Research Catalog

Conversations on mind, matter, and mathematics

Title: Conversations on mind, matter, and mathematics / Jean-Pierre Changeux, Alain Connes ; edited and translated by M. B. DeBevoise.
Author: Changeux, Jean-Pierre.
Publication: Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, [1995], ©1995.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	QA8.4 .C4313 1995	Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

Connes, Alain.

Description

xii, 260 pages : illustrations; 23 cm

Summary

In a wide-ranging series of conversations Jean-Pierre Changeux and Alain Connes discuss the development of the human brain as a function of natural selection and variation, debate the character of human intelligence (and the obstacles that stand in the way of simulating, modeling, or actually reproducing it by mechanical means), dispute the reasons for the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics in explaining the physical world, and differ over the sources of mathematical creativity.
In an epilogue they go on to inquire into the relation of mathematics and science to ethics, asking whether a code of human morality consistent with what is known about the structure and function of the human brain can be devised, and whether the "enlargement of human sympathies" hoped for by Darwin, Kropotkin, and others may be given a natural basis. This vivid record of profound disagreement, and, at the same time, passionate search for mutual understanding, follows in the modern tradition of Poincare, Turing, Hadamard, and von Neumann in probing the limits of human rationality and intellectual possibility.
Why order should exist in the world at all - and why it should be comprehensible by human beings - is the question that lies at the heart of these remarkable dialogues.

Uniform Title

Matière à pensée. English

Alternative Title

Matière à pensée.

Subjects

Note

Includes index.

Contents

1. Mathematics and the Brain -- 2. Plato as Materialist? -- 3. Nature Made to Order -- 4. The Neuronal Mathematician -- 5. Darwin among the Mathematicians -- 6. Thinking Machines -- 7. The Real and the Rational -- Epilogue: Ethical Questions.

ISBN

0691087598

LCCN

94037370

OCLC

31167178
ocm31167178

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries