Metamagical Themas, page 109
-----Why People Think Computers Can't". AI Magazine (Fall 1982): 3-15. With his usual unusual insight, Minsky tears people apart for not understanding how to think about thinking (or about machines, for that matter).
Mondrian, Piet. Tout l'tEuvre Peint de Piet Mondrian. Paris: Flammarion, 1976. For a grand overview of the evolution of the style of one painter, I know of no better book than this, which traces Mondrian from his earliest representational paintings to his most abstract and geometrical ones, revealing the sweep to be continuous and logical, but no less dramatic for that.
Morrison, Philip and Phylis, and the Office of Charles and Ray Eames. Powers of Ten. New York: Scientific American Books, 1983. Kees Boeke's inspirational Cosmic View (see above) revisited some thirty years later, with considerably more commentary. A charming and . - worthy successor.
Myhill, John. "Some Philosophical Implications of Mathematical Logic: Three Classes of Ideas". Review of Metaphysics 6, no. 2 (December 1952): 165-98. In 1982 I met Myhill and asked him about this paper. He told me he considered it to be a piece of junk. That astonished me, since I consider it to be a thoughtful and important piece of philosophizing making use of mathematical metaphors, something that hardly anyone dares to do. You never know how someone will evaluate their own work 30 years later!
Nagel, Ernest, and J. R. Newman. Gödel’s Proof. New York: New York University Press, 1958. A gracious and highly accessible introduction to the twists in Godel's reasoning, as well as to the philosophical issues surrounding his work.
Nakanishi, Akira. Writing Systems of the World. Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1980. For a sampling of the many different spirits residing in letterforms, see this book. It features reproductions of newspaper pages showing each writing system in several different styles.
Newell, Allen. "Physical Symbol Systems". Cognitive Science 4, no. 2 (April-June 1980): 135-83. A lengthy article putting forth the orthodox dogma on which artificial intelligence has traditionally considered itself founded: the idea that a universal computer embodies all the prerequisites for intelligent behavior.
Norman, Donald. "Categorization of Action Slips". Psychology Review 88, no. 1 (January 1981): 1-15. A delightful compendium of types of error that people commit in performing everyday actions such as putting water on to boil, answering the telephone, unbuckling one's seatbelt, driving home from work, and so on. There is remarkable regularity behind the seeming chaos, and Norman's purpose is to chart and exploit that regularity in order to reveal hidden mechanisms of thought.
Nozick, Robert. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Belknap Press, 1981. A very wide-ranging book on philosophy, intended for lay readers as well as for professionals. It covers matters from personal identity and the meaning of reference to free will and morality, and only occasionally lapses into brief spasms of absolutely inscrutable jargon.
Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. A very thoughtful treatise on moral dilemmas and ethical behavior, rooted in close consideration of the deepest roots of caring: why do I care about my present and future self? Parfit knows that to make any serious attempt to answer this riddle, one must look long and hard at the meaning of the word "I" in the real world and in many counterfactual ones, which he does with skill and insight.
Pascal, Louis. "Human Tragedy and Natural Selection". Inquiry 21: 443-60. Taking up where Garrett Hardin left off (see above), Pascal paints a gloomy picture of a population explosion as the natural outcome of selection itself, something built into the nature of societies just as deeply as the sexual drive is built into individuals.
"Rejoinder to Gray and Wolfe". Inquiry 23: 242-51. A bitter indictment of the human race's apathy before visibly onrushing catastrophe.
Peattie, Lisa. "Normalizing the Unthinkable". Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 40, no. 3 (March 1984): 32-36. Like Pascal, Peattie is concerned with people's apparent ability to turn off their sensitivities and to focus on the very local to such an extent that great tragedies are allowed to ensue. In a striking analogy, she likens the current public apathy about the arms madness to the inhumanity of collaborators in Hitler's concentration camps.
Perec, Georges. La Disparition. Paris: Editions Denoel, 1969. If anything, writing without 'e's is harder in French than in English, yet here is an entire novel in that bizarre dialect. Naturally enough, its subject is the mysterious disappearance of item number five in a collection of twenty-six objects. It was probably inspired by the 'e'-less novel Gadsby, written in English by Ernest Vincent Wright in the late 1930's.
Perfect, Christopher and Gordon Rookledge. Rookledge's International Typefinder. New York: Frederick C. Beil, 1983. A wonderful (though expensive) compendium of typefaces, indexed in such a way that you can look a typeface up by its features, thus allowing you to home in quickly on an unknown specimen instead of spending hours leafing through catalogues. Lovers of my "horizontal and vertical problems" will delight in this book.
Phillips, Tom. A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1980. Like a child who has covered a wall with colorful crayon drawings, Tom Phillips has completely obliterated the pages of an old novel (A Human Document by W. H. Mallock) with his colorful scribblings, and only here and there do traces of the original show through. A droll stunt!
Poincare, Henri. "On Mathematical Creation". In The World of Mathematics, vol. 4, edited by James R. Newman, 2041-50. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956..A lecture presented to the Psychological Society in Paris in the early part of this century. Anticipating developments in cognitive science some eighty years later, Poincare speculates on the nature of the events taking place inside his skull as he makes mathematical discoveries.
Po1ya, George. How to Solve It. New York: Doubleday, 1957. P61ya, like Poincart- a mathematician fascinated by thought processes, attempts here to give recipes for how to attack mathematical problems. The problem with this is that there is-and can be-no failsafe recipe. Even trying to give guidelines is probably futile. The nose that smells the right route is simply rare, and there are no two ways about it.
Post, Emil. "Absolutely Unsolvable Problems and Relatively Undecidable Propositions: Account of an Anticipation". In The Undecidable, edited by Martin Davis, 338-443. New York: Raven, 1965. In this paper, Post concludes that mathematicians' thought processes are essentially creative and non-mechanizable. Related to the article by Myhill (see above).
Poundstone, William. The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge. New York: William Morrow, 1985. A superlative account of the reductionist miracle: fantastically complex entities-living, self-reproducing organisms-turn out to be vast arrays of very simply interacting parts. Von Neumann's trick of self-reproduction without infinite regress (adapted from Gödel) is one of the main topics explored here, and with the help of Conway's absorbing game of Life, which plays the starring role in his book, Poundstone does a masterful job of explaining how it comes about.
Racter. The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed. New York: Warner Books, 1984. "Racter" is a program written by Bill Chamberlain and Thomas Etter. The Policeman's Beard is a book written by Racter. It is all somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because Racter does not really know much about half-constructed beards, but what is lovely about Racier's prose is the way it skirts the fringes of meaning, weaving drunkenly across the boundary between sense and senselessness.
Rapoport, Anatol. Two-Person Game Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor Science Library, 1966. A sound treatment of game theory, featuring a most .interesting personal discussion on opinions about the meaning of "rationality" in Prisoner's-Dilemma-like situations.
Reps, Paul. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. New York: Doubleday, Anchor Press, n.d. An easily available collection of Zen koans, highly amusing and, perhaps, even enlighteningproviding you take it all with sufficiently many grains of salt.
Rogers, Hartley. Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. A standard reference work on many advanced concepts in metamathematics, including such concepts as "productive" and "creative" sets, referred to in my Chapter 13.
Ross, Alf. "On Self-Reference and a Puzzle in Constitutional Law". Mind 78, no. 309 (January 1969): 1-24. A condundrum in the philosophy of law: Can laws modify themselves, or is that paradoxical? Ross' view is that logical inconsistency is unacceptable in law, and therefore that self-amendment is impossible. For a response, see the paper by Hart (above).
Rucker, Rudy. Infinity and the Mind. Boston: Birkhauser, 1982. A book that had to be written. Presenting the most abstruse concoctions of the mind in language that is not abstruse, and connecting it with thoughts about consciousness and the mystery of existence -this is what Rucker excels in.
Ruelle, David. "Les Attracteurs Etranges". La Recherche 11, no. 108 (February 1980): 131-44. A good article relating these wispy mathematical clouds to the physics they are supposed to explain, featuring a number of excellent illustrations.
Rumelhart, David E. and Donald A. Norman. "Simulating a Skilled Typist: A Study of Skilled Cognitive-Motor Performance". Cognitive Science 6, no. 3 (JulySeptember 1982): 1-36. Anticipating the current "parallel distributed processing" project at the University of California at San Diego, the research described in this article is among the most interesting work on modeling human performance that I have encountered.
Russett, Bruce. The Prisoners of Insecurity. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1983. The arms race as an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and how we might be able to break out of the deadlock. The last section-"Responsibility"--concludes with this admonition (and how I wish people would take it to heart!): "In a democracy, silence about nuclear issues carries an implication not just of indifference but of acceptance. If we stand silent in the face of an arms race-and the war to which it may lead us-we must share responsibility for the outcome. `Silence gives consent.' "
Ryder, Frederick, and Company. Ryder Types, 2 vols. (with periodic supplements). Chicago: Frederick Ryder and Company. The best catalogue of typefaces I have run across-but it is expensive. Some of the oddest faces I have ever seen are found in the four supplements I own.
Sagan, Carl, ed. Communication with Extraterrestrial intelligence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973.. An entertaining transcript of an international meeting in the days when Russians and Americans spoke to each other. Sagan puts forth his notion of various types of earth-life-based "chauvinisms". A hopeful and intellectually refreshing book-the kind one wishes there were hundreds of.
Sampson, Geoffrey. "Is Roman Type an Open-Ended System? A Response to ,Douglas Hofstadter". Visible Language 17, no. 4 (Autumn 1983): 410-12. Sampson tlisputes my claim that it is impossible to capture the fluid spirit of letters of the alphabet in parametrized computer subroutines; he suggests that it is possible, if you limit your goals to capturing the spirit of letters suitable for printing serious books in.
Schank, Roger. Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Reminding and Learning in Computers and People. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Although I disagree with some of his theorizing, I agree fully with Schank's focus on the types of problems that cognitive science ought to be most concerned with, and I like the examples he uses.
Scherlis, William L. and Pierre L. Wolper. "Self-Referenced Referenced, and Self-Referenced". Communications of the ACM 23, no. 12 (December 1980): 736. A humorous short note on papers that cite themselves.
Schrodinger, Ernst. What Is Life? and Mind and Matter. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967 (reprint of 1944 edition). This philosophically-minded physicist prophetically speculates on the nature of the hereditary message, before the days when DNA's structure or function were known. Also venturing into the deep waters of consciousness, he comes up with this mystical conclusion: "The over-all number of minds is just one."
Schwenk, Theodor. Sensitive Chaos. New York: Schocken, 1976. A book about fluids in the wild and in the laboratory, filled with striking patterns and fantastic photographs strongly suggesting this mystical conclusion: "The over-all number of fluids is just one."
Searle, John. "Minds, Brains, and Programs". The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (September 1980): 417-57. Like the Lucas article (see above), this one launched a thousand rebuttals (including two by me). In this, its original setting, it was followed by nearly thirty rebuttals and counter-rebuttals. It is amusing and educational to read them all. I view this article as a litmus test, in the sense that someone convinced by Searle's imagery is almost sure to have a very negative opinion of AI.
-----The Myth of the Computer: An Exchange". New York Review of Books (June 24, 1982): 56-57. Searle portrays Dennett and me as blind advocates of "strong AI"-the notion that "the appropriately programmed computer literally has a mind". He resents the fact that such views are "well financed and backed by prestigious teams of research workers", and tells how he is constantly working toward "the relentless exposure of its preposterousness".
-----The Myth of the Computer". New York Review of Books (April 29, 1982): 3-6. A rather negative review of The Mind's I by someone roundly criticized in the book. The one good thing Searle does in this review is to stress the central epistemological problem facing AI: to explain the nature of the fluid reference, or semanticity, that mental activity exhibits.
Serafini, Luigi. Codex Seraphinianus. Milan: Franco Maria Ricci, 1981. A complete pseudo-encyclopedia, in two volumes. The writing system, the page numbering, the weird diagrams, and especially the wonderful color illustrations are all products of the cryptic mind of Serafini, an Italian architect. Also available in one volume, and more inexpensively, from Abbeville Press in New York, N.Y.
Seuss, Dr. On Beyond Zebra. New York: Random House, 1955. Humorous ways of extending the alphabet beyond 'z': a metaphor for jumping out of the system (' jootsing").
Simon, Herbert A. "Cognitive Science: The Newest Science of the Artificial". Cognitive Science 4, no. 2 (April June 1980): 33-46. Simon's confident assertion that computers already have what it takes to possess full intelligence: symbol manipulation. In his conclusion, he claims: "Wherever the boundary is drawn, there exists today a science of intelligent systems that extends beyond the limits of any single species."
-----Studying Human Intelligence by Creating Artificial Intelligence". American Scientist 69, no. 3 (May June 1981): 300-309. This is the lecture in which Simon spoke of the all-important 100-millisecond barrier, below which it is of no interest to cognitive scientists to know what happens (see my Chapter 26). In print he changed "100 millisecondsto "ten milliseconds", although the point remains the same either way.
Singmaster, David. Notes on Rubik's "Magic Cube". Hillside, NJ.: Enslow, 1981. On its cover, this book proudly boasts: "'The definitive treatise.'-Scientific American. " Well, if Scientific American says so, who am I to dispute it?
Sloman, Aaron. The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy, Science, and Models of Mind. Atlantic Highlands, NJ.: Humanities Press, 1978. A book that warns philosophers that they will miss the boat if they don't jump on the Al bandwagon. This a good though somewhat tendentious discussion of the philosophical import of Al.
Smith, Brian C. "Reflection and Semantics in Lisp". Palo Alto, Calif.: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Report, 1983. A boiling-down of a 500-page Ph.D. thesis into a dozen pages or so, concerning a system capable of reasoning about itself (and reasoning about such reasoning, etc.). This work exemplifies the "meta-meta" style of Al research (see my Chapter 23-especially its P.S. ).
Smith, Stephen B. The Great Mental Calculators: The Psychology, Methods, and Lives of Calculating Prodigies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. A set of portraits of very strange yet very human beings whose aberrant minds let them do calculating tasks that we ordinary people-no matter how number-loving-could not conceivably do.
Smolensky, Paul. "Harmony Theory: A Mathematical Framework for Stochastic Parallel Processing". University of California at San Diego Institute for Cognitive Science Technical Report ICS No. 8306. Based on the ideas of statistical mechanics, this project utilizes stochastic parallelism, regulated by a "temperature" that gradually drops to zero, to search most efficiently for the optimal global state of a system.
Smullyan, Raymond. This Book Needs No Title: A Budget of Living Paradoxes. Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1980. A very humorous collection of observations about the constant intermingling of life and paradox, by a logician whose awareness of paradox is especially keen.
Solo, Dan X. Sans Serif Display Alphabets. New York: Dover, 1979. A collection of elegant letterforms whose subdued flair resides exclusively in their gentle curves, stroke taperings, line endings, and the interplay between positive and negative space.
-----Special-Effects and Topical Alphabets. New York: Dover, 1978. After you've looked at a book like this, you know why the problem of letterforms is synonymous with the problem of full human intelligence.
Sonneborn, Tracy M. "Degeneracy of the Genetic Code: Extent, Nature, and Genetic Implications". In Evolving Genes and Proteins, edited by Vernon Bryson and
Henry J. Vogel. New York: Academic Press, 1965. Perhaps the first paper to suggest that there is evolutionary rhyme and reason to the particular match-up between codons and amino acids that exists in the arbitrary-seeming genetic code.
Soppeland, Mark. Words. Los Altos, Calif.: William Kaufmann, 1980. A witty collection of words drawn as self-referential pictures: stacks of books whose shapes spell out "books", and so on.
Sorrels, Bobbye. The Nonsexist Communicator. Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1983. A sizable collection of sexist usages and nonsexist remedies; some of the remedies, however, are needlessly awkward.
Sperry, Roger. "Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values". In New Views on the Nature of Man, edited by John R. Platt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. The article that asks, and tries to answer, the question "Who pushes whom around in the population of causal forces that occupy the cranium?" My answer is in Chapter 25.
