Abstract

A transatlantic Alice in Wonderland americanized to the point of gigantism, this conceptual romp through the widest range of topics proceeds alternately by way of heavy-handed dialogues—featuring indeed Achilles and the Tortoise not to mention the Crab, the Magnificrab, the Anteater, etc.—and extended expositions of Bach’s Musical Offering, Escher, Zen, DNA, Gödel, Turing, and artificial intelligence. The central theme is self-reference, and at no point does the author fall below the standards of basic philosophic competence that obtain today in professional philosophy. Most successful perhaps as an exercise in haute vulgarisation, this hefty tome whose author is himself a professor of computer science will interest the philosopher largely as a highly redundant message, transmitted through a screen of noise, from a computer culture of a logico-materialistic orientation.