There is a biological controversy of long standing between proponents of the Wilsonian view that all organisms of a certain class have at least one part that is a cell and proponents of the contradictory, or Dobellian, view that some organisms in the same class have no parts that are cells. The controversy is considered from the standpoint of the methodology of explication. It is concluded that on the grounds of prevalent biological usage, precision, utility and generality the Wilsonian view (...) may be defended successfully against attacks that have been made upon it. (shrink)

This book explains, in lay terms, the surprisingly simple system of mathematical logic used in digital computer circuitry. Anecdotal in its style and often funny, it follows the development of this logic system from its origins in Victorian England to its rediscovery in this century as the foundation of all modern computing machinery. ONES AND ZEROS will be enjoyed by anyone who has a general interest in science and technology.

"We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow, are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our own experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.".

As we encounter things in the world around us, when do we judge something to be just a heap or aggregate of smaller things, like a pile of sand, and when do we judge it to be a true, unified, single thing? It depends, almost always, on how you look at it. I have argued that when we look at the world in strict reductionist terms, nothing above the sub-atomic level really counts as a holistic thing. Are there any things (...) above the micro level that really are inherent, single things in a way that does not depend on how you look at them? Do we have any reason to believe that there are, in contrast to the reductionist view, inherently unitary mid-level things in the universe? (shrink)

Roger Penrose, in _The Emperor's New Mind_ (1989), writes about the way Mozart perceived music. Mozart did not play a piece in his mind in real time, or even speeded up, but could hold it before him all at once. We all do this, although usually for much shorter riffs than entire symphonies. I have argued that the all-at-onceness of our thoughts and perceptions is at least as inexplicable as what it is like to see red; I think the aural/temporal (...) all-at-onceness makes the point at least as vividly as the visual/spatial all-at-onceness of the curl of smoke in an art nouveau poster. (shrink)

One of the most certain truths in the world is Descartes' "I think, therefore I am". Descartes was so certain of the existence of some kind of essential _self_ that others have coined the term "Cartesian theater" to describe the sense that we all have of being the audience enjoying the rich play of our experiences. We tend to believe in an enduring self, independent of our individual percepts. Sometimes this virtual "self" in our mind, sitting in the audience of (...) the Cartesian theater who watches our thoughts is referred to as a homunculus. This is not necessarily to imply that most of us believe that the self or homunculus is an identifiable region of the brain like the pineal gland, just that at some level of organization, we assume that there is a self that is separate from the stuff that self experiences, remembers, thinks about, etc. (shrink)