Tim Crane (1) (1962–)

Another book subtitle I forgot to read before starting. You know how some people experiment with marijuana or sex in college, or really get into Ayn Rand when they're a teen? Most people go through a phase, become adults, and grow out of it. A few, however, become philosophers and spend their lives trying to convince people that they are gainfully employed and actually contributing something of worth to society. I have near-zero use for what passes for philosophy today and less for philosophers, quite simply because I have yet to see anything of rational value to emerge from what I've come to consider to be a waste of intellect. Despite that, I read these books hoping for some potential modicums of logical thought. I am usually disappointed by the nonsense, and come away wondering how these people can sleep at night knowing that they are selling snake oil.

Touted as accessible to the general public, Crane does do a good job of filtering more of the normally deliberately obfuscatory jargon that the fuzzy sciences must resort to to hide their lack of substance. Actually, I'm being kind...while he relaxes the lexicon, he masterfully weaves such a circuitous Möbius band of nonsense that I doubt even he knew he was writing in circles.About the only thing that Crane makes sense of in this book is that psychology is at best, an approximate generalization of probable outcomes that might apply to some people. He tries, and fails (though an agonizingly long dissertation on the Turing machine), to make his case that artificial intelligence is impossible. Too many problems to address, I'll just offer this silliness:

"...[h]opes, beliefs, and desires and so on represent the world,..."

Um...the world "represents" the world. Hopes, beliefs, and desires have no effect on the world, though admittedly they do affect how one interacts with it.

I had hopes that my desire to exorcise irrational belief from the world might gain some ammunition through this work. So much for that.… (más)