In sum, though there are many interesting comments, like nearly all writing on behavior, this work lacks any coherent account of the logical structure of rationality, which I try to give in my writings. Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019) ,The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019)

Although figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Gottfried Leibniz are admired for their multiple expertise and their contributions for multiple domains of human endeavor, the phenomenon of polymathy, which traditionally means wide-ranging knowledge, is still surprisingly underexplored in the literature. Despite having received wider attention in the popular domain in the last few years, polymathy as a field of scientific study is still in the early stages of development, with researchers calling for more studies in the area (e.g., Shavinina, 2013; Sriraman, 2009). At present, researchers studying this topic come from backgrounds as diverse as psychology, physiology, mathematics, management and education. Although incipient, the extant studies can already demonstrate the importance of polymathy as a concept that can help enhance our understanding of human diversity and of the elements that underlie one of the most human of traits: creativity. This article presents an overview of the contributions of six contemporary scholarly authors to the understanding of the phenomenon of polymathy. The criterion to choose the authors included in this article was the existence of publications in academic outlets focusing on the concept of polymathy itself (and not, for instance, on the biographies of specific polymaths).

The existence of a non-algorithmic side of the mind, conjectured by Penrose on the basis of G\"odel's first incompleteness theorem, is investigated here in terms of a quantum metalanguage. We suggest that, besides human ordinary thought, which can be formalized in a computable, logical language, there is another important kind of human thought, which is Turing-non-computable. This is methatought, the process of thinking about ordinary thought. Metathought can be formalized as a metalanguage, which speaks about and controls the logical language of ordinary thought. Ordinary thought has two computational modes, the quantum mode and the classical mode, the latter deriving from decoherence of the former. In order to control the logical language of the quantum mode, one needs to introduce a quantum metalanguage, which in turn requires a quantum version of Tarski Convention T.

Before remarking on “The New Science of the Mind”, I first offer some comments on philosophy and its relationship to contemporary psychological research as exemplified in the works of Searle (S), Wittgenstein (W), Hacker (H) et al. It will help to see my reviews of PNC (Philosophy in a New Century), TLP, PI, OC, Making the Social World (MSW) and other books by and about these geniuses, who provide a clear description of higher order behavior, not found in psychology nor philosophy, that I will refer to as the WS framework. As with so many philosophy books, we might stop with the title. As the quotes and comments above and in my other reviews and the books they cover indicate, there are compelling reasons for regarding the problems we face in describing the psychology of higher order thought as conceptual and not scientific. This ought to be crystal clear to all, but science envy and almost complete oblivion to WSH etc. is a la mode! But as H notes above, the issues discussed here are all about language games and have nothing to do with science. In fact, as usual, if one translates into plain English there is very little of interest here, and certainly nothing not said before and better by WS etc. countless times since the 30’s (see e.g., The Blue and Brown Books from 1933-35). It is not surprising that he makes no significant references to any of the above books or persons (the only reference to S is an article from 1958!), though in my view they are at the top of the list of the major figures in descriptive psychology. On p119 he tells us that the key to all this is to figure out how “…a personal level cognitive process can belong to a representational subject. This is the task of the second half of the book.” But W did this 80 years ago and since we have the beautifully clear explanations of WSH, H&M etc., there is no point to torturing oneself with the rather aimless and opaque prose that veers off at the end into Sartre, Heidegger, Husserl, and Frege, with a dash of postmodernist word salad for good measure. A valiant effort on an interesting topic, but ultimately exhausting and fruitless. Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my article The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language as Revealed in Wittgenstein and Searle 59p(2016). For all my articles on Wittgenstein and Searle see my e-book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Wittgenstein and Searle 367p (2016). Those interested in all my writings in their most recent versions may consult my e-book Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 662p (2016). All of my papers and books have now been published in revised versions both in ebooks and in printed books. Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071HVC7YP. The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle--Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071P1RP1B. Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711R5LGX Suicide by Democracy: an Obituary for America and the World (2018) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQVWV9C

Central in this thesis is the project of ‘historical cognitive science,’ as described and pursued by John Sutton. Throughout his work, Sutton has provided both exemplars of this project and made remarks about its aims and the rationale behind it. In this thesis I want to provide my own contribution to this project. I will do this by first discussing the nature and aims of ‘historical cognitive science’ as envisioned by Sutton and afterwards providing two studies which were envisioned as exercises in historical cognitive science. In the first chapter I will give an outline and discussion of Sutton’s own descriptions of what the project of ‘historical cognitive science’ amounts to. This will provide the background for the two following chapters. In chapter two I will discuss Robert Hooke’s “universal cure of the mind,” in which books are invoked as an aid to the memory. I will argue that there is a strong structural similarity between the way Hooke conceptualises the role of these aids and Clark & Chalmers theory of the “extended mind”. Chapter three focuses on the notion of brain plasticity. I will discuss two historical figures in which (brain) plasticity is invoked in a context of self-reformation, namely René Descartes and Denis Diderot. In both cases, the combination of plasticity with the notion of self-reformation or self-discipline will lead to a conceptual separation of the self from the plastic material being reformed. In the last chapter I will provide a further analysis of the cases discussed in chapter 2 and 3. More specifically, I will look at the implications of the structural similarities between Hooke and Clark & Chalmers. With regards to Descartes, I will use Foucault’s genealogical work to point out the entanglement of psychological practice and theory in the works of Descartes discussed in chapter 3, an entanglement which is also referred to by Sutton.

This prize-winning book attempts to address the major issues that have challenged western philosophy, such as consciousness, thinking and conceptual systems, like mathematics as a model of reality. The mystery is why this book became an international best-seller because it can only be understood by experts. The author, Douglas Hofstadter, is a polymath, who started as a physicist but could not resist the lure of logic and theories about arithmetic, as he immersed himself in the early days of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). This review will attempt to create a shortcut of a shortcut to minimize frustration.