Chaotic Logic: Language, Thought, and Reality from the Perspective of Complex Systems Science

by Ben Goertzel

This book summarizes a network of interrelated ideas which I have developed, off and on, over the past eight or ten years. The underlying theme is the psychological interplay of order and chaos. Or, to put it another way, the interplay of deduction and induction. I will try to explain the relationship between logical, orderly, conscious, rule-following reason and fluid, self­ organizing, habit-governed, unconscious, chaos-infused intuition. My previous two books, The Structure of Intelligence and The Evolving Mind, briefly touched on this relationship. But these books were primarily concerned with other SI with constructing a formal language for discussing mentality and its mechanization, and EM with exploring the role of evolution in thought. They danced around the edges of the order/chaos problem, without ever fully entering into it. My goal in writing this book was to go directly to the core of mental process, "where angels fear to tread" -- to tackle all the sticky issues which it is considered prudent to the nature of consciousness, the relation between mind and reality, the justification of belief systems, the connection between creativity and mental illness,.... All of these issues are dealt with here in a straightforward and unified way, using a combination of concepts from my previous work with ideas from chaos theory and complex systems science.

295 pages, Hardcover

First published July 31, 1994

Reviews

[Bria · Rating 3 out of 5]

From this book, I learned that the three people Ben Goertzel admires most when it comes to ideas about language, reality, and cognition are Nietzsche, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Ben Goertzel. While he may not agree with everything they say, it's clear that these three people, particularly the first and last, are geniuses who really had the right idea, even if the details were not quite right. Surprisingly enough, I found that there were plenty of interesting thoughts and suggestions and ideas nestled in between all the sorta-math that provided little or no information about the subjects at hand, but did manage to portray the fact that Ben Goertzel knows math real well and is super smart. Now, some of the suggestions he makes might be hard for the rest of us, who are not used to such enormously deep and radical ideas to swallow, but rest assured that with time, even those who are not Ben Goertzel might come to be able to appreciate just how brilliant a mind it must take to come up with such astounding theories. Also, Ben Goertzel is great.