Enticing review of Neal Stephenson’s forthcoming Quicksilver novel.
It’s easy to riducule the idea of “encoding” the creative acts into mere number crunching as a hacker hope to make things computable, as this reviewer seems to do. Somewhere, though, there is a link between the seemingly simplistic acts a computer performs, and the equally simplistic propagation of electrical impulses that course through our brains.
Where in all of this does the mind emerge?
It will be interesting to see if Stephenson takes on any of this in Quicksilver.
NTS describes the earth shattering implications of Hooke with his newly invented microscope discovering the structure of cell and its prevalence among all the living creatures he investigates. He is caught up in trying to decide where the interface between the “hardware” and the “software” is located, or the organic and the soul, or what-have-you. You ask “where in all this does the mind emerge?”. AI folks have been trying to answer that for years (since Turing I suppose) and nobody has got a good answer to that one. As a software engineer, I leave questions like that to philosphers and technophiles who don’t have to bother with the actual details of things that are semi-miraculous to them anyways (such as brains and computers).