Heaven in a Chip: Fuzzy Visions of Society and Science in the Digital Age - Softcover

Kosko, Bart

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0609805673 ISBN 13: 9780609805671

Publisher: Three Rivers Press, 2000

Synopsis

Would you still be you if a chip replaced your brain? Who draws the line in the digital age? Those with the most power? Does the digital age even have black-and-white parameters? Where does one country's Internet jurisdiction end and another's begin? Who owns the ocean or the moon -- or your genome blueprint? Bart Kosko sheds new insight on these questions and shows how a revolutionary way of thinking will affect every aspect of life from politics and genetics to warfare, technology, art, privacy, and even mortality itself.

About this title

Review

As the leading American proponent and theorist of the software-design philosophy known as fuzzy logic, Bart Kosko, author of Fuzzy Future: From Society and Science to Heaven in a Chip, can be expected to have high hopes for the discipline. And it's not like it hasn't lived up to some of them already. Forsaking the binary either/or at the heart of digital computing, fuzzy logic's emphasis on the shades of gray between true and false makes it a valuable way to program microchips that guide factories, cars, household appliances, and other gadgetry that works with the physical world's nonbinary facts. It also makes for a pretty slick philosophical end run around the yes-or-no logic that has been the basis of Western thought for the last couple of millennia.

But here Kosko announces that fuzzy logic is ready to do more. Taxes, voting rights, abortion, warfare, genetic engineering, deep physics, computer-generated art, the quest for transcendent posthuman immortality--all of these and more, he tells us, may in the future be transformed by the powerful techniques of fuzzy thinking. The overall result: less government, ignorance, poverty, death; more power to the people. This of course is exciting news, and that may explain why Kosko sometimes seems less than interested in nailing down the details of what fuzz has to do with any of it. So if it's an education in fuzziness you want, look elsewhere--at Kosko's earlier, more introductory Fuzzy Thinking perhaps. But for a vivid snapshot of fuzzy thinking at its most ambitious, jump right on in. --Julian Dibbell

From the Back Cover

"The best way to learn more about fuzz and its increasing applications, not only to technology but also to science, politics, and even the liberal arts, is to read [Heaven in a Chip]. Bart Kosko writes about it with unfuzzy skill and enthusiasm that makes his book a delight to read."         
-- Martin Gardner, editor of Great Essays in Science

"If you think that resolving ethical, legal, and political disputes is a matter of deciding where to draw the 'line,' think again. Bart Kosko's fascinating new book will convince you that it is the 'line' that's the problem."        
-- Prof. Ian Stewart, author of The Magical Maze

"The mind-boggling epic that is [Heaven in a Chip]."
-- Techweek

About this edition

• Publisher: Three Rivers Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0609805673
• ISBN 13: 9780609805671
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368