The Closing of the Scientific Mind - David Gelernter

"But science used to know enough to approach cautiously and admire from outside, and to build its own work on a deep belief in human dignity."

When was this golden age, and who were its leaders? During the mid-1900s and the The Tuskegee syphilis experiment? Early 1900s and Eugenics? 1800s and Phrenology? Indeed, pair off the reference to Pythagora's "Man is the measure of all things" to Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man."

"Science has become an international bully." Everything was true, up until there. There are "many scientists" who are proud to say that Man is an animal, and not the center of the Universe. And when scientists leave ethics behind, to pursue a scientific goal, then they have gone beyond the pale. But the essay does not show how "science", as metonymy for "nearly all scientists", has become a bully.

Scientists, for the most part, ignore philosophy outside of ethics, which tends to drive philosophers a bit batty. Nagel proposes that there may be a teleological for the emergence of life. Most biologists would just ask "where's the evidence?", rather than spend a long and likely fruitless exploration of that idea. Of all the possible interesting ideas, why spend time on that one?

"He believes that Darwin is not sufficient."

The author of this commentary is ill-informed. Biologists, and Nagel, also know that Darwin is not sufficient. Nagel is talking about the neo-Darwinian synthesis, or more often termed "evolution." The two major classes of people who use "Darwin" this way are either 1) the ill-informed, or 2) deliberately focusing on Darwin as if he were some sort of saint in the pantheon of science gods. When in truth, most scientists have read very little of his works.

"The Kurzweil Cult"

Which is a small minority of scientists. In fact, I go further and propose that it's more representative of engineers and people with some science training (eg, a B.S. in physics) than it is of scientists. As an example, here's a chemist's views on Kurzweil: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/08/18/reverseengin... . The chemist ends "I don't see how anyone who's ever worked in molecular biology, physiology, cell biology, or medicinal chemistry could fail to [disagree with Kurzweil's 'ever-more-optimistic predictions']."

"That we can agree nonetheless on the observable, exactly measurable, and predictable characteristics of objective reality is a remarkable fact."

Ahh, so the author longs for the classical mechanics of the 1800s, where things are exactly measurable, and predictable. But we live in a Heisenberg world, where no one can say when a radioactive particle will decay.

Which means the next paragraph, "How in this modern, scientific world can we be forced to accept the existence of things that can’t be weighed or measured, tracked or photographed—that are strictly private, that can be observed by exactly one person each?" is yawningly boring. For example, we have no real way to measure pain. We can ask if someone is in pain, and ask if a pain treatment helps. We can ask lots of different people, and hope there's an improvement across the population. Certainly that's as trackable as asking if someone feels they've received God's blessing.

"The Brain as Computer"

In the early 1900s, it was compared to a giant switchboard, and Freud compared it to steam engines and hydraulic machines. The general idea is "a complicated thing which lots of parts, combined with feedback of some sort." In any case, the computational model isn't strictly that "Mind is to brain as software is to computer." Much software can be replaced with a hardware equivalent, and the result would still be a computer.

Thus, when the author get to "The Flaws", they exist only because of a bad analogy. Consider "You can transfer a program easily from one computer to another, but you can’t transfer a mind, ever, from one brain to another." Adrian Thompson & Paul Layzell's CACM paper "Analysis of unconventional evolved electronics" showed how one genetically evolved program depended on specific details of the FPGA and so could not be transferred to another seemingly identical FPGA. In other words, evolution can lead to programs which cannot be easily transferred to other hardware.

I think that's enough. The author of this commentary does not know about the theory or experiments related to the thesis which show that the commentary has little basis with "objective reality."

What an utter idiot