“Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne”: “A Chave Perdida” /”The Lost Key” by Flor da Boca - Projectos

Ironically, a better philosopher skewered the idea of truth a while ago.

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all...

Even more ironically, although Nietzsche  (and Álvaro Cordeiro aka Paulo Vaz as his on-stage persona) avoids applying the word "truth" to it, he is presenting this as ... truth! Whenever I have tried to read Nietzsche I have got the impression that he presents his subjective views on social and psychological matters as philosophical truth. Basically, for Nietzsche, truth is what Nietzsche says. On this play, truth is what the characters in this play say.

We do not live in a post-truth world; we live in a world of competing "truths" because people do not agree on what our criteria for and sources of truth should be. For many, truth is defined by their own experience and self-perceived identity, rather than with reference to others or history or philosophy or epistemology or science or faith. As a Christian I believe these are vital issues. As someone in the gospels is reported to have said: What is truth?

As a Computer Scientist and Maker, I can confirm that Philosophers and Creative Artists (including artists) give us a different kind of truth to what Scientists do. The purpose of Science is to uncover empirical truth, which is undoubtedly very important for us in order to distinguish fact from myth or other falsehood. However, "Science" has only been around for a few hundred years, whereas Philosophy has been around for Millennia. Much of our fundamental philosophical thinking is derived from times pre-dating Caesar. Indeed the development of the Scientific Method came about through Philosophical means. Philosophy asks the questions: Science (mostly answers them). However, the question is often far more important than the answer. You need to understand how/why the question was asked in order to understand the significance of the answer. This is why Philosophy is far more important to the critical questions of life. How do we live? How do we treat others? Science can definitely help us sort through the details but cannot provide the answers to these most fundamental of questions. Philosophy provides some answers, correct or otherwise.

And Art? Well that's where we get our imagination from. And why do we need imagination? So we can ask the right questions. So Art, and Theatre in particular, is perhaps more important to truth than Science is (and yes, Science is VERY important in this regard). As a simple starting point, the denial that there is truth is itself either true, false, or meaningless. If it is true then it is self-contradictory and therefore meaningless. If it is false then there are truths that we can ascertain. If it is meaningless then we can use the claim as an opportunity to explore why someone might want to make the claim, and this might help our understanding of the complex issue of truth. Some claims are quite easily demonstrated to be either true or false. Other claims may hold some truth, as established by experience (and science e.g.) and the true elements need to be teased out from the false and the irrelevant. Some claims may hold no truth whatsoever, but represent some indirect aspect of the claimants experience and this may be worth the effort to examine, especially if the claimant shows some prospect of being open to demonstration of the truths relevant to their claim. Some claimants show little or no capacity to be.

Abel believes the old argument that "So long as I believe it to be true then it is true." Liars and conmen have been using it for a long time. Whereas theirs is the possibility of bias in regards to one’s personal experiences, especially when conflicted with the desire to remain the dominant or positive influence in a group encounter, the reality is that those people that have "forgotten" the events have really forgotten the lies they used that day to point the blame elsewhere. Those people also usually fall into the "Say sorry to Dog before I die" category. But then try desperately to make amends with the party/ies they wronged all those years ago.

This plays showed me there is trouble with this take because we're not as reasonable as we like to believe, and we're increasingly faced by unfathomable complexity. Digestible, easily communicated, 'truths' aren't really present at the level of politics, regardless of whether philosophers say truths are possible or not. Inevitably people misunderstand (I’m not sure how many people present in the audience misunderstood what was taking place in the play), and others who are aware of the difficulty of grasping truths, exclusively utter ambiguities, which is a fair way to behave considering they're liable to be crucified at the first opportunity. It's nonsense to believe that the social world can consists of established truths; it's only ever pursuit of 'truth', a larger consensus, satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the results, righteousness, rebellion, tribalism, and headaches.

The sooner we hand over responsibility to the algorithms the better. In the current world, truth is like art. I don't know what art is, but I know what I like. If truth depends on your like for it, or not, then I recommend John Berger's "Ways of Seeing". There is an objective way of looking at art, and there is an objective of determining truth. Those who cannot do that have blinders on, for both art and truth.

My impression is that Vicente Morais’ staging successfully embodies "post-truth", although we are not in a post-truth society. For that to be applicable, we would have to have lived through a truth society. What we have is challenge of establishment orthodoxy; the "truth" that the establishment has demanded be treated as truth no longer remains unverifiable. The mainstream media is suffering because it has demonstrated it cannot be trusted to tell anything approaching an honest description of our world. Rather than post-truth, we are experiencing multi-truth. The fun is in attempting to discover which truth is reality and this play wonderfully depicts this.

In a democracy, the shared understanding is the foundation. If we want to reduce and delay poisoning this foundation with harmful fantasies, we may have to come to some common understanding on how to check the extent of broadcasts and watch more stage plays. Something like, don't propagate any new information if it is not an experience had by someone of 2-3 degrees of separation from you. Perhaps it's just etiquette, like when telephones were introduced, we agreed that you ring somebody, wait for them to say "hello" or "ahoy" or acknowledge in some manner.

I like the ritual of going to the theatre in the centre of a city or town. There is a sense of excitement and anticipation as you converge with others who have made similar pilgrimages from their own neighbourhoods. A theatre in a suburb seems earthbound by comparison. Going round the corner is not an event. The best theatres tend to be blank spaces - like the best galleries - because they focus all the attention on the play. The old Victorian jewel box theatres can be very depressing: shabby, smelly, moldering, encumbered by the distant past, poor sight-lines etc. Mind you, when I was a teenager, I loved going to the Laura Alves Theatre, an historic old auditorium, which charged only peanuts per seat. I was born in Mouraria so this way one of my favourite lairs when it came to watching plays. Everything was painted red, green and gold as far as I recall. Going there as a fifteen, sixteen year old in the 1970s one experienced the same sort of frisson one might have expected going behind the velvet curtain of a brothel. That was some theatre. I had the same experience going to Casa do Coreto (Bandstand’s House) in Carnide to watch “A Chave Perdida”. Fond memories reenacted.

Performance needs the emotional reaction from the audience, and I think we ourselves benefit emotionally and intellectually from the face-to-face contact with the arts in all its manifestations. I know so many people who say they've never been to the theatre, etc. who feel it's "not for someone like me". Schools can break this attitude down and enable young people to realise the arts are exactly for them.

Bottom-line:

- As social animals, with understanding potential limited by our sense organs and brains, we need certain axioms to make sense to each other;

- Axioms are produced out of necessity and shaped out of experience. A man in a remote Amazon community can live a fulfilled life without knowing who the prime-minister of Portugal is;

- Gossip is a means of spreading axioms. Gossips take a trial-and-error approach to networking like our own neural networks. Some are reinforced and some fade;

- Not all reinforced axioms are facts; quite a lot are fantasies that persist owing to human interest in aesthetics (art, and music; it was a clever move on Álvaro Cordeiros’ part to juxtapose both Schönberg and Kandinsky in the play) and exercising emotions (joy, fear, anger, surprise and even guilt; Rita/Sónia was absolutely mesmerizing in the way she was able to show us the two extreme opposites of emotion);

- Before the internet, a trial-and-error branch of a gossip would hit about 5-7 people. What gets reinforced over time and what is dropped was shaped by the experience of people in each branch;

- After the internet, the branch can hit thousand to million nodes (people) easily. Many fantasies (harmful base ones as well as innocuous beautiful ones) survive along with facts. Plus, to rephrase McLuhan, the gossip branch is itself information. Google and Facebook are studying the patterns all the time; go watch a play instead.

NB: “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne” = On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.

Shitty Philosophy and Physics : “Time Reborn - From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe” by Lee Smolin

“I propose that time and its passage are fundamental and real and the hopes and beliefs about timeless truths and timeless realms are mythology.”

In “Time Reborn - From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe” by Lee Smolin

Impermanence, Buddhist style?

Buddhism seems to acknowledge the play of opposites I've referred to elsewhere.

Recognising the yin-yang nature of the universe, in order to claim there is constant 'flux' (fluidity, rather than change; a subtle difference) - or for argument's sake, change - Buddhists balance that by asserting a 'greater' reality - the one, eternal, stable, whole (a supposed 'deeper' reality).

Contradiction and paradox is near the heart of evidenced, reasoned contemplation?

As for Aristotle:

time is a measurement of change is a measurement of time.

Change makes time possible, and vice-versa.

In principle, it seems that time persists, even in conditions of perfect stillness.

Yet any attempt to conceive a temporal progression, absent all change, seems to lead us into perplexing self-contradictions: any attempt to imagine how such unchanging time-flow could be measured, requires changing. It seems that time must be more than change; yet remove change, and time vanishes!  But if time is just a means to measure change, then in principle, it should permit the possibility of a world where change is cyclical. Yet our understanding seems to limit time to a linear, one way progression.

Or does it?

Would a world where each day began the same as the previous one be conceivable? A world where, during 24 hours, everything that ever happens and could happen takes place? Alternatively, could a world be conceived of, in which everything changes every moment? Where NOTHING is the same from one moment to the next? How could time possibly apply to a world where there was nothing stable to measure change by?

Smolin talks of life lived in the moment: of time being a succession of moments.

But who, seriously, experiences life like that? To me, here, typing away, the present seems to persist. There's a smoothness, a constancy, and an openness about it. Smolin also claims that we must reconcile relativity theory and quantum mechanics - the micro and the macro - into one unifying theory.  But, when asked why - perhaps we must live with fact that they are, and always will be, irreconcilable? - he flounders. It seems this is simply a matter of faith for him! Yet, he also claims that the world physics says is 'real', is merely a mathematically modelled one. And that these models, rather than existing in some sense 'outside' our spatiotemporal world of experience actually emerges from it; We should realise that, attempting to apply (as, he claims, physicists do) abstract mathematical models - designed to describe local, experimentally conditioned phenomena - to reality as a whole, is erroneous. Cosmology needs different concepts than quantum physics uses on the micro, mathematically modelled scale.

Everywhere and anywhere, our existence always pre-supposes our existence.

To assert it in the sense you do is, as I've said elsewhere, an obvious (sic) truism.

When lots of things are happening, and we are fully engaged, time may seem to 'fly by'.

When bugger all things are happening, and we are disengaged, time may seem to drag.

When young and active, time seems to pass so slowly.

When old and inactive, time seems to pass so quickly

As Einstein showed, time is relative - to an observer; to speed; to distance. The effects of change may seem temporal, insofar as we see them in a linear sense, from our past to our future.

Yet, what is the present?

On reflection, it seems that there's only the past - which, as past, no longer exists; and the future, which is yet to exist.

The present, where things supposedly 'exist', are 'real', right now.

Is illusion.

If time must exist, then how can there ever be a present?

And, if there's no present, how can anything, let alone time, exist?

In spatiotemporal terms, if Smolin's take on the 'metaphysics' or 'cosmology' of current physics is reasonably accurate, it's more like a link - or a line - between (point) A and (point) B. (Insofar as we conceive it as a 'journey', that's down to our woefully limited intellectual/instinctive/sensible abilities: we are stuck as things within space-time, rather than observers outside it, able to see the greater reality: what's real (sic). What you imagine to be the signs of a journey through time, taking its toll (e.g. ageing) are 'really' more like signposts on a route. Or the sights along the way, when you go from Cornwall to London, say.

To us spacetime trapped beings, it’s a one-way journey. But from 'outside' spacetime, that temporal transformation is neither back or forward. It just IS. Fully formed. Mapped out. 'Change' is a concept arising out of our limited conceptual capacity to comprehend the 'big picture'. We put our faith in seemingly obvious, common sense views; yet so often, over time, science has exposed their erroneousness (It seemed so obvious that a smaller, lighter object would fall slower than a big heavy one; yet science proved this wrong).

Kant realised time was imposed on experience by minds; physics has seemingly 'proven' this (Einstein onward) through evidenced reasoning. (Though, of course, a comparatively few theoretical physicists - like Smolin - resist this 'consensus'). Of course, what you think physicists mean when they deny time, and what they really (sic) mean, may well differ.

It may be useful to substitute (best) "explain" for "exist".

Assuming 'time' fails to explain what common-sense assumes it does about reality, as far as physics is concerned. So, physics, post-Einstein, replaced it with 'space-time'. Time, like length, width and depth, is an idealised, mathematical dimension; something we conceptually construct to measure stuff. Of course, I'm playing devil’s advocate above; assuming for sake of argument that Smolin is correct, and that most theoretical physicists have rejected time's 'existence'.

Hence, everything is true and false; real and unreal.

Which lead me to a choice: if everything is isn't; and vice versa.

Then attempting to think anything is impossible; as one must always be looking to negate anything Smolin asserted.

And, if you manage to do that, then you have then to try to re-assert it.

Anyway, I saw relativity (or relativeness) as a possible way out of this.

'Everything that is true is false' smacks of absolutism.

But if all is true and all is false, perhaps that can be seen as:

Everything is partially true and partially false; to varying, and probably changing, degrees.

What we are doing, for the most part, may be distinguishing what seems (relatively) more true from what seems (relatively) more false.

IE: what we say is true, is really more true than false.

Relatively speaking. (Absolutely speaking, it's still as false as it is true).

But, 'cos I'm still a sucker for this philosophy shit, I thought it might be interesting to try to see everything in positive terms.

After all, when we deny something, we say sod-all about what is.

'He's not guilty. your honour."

"So who is? Somebody did it!"

If 'time' is not 'real'; what is it? What does it refer to?

As long as any word has any meaning; as long as it's utterance makes some sense to someone, then it exists as something more than merely an empty word.

I'd like answers.

But I've been compelled to ask questions from an early age.

"That kid won't let up. He's always asking why!"

Somewhere along the line, that seemed to change from "why" to "what".

What is?

Sod all, really.

But, 'unreally', everything imaginable, and more.

Seeing the world as made up by minds; as the work of imaginations; It sure helps trying to understand how so many people seem to believe such silly stuff.

From astrology, thru theologies, UFOs, conspiracy theories, ad infinitum.

Everything is made up; but some of it makes more (evidenced reasoned) sense than others.

What alternative to science does Smolin offer?

None!

Merely an alternative scientism.

Theoretical physicists, in the absence of experimental support for their theories, have understandably come to increasingly rely on mathematical models, on which to base their speculation on the possible nature of the universe. Smolin's response is an appeal to 'everyday intuition'; but that 'intuition', in his hands, maybe more akin to an earlier, pre-post (or even simply) modern, metaphysical ideology. He says he seeks to re-align physics with making falsifiable hypotheses; yet how is what he seems to offer any more open to such testability?

"Is time emergent or fundamental?"

That's more akin to "the disagreement" that "could hardly be more fundamental".

And what about space?

Smolin seems to accept that space is "unreal" (is emergent).

If given a choice between space or time, people would be more likely to 'intuitively' assume space existed, than time.

Smolin, in the simplified, distorted sense in which his speculation about a fundamental conception of time is presented here, would be proposing a pretty bog-standard and old-hat metaphysical realism (the universal 'time' has objective/absolute 'existence').

Dressing this up as "everyday intuition' hardly does him any favours; it's more-like a kiss of death. (Science typically progresses by defying intuition).

Check yourself before you wet yourself!

If it's 'outside' time (actually, that's 'outside' spacetime), it can hardly precede or succeed), can it?!

Such a theory, should it ever emerge, would unite quantum field theory with general relativity. Insofar as 'time' is 'unreal', how could it concern itself with a 'history', when history presupposes time?

Smoliin claims to have captured something of the essence of physics; minus the maths. If this is any indication, then it's also minus any sense, common or otherwise.  If Smolin is right - if he's being read right - then physics' study of the natural (material) world has lead it to largely posit ideal objects - mathematical models and speculative concepts derived from them - as if they are the constituents at that make up the material world's essence? Black holes, dark matter, electromagnetic fields, etc. are theoretical constructs - ideas - that are inferred and imagined, based on understandings of observed 'material' phenomena.

How is it inconsistently to be skeptical of something unless and until there is some necessary data? Necessary and sufficient would be nice but I'm enough of a realist and a seasoned experimentalist to know that is asking a lot. Just some at least indicative data. All I've had thrown at me is 'Theory' meaning hypotheses. A theory without data is just waffle. Darwin knew that, which is why “On The Origin of Species” is packed with data. He also spent years doing scientific grunt work to establish himself. His systematics of the barnacles is still the seminal work on the subject. Added to, amended by genetics but still sound, referred to science. He was the first to demonstrate what good worms did to soil. Some people think all he did was think up a nice theory then sit back. Darwin was a data man. Evolution came upon him in contact with the data just as it did with Wallace in the Indies. The Wallace line denoting the divide between Asian animals and plants and Australian animals and plants still exists, still carries his name.

AS HEINLEIN WOULD SAY. AGAIN, SHOW ME THE DATA!

Bottom-Line: Sadly, drink is consuming me - even now, I'm pissing blood, I should be drinking water, and here I am with a glass of booze. Like the smoker, putting a cig into a hole in his throat, as he approaches lung-cancer death? Nietzsche helped me 'realise' that everything true is false; Derrida, that everything false is (therefore) true.

NB: After the wonderful “The Trouble with Physics”, Smolin fell on his face with this one…

Motorcycle Emptiness: "The Book of Disquiet" by Fernando Pessoa

You'll admit I'm sure that many do indeed adopt nihilism/inner 'emptiness'/void gazing/ennui -- Motorcycle Emptiness for short -- as a social pose, as a way of attracting chums, sexual and otherwise. And this will of course continue no matter how many read Wallace or Lee Rourke or this here little chat.

So what I'm really driving at is this: what's the point -- literally; I'd really like to know -- of fiction (or art of any kind) that gazes into the void *and then keeps gazing*? Of what use is void-gazing writing to some impressionable victims? Let's not forget that Nietzsche is *not* recommending an overlong gaze into the abyss ('lest it also gaze into you'). And let's never forget that although Hamlet may peak with 'To be or not to be...' it does not *end* there.

Pessoa had a grand old time. Got through a bottle of wine most evenings, had a cushy civil service job where he was allowed to spend most of the time working on his private projects. He was friends with Aleister Crowley and I can only speculate about what they must have got up to. Honestly, we're talking about one of the world's great artists here! Too few know him outside of the Lusophone world. Surely after 100 years or so we can ready him safely enough.

It is not the glamour of ennui/emptiness that interests me; so the tears I find beautiful are those tears that Pessoa wrote onto the page - and those that were left behind in his trunk - and those he chose to ignore. I am interested in the beauty he saw in his mundane life. I am interested Pessoa's own intellectual sadness, yes. Not the actuality of it. How could anyone find despair beautiful?

Now, the 'meaninglessness' in Literature that interests me is something special: those voids, facades, created by the author. The fact that everything is lost; Blanchot hammering home the truism that once a writer has put pen to paper s/he has failed. Pessoa seemed, to me at least, fully aware that the very act of writing (not what is written) is meaningless, an illusion - hence his multitudinous personalities. For me the beauty I find in writing isn't necessarily what I read on the page, it's everything that is left, consciously or unconsciously, behind. For me the truth is never written. Nor can it ever be. Isn't that the epitome of all that is beautiful in Literature, yes?

I really don't think Pessoa is deconstructing Literature, although I feel he's revealing its translucency via playing with it's assumed rules, but it's a thorny one; on one level I'd argue that a writer is responsible only to themselves; however, I'd also argue that that self is the whole person, an adult with a full range of responsibility in the world. As such, the artist (writer) is responsible for looking squarely at the world and at their own responses to that world and for then making art that is true to what they see and that interrogates their responses. Not art that is hip, or art that will please an imagined readership, but art that is, on some fundamental level, true. The big problem is when a specific "stance" towards the world comes to be seen as the sole valid "artistic" position; when the would-be writer insists on being true to their idea of what art "should" be rather than accepting the responsibility. Worse still, they may decide that the stance they have adopted (which is, in effect, how they have chosen to respond to the world) is beyond question *because* it is "artistic".

So, the artist (writer) is responsible to her/him self only, but the whole self, the person who has friends and family who the would like to be happy, who requires clean air and wholesome food and a roof over their head, who has responsibilities to themselves and others, and who is always open to the notion that they could be wrong. Art (writing) that lives up to this responsibility (as opposed to looking for an audience or trying to be hip, for instance) is what I believe in.

Bottom-line: Pessoa wrote for himself, and, yes, heteronyms are irresponsible and lead to madness. Where's Ovid and Yeats by the way?

The Revelation of the Identical:"Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco

(My own copy)

"You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another; you cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple."

In "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco

I've always been a keen follower of Prof. Eco's books, both literary and academic. If there's one question I would like to ask him is this:

"What about the question of being, as the Greeks first raised it? Do you think Professor that this question is no longer a question, perhaps entirely dissolved by the sign and/or the 'language game'? Ontology dissolved by epistemology (in the modern era) and which is in turn also dissolved by the signs humans come up (post-modern era). William of Ockham, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein rule supreme -- matter closed. No question of being. Is that it, Professor?"

Anyone who hasn't read Foucault's Pendulum - please buy it today! I think that while the first chapter seems almost deliberately intended to put off the casual reader, once you get through that you find an incredibly absorbing plot, a totally immersive atmosphere, incredible amounts of research dressed in swathes of mystery, and above all some of the most fully realised characters I've ever seen. It also has some quite unbelievably good prose even in translation - the segment of book-within-a-book set in Prague (the bit with the golem, etc.) is astounding. And the ending is superb. Like much of his work (particularly the almost equally good “Baudolino”) it revolves around the conflict between truth and fiction, and the way Foucault addresses this is brilliant. Here's a man that's studied for decades, passing on choice concepts in story form over relatively few pages. It's not like trying to dive into Derrida or Heidegger!

(Bought in 1990)

Bottom-line: If I can give a piece of advice, anyone whjo reads this should concentrate on being introduced to the likes of the Count of Saint-Germain rather than obsessing over what "constopulosiously" might mean... Be grateful of the inclusion of Prester John in “Baudolino”, he didn't exist - but he sort of did... so you can set to inferring why it is we create such figures in our minds and apply that to other beliefs and interests (deities, physics, celebrities, modern art...). This is why I maintained his books are edifying rather than obscure. However, human lies and linguistic lies are of a different kind of complexity. The possibility of telling lies for their own sake with no other motive and the ability to tell lies to ourselves- and believe them- are what makes the difference between language and philosophy and a simple behavioural code. Indeed, perhaps language and philosophy are only possible because we can say things we know are not true and as a result of that imagine things that may or may not be true. Indeed - I have been through it 7 or 8 times. It's simply fascinating, alternately hilarious, erudite, and intensely moving. The 'long stretches' are only 'opaque' for those too dense to understand them, and these diversions throughout, are among the book's many highlights.

Nietzsche’s Metaphor: "The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications" by David Deutsch

(Original Review, 1988-05-30)

Perhaps it is worthwhile clearing up a few fundamentals here. Specifically, the concept of something complicated being created as opposed to evolved. Of course, consciousness has evolved and is a characteristic of the complex arrangement of entities whose properties are understood by physics. But, going from the basic laws governing the building blocks to the complex is currently way beyond anything dreamt of in systems theory, where biological simulation is hovering around the simple swim patterns of single celled flagellum bacteria. Before attempting to build something we try and understand it. That is, what aspects of the thing to focus on. What are the essentials? For example, the planetary orbits are described by their mass relative orientations and velocities. We don’t bother about their colour, smell or aesthetic properties. This is a canonical example of the great success of predictive science. When we come to other things, broadly termed complexes then we have a completely different situation. This is because of the problem of defining what we want to predict. To progress we have to get at something simple. Like a phase transition, a gross change in behaviour. But, what are we looking for in the human mind? What do we hope to find? This is a perfectly legitimate area of investigation, but we should be cognisant of the relative fruitfulness of different approaches. I’m reminded of Nietzsche’s metaphor where a huntsman sets of in pursuit of this elusive quarry. His dogs get separated each pursuing a different scent and the hunt has to be abandoned, as each dog’s lead is equally valid. We end up knowing more and more about less and less.

I am a little suspicious on the strong statement about the relation of computation to Physics. I am not aware that computation is fundamental to physics itself. The statement that given enough time and space any physical situation can be computed seems overstated. Even at the mundane levels of chaotic systems Nature 'solves' the physics uniquely and in real-time - the problems we have arise from the fact that we cannot in real-time acquire infinitely precise and infinitely covering representations of the physics and we cannot do the fully parallel calculations required (not even with more processors - we do not have analytic methods which solve for all degrees of freedom truly simultaneously). Consider n-body attraction - we have no analytic solution which emulates Nature - we do have approximations of course, which are good enough for everyday use.

Of course Penrose has also looked at this from another angle - specifically whether computation as a formalism can deliver the measurable/observable behaviour of the human mind. This is still controversial but for the moment is quite a strong position. More heuristically, Searle's chinese room poses multiple unresolved issues for the 'mind as computation' camp - precisely because it is a very good analogue to computation and is self-evidently a nonsense.

There are plenty of reasons to doubt the universality of computation and thus our ability to simulate organic and mental processes beyond the little toy models we have currently.

No objection to the possibility of AGI, nor to the author's positing of philosophical questions as central, nor to the history given of AGI attempts so far BUT, Professor Deutsch goes wrong, wrong, wrong with his very first sentence. The human brain has no capabilities at all. The human organism however has all the capabilities of thought ascribed to its brain AND capabilities of movement, action, speech which are in no way optional accessories. The only intelligence we know of has arisen exclusively in the context of beings which act and react in and against the world. You can emulate that in Turing machines all you like; and end up with an simulation.

The computer analogy for the organism, with its implicit partner of the disembodied brain, has been and remains profoundly misleading. Following the evidence we have - ourselves - the best prospect for AGI may be in robotics. There is no reason - other than carbon chauvinism - to suppose that a machine, with the ability to act and react in the world, cannot be conscious and intelligent. There is every reason to suppose that a computer programme cannot.

[2018 EDIT: I suggest looking in to the work of Robert Rosen rather than Deutsch's; Rosen "revealed" the underlying tacit assumptions of a state/phase-based physics and showed that biology requires entailment structures that are not present in this physics. Thus it is that biological organisms are not a mere subset of current physics, but are representative of complexities that require physics to be enlarged.]