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Title: Goodbye, Descartes : The End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of the Mind by Keith Devlin ISBN: 0-471-14216-6 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 20 December, 1996 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.43 (7 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: Rethinking the process of thinking
Comment: The astonishing thing about human communication is not that it sometimes fails but that failure is so rare. Given the complexities of context, facial expressions, tone, body movements, and grammar, all going in at least two directions, it is truly incredible that it works so well. As the author points out by example, he can write a sentence that no one else has ever created before, and yet there is no difficulty in determining what he means. Understanding human language is a situation where our obviously finite brains are capable of resolving an infinite number of scenarios. The examples given in this book make you appreciate just how much "computing" power there is in the human brain.
Many of the theories regarding the instinctive understanding of human language, independent of word order, are considered and often questioned. The gross shortcomings of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are also raised and used to demonstrate that there is now no effective model for how humans process data and make "rational" decisions. Despite all the original promise and hype, AI has been used to solve few problems and even some of the reported successes are clearly very weak when thoroughly examined. Therefore, the argument throughout the book is that there needs to be a new approach to the problems of cognition
The arguments are presented in a thoughtful, detailed, and understandable manner. There are times when the arguments do get technical, but they are few and can be skipped without disrupting the flow of the material. At the end, Devlin also argues for a radical rethinking of the last three thousand years of traditional reasoning that dates back to the Greek origins of logic. He uses the phrase "soft mathematics" to describe what he believes the answer to be. Unfortunately, or perhaps necessarily, he is quite vague as to what it is. Devlin only points out that it will be something quite different from the current rigorous reasoning.
Raising some profound and fascinating questions regarding fundamental shortcomings in understanding the most human of activities, Devlin is at his best. Whatever your field of interest or background, if you are interested in thinking about thinking, then you must decipher the squiggles that appear on these ages.

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission.

Rating: 2
Summary: Your results may vary
Comment: I notice that the other reviews of this book are all over the map. That distribution of opinion matches my own feelings. I found the first part of this book delightful and informative, as good as the author's previous book Mathematics: The Science of Patterns. The last part I found unreadable. Goodbye Descartes begins with a persuasive argument that intelligence is not computation and ends up speculating on what intelligence DOES involve. The latter is admittedly a next to impossible task, but the author's attempt to combine logic and sociology to form "soft mathematics" left me unimpressed. Overall, a disappointment.

Rating: 5
Summary: No review
Comment: My original review was erroneous. Many examples were counterintuitive, but it turns out they were correct. The book is an excellent exercise.

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