Philosophy and computing. An introduction (Q2735588)

The book under review is a very good introduction to computing and to philosophical problems of computing, an introduction written for philosophy majors. It starts from scratch, by explaining things like binary numbers, by outlining history of computing, etc., and ends up introducing the reader to technical details and philosophical problems of computability (via Church-Turing thesis), of Internet as a communication tool, of the Web as a compendium of human knowledge, and of AI, fuzzy logic, neural networks, intractability, quantum computing, etc. In all the descriptions, the author clearly knows his material; the description is both technically correct and popularly accessible (and, as readers of many popular books on math-related subjects know well, it is not easy to be both correct and accessible). NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINESince the book is intended for philosophers, the author spends a large amount of effort clarifying sloppy philosophy-related statements which can be encountered even in serious AI books and articles; for example, he emphasizes that although fuzzy logic captures some features of human reasoning, and neural networks capture some structure of the human brain, our reasoning is much more complex than fuzzy logic rules, and the real brain is much more complex than a typical artificial neural network. NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThis book will provide philosophers with a very good understanding of computer science and related philosophical problems, and I wish the author had always clearly distinguished between his interesting exposition of known computer science results and his own -- very raw and informal -- ideas. At present, there is no such distinction, and a reader may be confused. For example, on p. 63, the author introduces his own ``definition'' of cyberspace, a definition that is written in terms of first order logic but in reality, just tries to describe some raw philosophical ideas without giving precise meaning to the terms. Similarly, the author's idea that a natural metric on the information space makes it a hyperbolic space may lead to future fruitful research but at this moment, it is simply a speculation without a precise and testable meaning. Due to this unfortunate confusion, this book may not be very suitable for an individual study; however, under the guidance of an instructor who can clearly separate established facts and opinions from the author's raw ideas, this book will be very helpful.