h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There's a link on my home page [1] to some thoughts of George Lakoff, some of which discuss religion and religious belief. You may find it interesting?

Lakoff (with others, notably Johnson) has done a lot of work on metaphor (see "Metaphors we live by" by Lakoff and Johnson) and cognitive linguistics (see "Philosophy in the flesh" by Lakoff and Johnson) which I found fascinating (but you may not? ). My personal philosophy is heavily influenced by Lakoff's work.

The URL on my home page goes to the 'Edge' site, which asked an assortment of 'intellectuals' what they thought was the ultimate question, and why. Lakoff chose to answer several of the other contributor's questions, from his own perspective as a cognitive linguist. The URL points to these answers. [Strip the URL to look at the main 'Edge' site - always worthwhile, IME. ]

His views on the possibility of an afterlife I find especially interesting. Luckily, I don't *have* to abandon my belief that there is life after death, only to accept that it must be quite different from embodied life. This is OK; believers have always felt (IMO) that the move from life here to life hereafter is not a simple progression, but a radical transformation.

Enough for now. If you bothered to follow the link on my home page, did you enjoy what you found? Should I post similar links in the future?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

[1] For those who don't know, we aren't allowed to post external links in discussion forums such as this one.

Interesting views on the inability of machines to think are hinted at. I'd like to find out more about his reasoning behind this - it *seems* to be one of:

1) human brains are really complicated, and our evolution to become thinking very improbably, so the chances of a machine brain thinking is remote.

Whether you can evolve a machine brain is a matter of experiment and fact, and it is pointless to speculate until we know more about both machine brains or human brains. Even if a machine brain cannot be evolved, that does not make the construction of a machine brain more difficult - just harder.

2) thinking is grounded in experience of the world - hearing, seeing, and so forth. Machines do not do these things, so they cannot think.

Clearly, any machine brains we make will interact with the world. It may be that cognitive science can prove that a machine brain with no inputs cannot think, but nobody is planning to construct such a brain, so this is an uninteresting assertion, at least for me.

I'll have to look further...

According to *my* understanding of Lakoff's work, your option 2 is closest to the mark. You'll need to consult "Philosophy in the flesh" to pursue this one: it's a two-inch-thick hardback, and a lot of it is quite heavy going. Luckily (?), much of it is devoted to showing how other philosophies fall short in comparison with Lakoff and Johnson's "embodied realism". These chapters can be safely skipped, IMO.

I have a sort of precis of "Philosophy in the flesh" - in Microsoft Word format - that I prepared from the copy of the book I got from my local library. It summarises *only* those parts of the book that interested me, so it's far from a complete coverage. If there's any interest, perhaps I could post it as a journal entry (copyright permitting)...

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"