Post date: Apr 4, 2015 11:54:30 AM
The great revolutions in science come about when what was formerly thought to be true and unassailable is both assailed and shown to not be true after all. Sometimes the assaults are brutal and front on, and sometimes they are gentle over a long period of time, gradually creeping up on the soon to be discredited truth. This book is a gentle assault on some of the collateral tenets of modern rationalism; not an assault on rationalism itself, but an assault on manyof the things that are commonly assumed by rationalists. Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard question whether our nervous systems compute, whether they are separate control systems for our bodies, and even whether there can truly be disembodied reasoning. These three ideas are so ingrained in our computational metaphors that they usually go unquestioned—they make no sense within our normal frameworks of thinking in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence, and even neuro- science. Beyond the mere technical these questions challenge the intellectual father of rationalism Rene Descartes and his “Je pense, donc je suis” (I think, therefore I am) from his Discourse on Method written in French, not Latin, in 1637).
Rodney Brooks Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Professor of Robotics