Douglas Hofstadter je oceňovaný mysliteľ, ktorého dielo sa ponára do hlbín vedomia, myslenia a kreativity. Pomocou rekurzie a analógií skúma prepletenú povahu matematiky, umenia a mysle. Jeho literárny štýl je známy svojou hravosťou a hlbokým skúmaním zložitých konceptov. Hofstadterove spisy vyzývajú čitateľov, aby prehodnotili povahu inteligencie a prepojenosť ľudskej skúsenosti.
Sie steigen in einen Aufzug, mit dem Sie noch nie zuvor gefahren sind. Wissen Sie, was Sie tun müssen, um nach oben zu kommen? Natürlich – und der Grund dafür sind die Analogien: Der Aufzug funktioniert wie alle anderen Aufzüge. Alles, was wir wissen, setzen wir in Beziehungen und schaffen es dadurch, Ähnlichkeiten zu entdecken, uns im Chaos der Welt zurechtzufinden. Diese Ähnlichkeiten machen wir uns täglich und meist ganz unbewusst im Umgang mit Neuem und Fremdem zunutze. Wie dieses Feuerwerk des Denkens »funktioniert«, das zeigen Douglas Hofstadter, brillanter Autor und Pulitzer-Preisträger, und der Psychologe Emmanuel Sander. Sie nehmen uns mit auf eine abenteuerliche Reise in die Welt der Sprache und des Geistes – und sie zeigen uns, warum Gedanken ohne Einfluss der Vergangenheit undenkbar sind. Ein inspirierendes Lesevergnügen!
What do we mean when we say “I”? Can thought arise out of matter? Can a self, a soul, a consciousness, an “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. Deep down, a human brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles, on a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call “symbols.” The most central and complex symbol in your brain or mine is the one we both call “I.” The “I” is the nexus in our brain where the levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down, with symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse. For each human being, this “I” seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such 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 all-powerful laws of physics? These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter’s first book-length journey into philosophy since Gödel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is the book Hofstadter’s many readers have long been waiting for.
"There is perhaps no better way to prepare for the scientific breakthroughs of tomorrow than to learn the language of geometry." ―Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe The word "geometry" brings to mind an array of mathematical circles, triangles, the Pythagorean Theorem. Yet geometry is so much more than shapes and numbers; indeed, it governs much of our lives―from architecture and microchips to car design, animated movies, the molecules of food, even our own body chemistry. And as Siobhan Roberts elegantly conveys in The King of Infinite Space , there can be no better guide to the majesty of geometry than Donald Coxeter, perhaps the greatest geometer of the twentieth century. Many of the greatest names in intellectual history―Pythagoras, Plato, Archimedes, Euclid― were geometers, and their creativity and achievements illuminate those of Coxeter, revealing geometry to be a living, ever-evolving endeavor, an intellectual adventure that has always been a building block of civilization. Coxeter's special contributions―his famed Coxeter groups and Coxeter diagrams―have been called by other mathematicians "tools as essential as numbers themselves," but his greatest achievement was to almost single-handedly preserve the tradition of classical geometry when it was under attack in a mathematical era that valued all things austere and rational. Coxeter also inspired many outside the field of mathematics. Artist M. C. Escher credited Coxeter with triggering his legendary Circle Limit patterns, while futurist/inventor Buckminster Fuller acknowledged that his famed geodesic dome owed much to Coxeter's vision. The King of Infinite Space is an elegant portal into the fascinating, arcane world of geometry.
Godel's Proof was first published in the US in 1958. In 1931 there appeared in a German scientific periodical a relatively short paper with the forbidding title "On Formally Undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems". Its author was Kurt Godel, then a young mathematician of 25 at the University of Vienna who since 1938 was a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The paper is a milestone in the history of logic and mathematics. When Harvard University awarded Godel an honorary degree, the citation described the work as one of the most important advances in logic in modern times. At the time of its appearance, however, neither the title of Godel's paper nor its content was intelligible to most mathematicians.
The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley Alan Turing was the mathematician whose cipher-cracking transformed the Second World War. Taken on by British Intelligence in 1938, as a shy young Cambridge don, he combined brilliant logic with a flair for engineering. In 1940 his machines were breaking the Enigma-enciphered messages of Nazi Germany’s air force. He then headed the penetration of the super-secure U-boat communications. But his vision went far beyond this achievement. Before the war he had invented the concept of the universal machine, and in 1945 he turned this into the first design for a digital computer. Turing's far-sighted plans for the digital era forged ahead into a vision for Artificial Intelligence. However, in 1952 his homosexuality rendered him a criminal and he was subjected to humiliating treatment. In 1954, aged 41, Alan Turing took his own life.
Readers of earlier works by Douglas Hofstadter will find this book a natural extension of his style and his ideas about creativity and analogy; in addition, psychologists, philosophers, and artificial-intelligence researchers will find in this elaborate web of ingenious ideas a deep and challenging new view of mind.
Includes articles, many of which originally appeared in Scientific American, on memes, innumeracy, William Safire, Frederic Chopin, Rubik's Cube, strange attractors, Lisp, Heisenburg's uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, Alan Turing, sphexishness, Prisoner's dilemma, and other topics.
Brilliant, shattering, mind-jolting,The Mind's Iis a searching, probing nook--a cosmic journey of the mind--that goes deeply into the problem of self and self-consciousness as anything written in our time. From verbalizing chimpanzees to scientific speculations involving machines with souls, from the mesmerizing, maze-like fiction of Borges to the tantalizing, dreamlike fiction of Lem and Princess Ineffable, her circuits glowing read and gold,The Mind's I opens the mind to the Black Box of fantasy, to the windfalls of reflection, to new dimensions of exciting possibilities.
