The title of The Rediscovery of the Mind suggests the question "When was the mind lost?" Since most people may not be aware that it ever was lost, we must also then ask "Who lost it?" It was lost, of course, only by philosophers, by certain philosophers. This passed unnoticed by society at large. The "rediscovery" is also likely to pass unnoticed. But has the mind been rediscovered by the same philosophers who "lost" it? Probably not. John Searle is an (...) analytic philosopher, with some of the same notions as the positivists and behaviorists who rejected consciousness and "lost" the mind in the first place, but he also does not sound like the kind of reductionist who would have joined that crowd. His views, indeed, are sensible enough, and some of his insights so important, that it is a shame to find his thought profoundly limited by some of the same mistakes and prejudices that ruined philosophy, and not just philosophy of mind, under the influence of those positivists and behaviorists. There is enough of genuine value in his treatment, that it can easily be taken up and, with relatively slight modification, added to what is of permanent value in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The familiar theories of physics have the feature that the application of the theory to make predictions in specific circumstances can be done by means of an algorithm. We propose a more precise formulation of this feature—one based on the issue of whether or not the physically measurable numbers predicted by the theory are computable in the mathematical sense. Applying this formulation to one approach to a quantum theory of gravity, there are found indications that there may exist no such (...) algorithms in this case. Finally, we discuss the issue of whether the existence of an algorithm to implement a theory should be adopted as a criterion for acceptable physical theories.“Can it then be that there is... something of use for unraveling the universe to be learned from the philosophy of computer design?” —J. A. Wheeler(1). (shrink)