"SE-I" Definition of Intelligence:   Intelligence, to our mind, is the art of rapid and reliable gist-finding, crux-spotting, bull’s-eye-hitting, nub-striking, essence-pinpointing. It is the art of, when one is facing a new situation, swiftly and surely homing in on an insightful precedent (or family of precedents) stored in the recesses of one’s memory. That, no more and no less, is what it means to isolate the crux of a new situation. And this is nothing but the ability to find close analogues, which is to say, the ability to come up with strong and useful analogies.    - " Surfaces and Essences "  This is a working definition of intelligence provided by the two authors, who are (not surprisingly) stunningly intelligent by their own definition. The book is itself a massive collection of strong and useful analogies. IQ The "man on the street" more or less equates "intelligence" with IQ . It's something people "have"...

The Kindle preview of " A New Kind of Science " is very generous - over 100 pages. Definitely enough to give an overall flavor of the book. The hard copy of the book is virtually unreadable due to tiny text fonts. The Kindle version is very affordable compared to the $40 cost (down from $70) of the phone-book sized original. I would normally not review a book I have not read from cover to cover, but a good friend presented this book to me as one of the most interesting in his collection. For the sake of discussion, I felt the need to dive in. I didn't find the first 100 pages to be particularly difficult to understand, but there wasn't much that I found interesting or original. My impression was that the next 700 pages would milk the basic cellular automaton idea (not original with Wolfram) to construct "original" ways of looking at virtually everything, allowing Wolfram to insert himself as offering the key insight - the turning point - in virtually...

From a discussion on the subject in Medium.com Debates about free will are fun but, like arguments about the existence of God, they are fun because the subject doesn’t exist. It’s like arguing over whether Santa is fat. I’m not saying free will doesn’t exist. I'm saying the idea of "free will" is part of our religious mythology. The concept makes no sense in the world we happen to inhabit. To be more precise, human behavior is inexplicable in principle. The “explanation” that it arises out of a sum of deterministic laws of nature doesn’t survive close examination. Boiled down to essentials, the argument against free will is saying that a given individual, faced with situation “A” will do exactly the same thing again if faced with exactly the same situation “A”. However, it is clearly impossible to specify “situation A” precisely. To mention just one tiny part of the problem, it is impossible to specify the “state” of a synapse precisely due to Quantum Mechanica...