" My approach to understanding the full implications of Gödel's work is mathematically analogous to the ideas of thermodynamics and Boltzmann and statistical mechanics. You might say, not completely seriously, that what I'm proposing is 'thermodynamical epistemology'!"
- G. Chaitin

The absurd capriciousness underlying such a memory system is best represented by the categorization scheme of an ancient Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, as interpreted by the South American fiction master J. L. Borges.
On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained , (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (1) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

There is, to be sure, a genuine problem in the phenomenon of quantum measurement, but I will not discuss it here. It concerns introspective systems, where subject = object so that the basic conception of a single subject observing an ensemble of objects must be modified.
- David Finkelstein

Gregory Chaitin has devoted his life to the attempt to understand what mathematics can and cannot achieve, and is a member of the digital philosophy/digital physics movement. Its members believe that the world is built out of digital information, out of 0 and 1 bits, and they view the universe as a giant information-processing machine, a giant digital computer. In this book on the history of ideas, Chaitin traces digital philosophy back to the nearly-forgotten 17th century genius Leibniz. He also tells us how he discovered the celebrated Omega number, which marks the current boundary of what mathematics can achieve. This book is an opportunity to get inside the head of a creative mathematician and see what makes him tick, and opens a window for its readers onto a glittering world of high-altitude thought that few intellectual mountain climbers can ever glimpse.

Daniel Dennett took on the grandees of philosophy while still a student at Harvard and Oxford, then turned to pioneering and controversial work on artificial intelligence. With Richard Dawkins he has fought the 'Darwin Wars' and, when not sailing or farming, sculpting or playing jazz, is writing a new book opposing the rise of supernaturalism.

Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Yes, declares the controversial philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. "Human freedom," he writes in his important new book Freedom Evolves (Viking), "is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species, us."

One might think that Dennett’s ringing endorsement of the reality of human freedom would make him popular with other intellectuals. It doesn’t. On the right, the conservative Weekly Standard denounces him as "a vigorous evangelist for evolutionary psychology." The neoconservative journal The Public Interest has called him "an evolutionary fundamentalist." That view was shared by the late left-wing evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, who disparaged Dennett as a "Darwinian fundamentalist." Gould’s scientific collaborator Niles Eldredge concurs, dismissing him as an "ultra-Darwinian." The liberal American Prospect accuses him of "cybernetic totalism."

But Dennett has his admirers too. The New York Times Book Review selected his Consciousness Explained as one of the 10 best books of 1991. The Wall Street Journal raved about 1995’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, and declared that Dennett "does one of the things philosophers are supposed to be good at: clearing up conceptual muddles in the sciences." Zoologist Matt Ridley, author of The Origins of Virtue, hails him as the "ebullient, pugnacious and ever pithy sage of Boston."

Born in 1942, Daniel Dennett studied philosophy at Harvard University and Oxford University. His philosophical views can be traced most clearly to the influence of his Oxford teacher, philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Ryle famously attacked Cartesian mind-body dualism, dismissing it as the doctrine of "the ghost in the machine." Dennett is now the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

Dennett has spent his intellectual career trying to extend the Enlightenment project of putting philosophy and morality on a scientific and naturalistic basis. In a sense, Dennett is updating David Hume in the light of Darwin’s theory of evolution. In doing so, he provides us with fascinating new ways to think about the meaning
of choice, the value of morality, and how the evolution of the human brain and its capabilities has made us more free.

Indeed, Dennett argues that human freedom is dramatically expanding. Language and culture, especially when abetted by modern science and technology, enable us to increase the range of our choices. As our understanding of our genes and brains increases, he believes we will increase our freedom rather than limit it. We will be able to prevent and cure more diseases, improve our social institutions, and even enhance human capabilities. He says that we defend freedom, especially political freedom, because among other things it enables people to make better and better choices over time. As important, Dennett maintains that to whatever extent we were ever at the mercy of our genes and biological evolution, we no longer are. Instead our genes are now at the mercy of our brains.
Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey interviewed Dennett in February.

Elegance is more than just a frill in life; it is one of the driving criteria behind survival.
- Douglas Hofstadter

It is impossible to dissociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based; the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind; and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and same reality. Words are thus required to preserve and transmit ideas, so that it is clear that the advancement of a science and the improvement of its technical vocabulary go hand in hand. No matter how certain we are of the phenomena, no matter how adequately our concepts reflect them, we cannot help perpetuating wrong ideas unless we have a precise terminology in which to express ourselves.
-Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794)

Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process.
- Isaac Asmiov

There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common in children, but gets lost in most people later on. Without this passion, there would be neither mathematics nor natural science. Time and again the passion for understanding has led to the illusion that man is able to comprehend the objective world rationally, by pure thought, without any empirical foundations—in short, by metaphysics. I believe that every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist, no matter how pure a `positivist' he may fancy himself. The metaphysicist believes that the logically simple is also the real. The tamed metaphysicist believes that not all that is logically simple is embodied in experienced reality, but that the totality of all sensory experience can be `comprehended' on the basis of a conceptual system built on premises of great simplicity. The skeptic will say that this is a `miracle creed.' Admittedly so, but it is a miracle creed which has been borne out to an amazing extent by the development of science.
—Einstein