RE: Scientific pessimism

From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Tue Feb 25 2003 - 08:41:57 MST


His thesis is remarkably aggressive...

Claiming that theoretical physics is stalled is plausible...

Claiming that real AI is 100 years off is dead wrong in my view, but, a fair
percentage of mainstream AI researchers seem to believe it

But claiming that *molecular biology* is not going to make any further
progress, is really a stretch. I don't think any mainstream scientists
believe that.

I haven't read the book, but as best as I can tell from the reviews I've
read, he has some sort of religious attitude, and he emotionally likes the
idea that the mysteries of the universe will remain forever beyond our
grasp!

-- Ben G

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-sl4@sl4.org [mailto:owner-sl4@sl4.org]On Behalf Of Jaffray
> Woodriff
> Sent: Tuesday, February 25, 2003 10:15 AM
> To: sl4@sl4.org
> Subject: Re: Scientific pessimism
>
>
> yeah, I have this book because I wanted to try and figure out
> what the heck's wrong with this guy!
>
> I just don't know!
>
>
> --- Ben Goertzel <ben@goertzel.org> wrote:
> >
> > Remarkably dumb scientific pessimism from an individual in a powerful
> > position...
> >
> > http://freeinfo.org/tch/fall99/articles/horgan.html
> >
> >
> > Unbelievably, this senior Scientific American writer is arguing
> that science
> > is basically over and won't significantly progress any further.
> >
> > Seriously!
> >
> >
> > -- Ben G
> >
>
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
> http://taxes.yahoo.com/
>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:41 MDT