Daniel Dennett,a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, spends most of his time thinking about thinking.
The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber, by Nicholson Baker.
"Ever since Baker wrote U and I, his hilarious and deep confessions about his relationships - real and imaginary - with John Updike, I have been a fan. He is both the funniest and the most insightful phenomenologist I have ever encountered. If you can read these essays on slang and punctuation without laughing out loud, you may need medication."
Galatea 2.2, by Richard Powers.
"The only other novelist to whom I've written a fan letter is Powers. This is a remarkably insightful and poetically vivid fiction about creating an artificial intelligence that can pass the Turing Test. Since Powers has to go beyond the state of the art in order to describe the imaginary software that is created, he could easily have stumbled and revealed his naïveté about AI, but in fact, his inspired guesses may in some cases prove to be precognitive science at its best."
Evolution of the Social Contract , by Brian Skyrms.
Skyrms's elegant little paperback is much more than a primer about the Prisoner's Dilemma and its more interesting progeny. It is a potent manifesto for the spread of Darwinian perspectives in ethics and economics."
*Peter G. Neumann
moderates the Risks Forum newsgroup (comp.risks) and is the author of* Computer-Related Risks*. (See* ReadMe, Wired 5.07, page 161 for more of his thoughts on reading.)
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and In the Absence of the Sacred , by Jerry Mander.
"Various books, including these, helped inspire Computer-Related Risks. I am by no means a Luddite and am professionally a technologist, but Jerry's strong views on the negative aspects of technology bear serious consideration."
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle , by Vladimir Nabokov.
"I'm also a big Nabokov fan. I'm working on a new edition of his old stories. I enjoy his multilingual puns. In the novel, for instance, he refers to a yellow-blue vase. But in Russian ya lyublyu vas means 'I love you' (with an added jest of the impersonal form of 'you' - reminding me of Tom Lehrer's joke about receiving a strongly worded letter of endearment, only to discover it was addressed to 'occupant')."
"I read a lot of musical scores, which turns out to be an excellent exercise in human multiprogramming and multiprocessing. Sometimes I listen to a recording and follow along; sometimes I just read the notes and hear the music in my head. Whenever I can get away, I sit in on Herbert Blomstedt's San Francisco Symphony rehearsals."
*Mitchel Resnick,
an MIT Media Lab professor, is inventing technologies that will transform education. (See* "Building a Learning Society," Wired 5.10, page 136.)
Inventing Kindergarten , by Norman Brosterman.
"As the world becomes increasingly digital, it's important to consider the role of physical objects in our lives. And, as this book makes clear, there is no better place to look than kindergarten. Brosterman describes how Friedrich Froebel, who created the first kindergarten, emphasized the role of physical objects (like blocks and balls) in the learning process. With such objects, children learn important concepts (like number, shape, and scale) through direct manipulation. What are the lessons for today? Rather than replacing physical toys with virtual ones, let's embed computational capabilities in physical toys in an effort to expand the set of concepts that children can learn through direct manipulation."
How the Mind Works , by Steven Pinker.
"Drawing ideas from computer science and evolutionary theory, Pinker provides a great overview of current thinking about the mind. Arguing that many aspects of human nature are shaped by natural selection, the book is likely to spark some controversy. I like Pinker's style of 'reverse engineering' the mind, using current mental capabilities as clues to how the mind got the way it is."
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