Tag: Tower of Babel

^{Type
post

Author
David Berlinski

Date
June 21, 2023

Tagged
, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Alonzo Church, biological life, Bohr model, Charles Darwin, ChatGPT, computable, computing age, Darwinism, David Berlinski, Dirac equation, Evolution, general relativity, Giuseppe Peano, incompleteness theorems, Kurt Gödel, mathematical logic, mathematics, Michael Ruse, Natural Selection, non-computable, philosophy of biology, physics, Platonic objects, Princeton University, Principia Mathematica, quantum field theory, quantum mechanics, recursive functions, Science After Babel, scientific reductionism, special relativity, survival of the fittest, teleology, theory of everything, Tower of Babel, Turing machine, Turing Test, Von Neumann machine, William Dembski}

David Berlinski on the Immaterial, Alan Turing, and the Mystery of Life Itself

_{David Berlinski

June 21, 2023

Uncategorized}

The new book Science After Babel is again in the spotlight here at ID the Future, with its author, philosopher and mathematician David Berlinski, and host Andrew McDiarmid teasing various elements of the work. The pair discuss the puzzling relationship between purely immaterial mathematical concepts (the only kind) and the material world; World War II codebreaker and computing pioneer Alan Turing, depicted in the 2014 film The Imitation Game; and the sense that the field of physics, once seemingly on the cusp of a theory of everything, finds itself at an impasse. Then, too, Berlinski writes, there is the mystery of life itself. If scientists thought that its origin and nature would soon yield to scientific reductionism, they have been disappointed. Life’s “fantastic and controlled complexity, its brilliant inventiveness and diversity, its sheer difference from anything else in this or any other world” remains before us, suggesting, as Berlinski puts it, “a kind of intelligence evident nowhere else.” Get your copy of the book at www.scienceafterbabel.com. Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
David Berlinski

Date
June 7, 2023

Tagged
, algorithms, Bruegel’s Tower of Babel, calculus, Charles Darwin, ChatGPT, Chinese Revolution, Dan Tawfik, Darwinism, David Berlinski, DNA, Erwin Schrödinger, Evolution, Francis Crick, French zoological tradition, genetic code, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, Marcel Schützenberger, Markov process, mathematics, methodological materialism, methodological naturalism, Mikhael Gromov, Murray Eden, Neo-Darwinism, optimizing process, Oswald Avery, Peter Medawar, philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, Pierre Grasse, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, protein chemistry, protein space, Richard Dawkins, Science After Babel, teleology, The Selfish Gene, Tower of Babel, What is Life?, WISTAR Symposium, World War II}

David Berlinski on His New Book, Science After Babel

_{David Berlinski

June 7, 2023

Uncategorized}

On today’s ID the Future, host Andrew McDiarmid rings up Science After Babel author David Berlinski in Paris to discuss the philosopher’s latest book. Berlinski is at his cultivated best as the two discuss everything from the biblical Tower of Babel as a metaphor for modern materialistic science, to his friendship with the brilliant and colorful French intellectual Marcel Schützenberger, a world-class mathematician who was self-taught and, as we learn here, came within a hair’s breadth of being swept up in the Chinese Revolution. Berlinski also reflects on the seminal 1966 WISTAR symposium, which laid out some mathematical challenges to Darwinism, challenges that Berlinski says remain unanswered to this day. At the same time, Berlinski gives the devil—here Darwinism—its due. Read More ›