The Cambridge Quintet: A Work Of Scientific Speculation (Helix Books)

I entered college the year after publication of C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. It was required reading in my Freshman English class. Three years later I took my first upper division philosophy course (actually a graduate course) called "Philosophy of Mind," and I was introduced to Gilbert Ryle, Norman Malcolm and, most importantly, Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations remains the most well-thumbed book on my bookshelf. I read it at least yearly to sharpen my mind. And to remind myself that being smart can be fun. When I got to graduate school, I became enamored with Behaviorism and B.F. Skinner then I discovered neuropsychology and had a career. All of these influences came together when my university position allowed me to teach cognitive science.I'm retired now, but John Casti's The Cambridge Quintet, brought back all of these experiences. Reading it is pure fun, probably more so for someone of my age and background, who cut my intellectual teeth on the writings of the "quintet" and who wrestled with the same problems as they did for much of my professional career, including my post-psychology career as a novelist.The quintet consists of Charles Percy Snow, the host for the evening, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, mathematician Alan Turing, biologist B. S. Haldane and physicist Erwin Schrödinger. The setting is Christ's College, Cambridge. The year is 1949. Snow has been asked by his government to explore the idea of "thinking machines," an idea pioneered by Turing in Great Britain and by John von Neumann in the United States, by discussing it with a group of the U.K.'s greatest thinkers. To do so, he invites Wittgenstein, Turing, Haldane and Schrödinger for dinner at his alma mater, Cambridge.The author, John L. Casti, a mathematician and futurist who has authored numerous books, some scientific or mathematical, some historical and some fiction is well qualified and well-versed in the work of his quintet and the issues discussed in the book. He calls it a work of "scientific speculation," rather than a novel.Wittgenstein and Turing are two of my personal heroes. The first because he has given what I continue to believe is the most cogent analysis of what philosophy is about and what it should not be about that I have ever read. His statement, "The first mistake is to ask the question, the second is to try to answer it," sums up, for me, most of the speculative conversations that have been spoken or written. Turing was a brilliant mathematician whose "Turing Machine" provided the theoretical basis for the computer revolution. His "Turing Test," to determine if humans can distinguish the output of a computer from that of a human being is still regarded as the best test as to whether a computer can really think.Turing and Wittgenstein provide the tension for the evening. Snow is the mediator and the Haldane and Schrödinger provide input from their respective fields of science (and Schrödinger from his studies of Eastern philosophy). While Turing asserts that a machine that follows a digital computational set of operations to solve any problem can be described as "thinking," the others are not so sure. Wittgenstein is the most vehement in his objection, arguing that the term "thinking" is not appropriate for a computer. The others are not sure and question whether the machine's ability to do circumscribed operations, such as solve math problems or play chess, brings it any closer to the way humans think.Casti claims poetic license and pulls his arguments and even some of his science from the post-1949 period. An example is Wittgenstein's use of Searle's "Chinese Room" thought experiment, relabeled as the "Hieroglyphic Room," or Chomsky's argument for a deep structure of language and a special language acquisition device, which Turing introduces as an "organ of language" inherited in all humans. The discussion of computing, which is led by Turing, cites the work of Mucullogh and Pitts (1943) on neural nets but goes well beyond that into some of the connectionist models and experiments decades later.I was somewhat puzzled by Wittgenstein's implacable stance against Turing's position, based as it was on the philosopher's argument that it didn't capture what went on "inside" of a human when they were thinking. Wittgenstein, in his later work was one of the staunchest opponents to the claim that the essence of thought or language was what went on inside of a person, as opposed to what was evident in their behavior and subject to community influence and interpretation. In fact, for this reason, most behaviorists have claimed him as one of their own. But it is Turing who champions the behaviorist position, at least at some moments in the dinner conversation. He in fact, arrives at the conclusion that a computer could learn through the same kind of operant conditioning posited by behaviorists (he seems prescient here with regard to connectionist experiments with neural network learning, especially in the area of language).Casti throws a lot into the dinner time colloquy. The conversation ranges over culture, religion and evolution. Turing defends the evolutionary point of view by introducing an "inclusive fitness" type of idea to explain altruism. And Snow comes up with the concept of "reciprocal altruism." They are both ahead of their time.But Wittgenstein's point about language being learned as part of a "language game" within a community of speakers and the semantic aspects of language being socially determined, added to his claim that a computer would not have a community around it to give meaning to its behaviors may contain a kernel of the most telling criticism of Turing's position. The output of computers only makes sense in terms of the "culture" surrounding the humans who program it so that it fits into their community. In fact, the situations in which computers can actually solve problems or produce creative results is severely circumscribed to those mathematical or mathematical-like situations that do not involve a social community anything like the one in which humans solve problems and create responses everyday.The debate is inconclusive, although the tenor of the discussion, with Turing providing the earnest voice of logic and Wittgenstein (the logician) flying off the handle in exasperation, seems to favor a positive outcome for the "machines can think" position. Snow is not convinced but he, like this reader, was quite satisfied with vitality of the discussion and settled down to write his report to the government.The Cambridge Quintet was published in 1998. I only discovered it now. The debate is still alive, carried out by philosphers, roboticists, computer scientists, cognitive neuroscientists and fiction writers. We are not a lot closer to a computer that can mimic the thinking or behavior of a human than were these scientists and philosophers of the last century. But the gauntlet has been picked up and the work on designing such a computer continues. The technical details are much better defined today than in 1949 and, probably pleasing to Wittgenstein, the cultural implications of designing such a device have been explored in depth in both the popular and academic cultures. The most intriguing aspect of this debate is the subject of the "personhood" of computers if they could really think. Casti's dinner guests discuss the topic. Philip K. Dick has examined it in depth. An episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation was devoted to the question of whether "Data" the android on the Enterprise deserved the rights of a person or was just an object. While I enjoy these sic-fi speculations, it was refreshing to imagine what real scientists and real philosophers would have said back in 1949, as envisioned by John L. Casti. This book is a great treat for all those who have enjoyed the actual works of the Cambridge Quintet.

skillful imagination-a great cast of characters, the presentation of their viewpoints, imaginative interpolations to break up the flow of the arguments in a natural way

Casti has succeeded in producing a brief and highly readable introduction to the concepts of artificial intelligence. His Cambridge setting in the rooms once used by Darwin and at a time not long after the Second World War, his lifelike rendition of Haldane, Schrodinger, Snow, Turing and Wittgenstein, and the presentation of arguments over the course of a dinner make his `scientific speculation' highly readable. The play of personalities and the challenging yet potentially complementary perspectives of the diners develop towards a `feasibility study' on artificial intelligence. The discussion does not get bogged down as some expositions of artificial intelligence do.Casti's `Afterwards' casts the fictitious dinner discussion in a more contemporary context. The book's treatment of diverse topics, ranging across adaptive algorithms, awareness, language and development, and group selection, is summary yet contained, and will enable the reader to pursue topics as he or she wishes. The field of artificial intelligence has waxed and waned since Casti wrote this speculation, yet the basic issues have changed little.

I love this book and wanted to have my friends enjoy it. It's a beautiful and very interesting dinner conversation among five great science men!

...namely, a novice. There's nothing here that philosophers of mind, linguists, and computer scientists -- in short, anyone who has even loosely followed the debates surrounding machine intelligence -- is likely to find striking. But for interested lay readers who have yet to ponder the many fascinating questions to do with this topic, TCQ is an entertaining and interesting read. Well worth a couple hours' investment of time.

I confess a weakness for this kind of format, a fictional situation in which historical figures meet around a table and argue their various points of view face-to face. This short book is an especially nice example of the genre, with the protagonists meeting around the dinner table in Cambridge on a stormy English night in 1949. It recalls a certain variety of detective story, and in a way that's what it is. But the essential mystery, what it means to be a thinking human being, is not finally solved.Many of the key issues connected with language, thought, and the possibilities for machine intelligence are touched on in these conversations, giving the reader a good sense of the kinds of philosophical and technical questions that remain unresolved even today. The mode of presentation is probably about as entertaining a one as possible for an introduction to this kind of material. At a minimum, I think your reaction to the book will tell you whether you have enough interest in the subject matter to pursue it much further. But even if you don't, you will have encountered a great many stimulating ideas in these pages. And you will know enough not to have to sit there like a stupid lump should the subject of AI (Artificial Intelligence) come up in conversation. The book does not go as far as some reviewers would have liked, but I think it nicely does the introductory overview job it set out to do.My only quibble is that while Chomsky's later ideas about language are presented (Casti admits the anachronism as a way to get certain ideas into the conversation), behavioral psychology is not given the benefit of a similar updating. Skinner's work on verbal behavior was quite sophisticated, much akin to the view here put forth by Wittgenstein, and far from the old Watsonian stimulus-response version of behaviorism used as a foil in the book. That was a difference, by the way, that Chomsky never managed to comprehend.