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Leonardo da Vinci is regarded as a "Renaissance man" and is one of the most recognisable polymaths.

A polymath (Greek: πολυμαθής, polymathēs, "having learned much")^[1] is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas. In less formal terms, a polymath (or polymathic person) may simply be someone who is very knowledgeable. Most ancient scientists were polymaths by today's standards.^[2]

The common term Renaissance man is used to describe a person who is well educated or who excels in a wide variety of subjects or fields.^[3] The concept emerged from the numerous great thinkers of that era who excelled in multiple fields of the arts and science, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo Galilei, Copernicus and Francis Bacon; the emergence of these thinkers was likewise attributed to the then rising notion in Renaissance Italy expressed by one of its most accomplished representatives, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472): that "a man can do all things if he will."^[4] It embodied the basic tenets of Renaissance humanism, which considered humans empowered, limitless in their capacities for development, and led to the notion that people should embrace all knowledge and develop their capacities as fully as possible. Thus the gifted people of the Renaissance sought to develop skills in all areas of knowledge, in physical development, in social accomplishments, and in the arts. The term has since expanded from original usage and has been applied to other great thinkers before and after the Renaissance such as Aristotle, Johann Goethe, and Isaac Newton.

Related terms[link]

Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval polymath, shown dictating to her scribe in an illumination from Liber Scivias.

A different term for the secondary meaning of polymath is Renaissance man or woman (a term first recorded in written English in the early 20th century).^[5] Other similar terms also in use are Homo Universalis (Latin) and Uomo Universale (Italian), which translate to "universal person" or "universal man". These expressions derived from the ideal in Renaissance Humanism that it was possible to acquire a universal learning^[6] in order to develop one's potential, (covering both the arts and the sciences^[7] and without necessarily restricting this farewell learning to be the academic fields). When someone is called a Renaissance man or woman today, it is meant that they do not have only broad interests or a superficial knowledge of several fields, but rather that their knowledge is profound and often that they also have proficiency or accomplishments in at least some of these fields and in some cases even at a level comparable to the proficiency or the accomplishments of an expert.^[8] The related term Generalist is used to contrast this general approach to knowledge to that of the specialist. The expression Renaissance person today commonly implies only intellectual or scholastic proficiency and knowledge and not necessarily the more universal sense of "learning" implied by Renaissance humanism. Note, however, that some dictionaries use the term "Renaissance man" as roughly synonymous with polymath in the first meaning, to describe someone versatile with many interests or talents,^[9] while others recognize a meaning restricted to the Renaissance era and more closely related to Renaissance ideals.

A more colloquial term for such a person would be a jack of all trades, though this often refers to skill and not necessarily knowledge. The term "jack of all trades" also occasionally has negative connotation (see, for instance, jack of all trades, master of none); such a person may be labeled as a dilettante, while "polymath" typically has a positive connotation.

The term Universal Genius is also used, taking Leonardo da Vinci as a prime example again. The term seems to be used especially when a Renaissance man has made historical or lasting contributions in at least one of the fields in which he was actively involved, and when he had a universality of approach. Despite the existence of this term, a polymath may not necessarily be classed as a genius; and certainly a genius may not display the breadth of knowledge to qualify as a polymath. Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Marie Curie are examples of people widely viewed as geniuses, but who are not generally considered to be polymaths.

Renaissance ideal[link]

Many notable polymaths lived during the Renaissance period, a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th through the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. They had a rounded approach to education that was typical of the ideals of the humanists of the time. A gentleman or courtier of that era was expected to speak several languages, play a musical instrument, write poetry, and so on, thus fulfilling the Renaissance ideal. The idea of a universal education was pivotal to achieving polymath ability, hence the word university was used to describe a seat of learning. At this time universities did not specialize in specific areas, but rather trained their students in a broad array of science, philosophy and theology. This universal education, as such, gave them a grounding from which they could continue into apprenticeship to a Master of a specific field. It is important to note that a university education was highly regarded. A person was not considered to need this broad knowledge to apprentice as a carpenter, but to apprentice in the sciences or philosophy it contributed hugely to their being able to comprehend the universe as it was understood at the time. During the Renaissance, Baldassare Castiglione, in his guide The Book of the Courtier, wrote about how an ideal courtier should have polymathic traits.^[10]

Castiglione's guide stressed the kind of attitude that should accompany the many talents of a polymath, an attitude he called "sprezzatura". A courtier should have a detached, cool, nonchalant attitude, and speak well, sing, recite poetry, have proper bearing, be athletic, know the humanities and classics, paint and draw and possess many other skills, always without showy or boastful behavior, in short, with "sprezzatura". The many talents of the polymath should appear to others to be performed without effort, in an unstrained way, almost without thought. In some ways, the gentlemanly requirements of Castiglione recall the Chinese sage, Confucius, who far earlier depicted the courtly behavior, piety and obligations of service required of a gentleman. The easy facility in difficult tasks also resembles the effortlessness inculcated by Zen, such as in archery where no conscious attention, but pure spontaneity, produces better and more noble skill. For Castiglione, the attitude of apparent effortlessness should accompany great skill in many separate fields. In word or deed the courtier should "avoid affectation ... (and) ... practice ... a certain sprezzatura ... conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it".^[10][11]

This Renaissance ideal differed slightly from the "polymath" in that it involved more than just intellectual advancement. Historically (roughly 1450–1600) it represented a person who endeavored to "develop his capacities as fully as possible" (Britannica, "Renaissance Man") both mentally and physically, and, as Castiglione suggests, without "affectation".^[10] For example, being an accomplished athlete was considered integral and not separate from education and learning of the highest order. Leon Battista Alberti, who was a Roman Catholic priest, architect, painter, poet, scientist, mathematician, inventor, and sculptor, was in addition a skilled horseman and archer.^{[citation needed]}

Renaissance men[link]

The list above provides examples of notable polymaths (in the secondary meaning only, that is, Renaissance men). Caution is necessary when interpreting the word polymath (in the second meaning or any of its synonyms) in a source, since there is always ambiguity of what the word denotes. Also, when a list of subjects in relation to the polymath is given, such lists often seem to imply that the notable polymath was reputable in all fields, but the most common case is that the polymath made his reputation in one or two main fields where he had widely recognized achievements, and that he was merely proficient or actively involved in other fields, but, once again, not necessarily with achievements comparable to those of renowned experts of his time in these fields. The list does not attempt to be comprehensive or authoritative in any way. The list also includes the Hakeem of the Islamic Golden Age (also known as the "Islamic Renaissance"), and other polymaths from other parts of the world.

Polymath and polyhistor compared[link]

Many dictionaries of word origins list these words as synonyms or, as words with very similar meanings. Thomas Moore took the words as corresponding to similarly erudite "polys" in one of his poems titled The Devil Among Scholars:^[12]

Off I fly, careering far
In chase of Pollys, prettier far
Than any of their namesakes are
—The Polymaths and Polyhistors,
Polyglots and all their sisters.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the words mean practically the same; "the classical Latin word polyhistor was used exclusively, and the Greek word frequently, of Alexander Polyhistor", but polymathist appeared later, and then polymath. Thus today, regardless of any differentiation they may have had when originally coined, they are often taken to mean the same thing.

The root terms histor and math have similar meanings in their etymological antecedents (to learn, learned, knowledge), though with some initial and ancillarily added differing qualities. Innate in historíā (Greek and Latin) is that the learning takes place via inquiry and narrative. Hístōr also implies that the polyhistor displays erudition and wisdom. From Proto-Indo-European it shares a root with the word "wit". Inquiry and narrative are specific sets of pedagogical and research heuristics.

Polyhistoric is the corresponding adjective. The word polyhistory (meaning varied learning), when used, is often derogatory.

Notable polymaths[link]

Shen Kuo was a polymathic Chinese scientist and statesman of the Song Dynasty.

A number of people have been described as "polymaths" by reliable sources, fulfilling the primary definition of the term, although there may not be expert consensus that each is a prime example in the secondary meaning, as "Renaissance men" and "universal geniuses" (see the list of renaissance men above for prime examples of "renaissance men" or "universal geniuses").

Other uses of "polymath"[link]

In Britain, phrases such as "polymath sportsman", "sporting polymath", or simply "polymath" are occasionally used in a restricted sense to refer to athletes that have performed at a high level in several very different sports. (One whose accomplishments are limited to athletics would not be considered to be a "polymath" in the usual sense of the word). Examples would include:

• Howard Baker – "Similar claims to the title of sporting polymath could be made for Howard Baker" (who won high jump titles, and played cricket, football, and water polo):^[13]
• Maxwell Woosnam – "Sporting polymath is a full-time post..."^[14]

The term can also be used loosely in other ways, for example, Rolf Harris (whose fame has come as a popular artist, television presenter and singer) has also been described by the Daily Mail as "the People's Polymath".^[15]

See also[link]

• Competent man
• List of people who have been called a "polymath"
• Opsimath
• Philomath
• Polyglot (person)
• Polymath (novel)

References and notes[link]

Further reading[link]

• Frost, Martin, "Polymath: A Renaissance Man"
• Mirchandani, Vinnie, The New Polymath: Profiles in Compound-Technology Innovations", John Wiley & Sons, 2010

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Douglas R. Hofstadter
Hofstadter in Bologna, Italy, in March 2002
Born	(1945-02-15) February 15, 1945 (age 67) New York, New York
Occupation	Professor of cognitive science
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Stanford University (B.S.), University of Oregon (Ph.D)
Period	1979–present
Subjects	Cognitive science, philosophy of mind, translation, analogy-making

Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979. It won both the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction^[1][2] and a National Book Award for Science.^[3][a]

Early life and education[link]

Hofstadter was born in New York City, the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. He grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where his father was a professor, and he attended the International School of Geneva in 1958–1959. He graduated with Distinction in Mathematics from Stanford University in 1965. He continued his education and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975.

Academic career[link]

Hofstadter is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition which consists of himself and his graduate students, forming the "Fluid Analogies Research Group" (FARG).^[4] He was initially appointed to the Indiana University's Computer Science Department faculty in 1977, and at that time he launched his research program in computer modeling of mental processes (which at that time he called "artificial intelligence research", a label that he has since dropped in favor of "cognitive science research"). In 1984, he moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was hired as a professor of psychology and was also appointed to the Walgreen Chair for the Study of Human Understanding. In 1988 he returned to Bloomington as "College of Arts and Sciences Professor" in both cognitive science and computer science, and also was appointed adjunct professor of history and philosophy of science, philosophy, comparative literature, and psychology, but he states that his involvement with most of these departments is nominal.^[5][6][7] In April 2009 Hofstadter was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences^[8] and a member of the American Philosophical Society.^[9]

Hofstadter's many interests include music, visual art, the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation and mathematics.

At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, he co-authored, with Melanie Mitchell, a computational model of "high-level perception" – Copycat – and several other models of analogy-making and cognition, including the Tabletop project, co-developed with Robert M. French. The Copycat project was subsequently extended under the name "Metacat" by Hofstadter's doctoral student James Marshall.^[10] The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model the act of artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models are Phaeaco (implemented by Harry Foundalis) and SeqSee (Abhijit Mahabal), which model high-level perception and analogy-making in the microdomains of Bongard problems and number sequences, respectively, as well as George (Francisco Lara-Dammer), which models the processes of perception and discovery in triangle geometry.^[11][12][13]

Both inside and outside his professional work, Hofstadter is driven by a pursuit of beauty. He seeks beautiful mathematical patterns, beautiful explanations, beautiful typefaces, beautiful sonic patterns in poetry, and so forth. Hofstadter has said of himself, "I'm someone who has one foot in the world of humanities and arts, and the other foot in the world of science." He has had several exhibitions of his artworks in various university art galleries. These shows have featured large collections of his gridfonts, his ambigrams (pieces of calligraphy created with two readings, either of which is usually obtained from the other by rotating or reflecting the ambigram, but sometimes simply by "oscillation", like the Necker Cube or the rabbit/duck figure of Joseph Jastrow), and his "Whirly Art" (music-inspired visual patterns realized using shapes based on various alphabets from India). (The term "ambigram" was invented by Hofstadter in 1984 and has since been taken up by many ambigrammists all over the world.)^[14]

Hofstadter collects and studies cognitive errors (largely, but not solely, speech errors), "bon mots" (spontaneous humorous quips), and analogies of all sorts, and his long-time observation of these diverse products of cognition, and his theories about the mechanisms that underlie them, have exerted a powerful influence on the architectures of the computational models developed by himself and FARG members.^[15]

All FARG computational models share certain key principles, among which are: that human thinking is carried out by thousands of independent small actions in parallel, biased by the concepts that are currently activated; that activation spreads from activated concepts to less activated "neighbor concepts"; that there is a "mental temperature" that regulates the degree of randomness in the parallel activity; that promising avenues tend to be explored more rapidly than unpromising ones. FARG models also have an overarching philosophy that all cognition is built from the making of analogies. The computational architectures that share these precepts are called "active symbols" architectures.

Hofstadter's thesis about consciousness, first expressed in Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB) but also present in several of his later books, is that it is an emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain. In GEB he draws an analogy between the social organization of a colony of ants and the mind seen as a coherent "colony" of neurons. In particular, Hofstadter claims that our sense of having (or being) an "I" comes from the abstract pattern he terms a "strange loop", which is an abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as audio and video feedback, and which Hofstadter has defined as "a level-crossing feedback loop". The prototypical example of this abstract notion is the self-referential structure at the core of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Hofstadter's 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop carries his vision of consciousness considerably further, including the idea that each human "I" is distributed over numerous brains, rather than being limited to precisely one brain.^[16]

Hofstadter's writing is characterized by an intense interaction between form and content, as is exemplified by the 20 dialogues in GEB, many of which simultaneously talk about and imitate strict musical forms used by Bach, such as canons and fugues. Most of Hofstadter's books are characterized by some kind of structural alternation: in GEB between dialogues and chapters, in The Mind's I between selections and reflections, in Metamagical Themas between Chapters and Postscripts, and so forth. Both in his writing and in his teaching, Hofstadter stresses the concrete, constantly using examples and analogies, and avoids the abstract. Typical of the courses he teaches is his seminar "Group Theory and Galois Theory Visualized", in which abstract mathematical ideas are rendered as concretely as possible. He puts great effort into making ideas clear and visual, and asserts that when he teaches, if his students do not understand something, it is never their fault but always his own.

Hofstadter is passionate about languages. He has studied many of them, and speaks them to varying degrees. In addition to English, his mother tongue, he speaks French and Italian fluently (the language spoken at home with his children is Italian). At various times in his life, he has studied (in descending order of level of fluency reached) German, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Mandarin, Dutch, Polish, and Hindi.^{[citation needed]} His love of sounds pushes him to strive to minimize, and ideally get rid of, any foreign accent.

Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language is a long book devoted to language and translation, especially poetry translation, and one of its leitmotifs is a set of some 88 translations of "Ma Mignonne", a highly constrained poem by 16th-century French poet Clément Marot. In this book, Hofstadter jokingly describes himself as "pilingual" (meaning that the sum total of the varying degrees of mastery of all the languages that he's studied comes to 3.14159...), as well as an "oligoglot" (someone who speaks "a few" languages).^[17][18]

In 1999, the bicentennial year of Russian poet and writer Alexander Pushkin, Hofstadter published a verse translation of Pushkin's classic novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin. It is highly constrained and filled with many types of sonic pattern. Aside from Eugene Onegin, Hofstadter has translated many other poems (always respecting their formal constraints), and two other novels (in prose): La Chamade (That Mad Ache) by French writer Françoise Sagan, and La Scoperta dell'Alba (The Discovery of Dawn) by Walter Veltroni, the then head of the Partito Democratico in Italy. The Discovery of Dawn was published in 2007, and That Mad Ache was published in 2009, bound together with Hofstadter's essay Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation.

Public image[link]

Hofstadter has said that he feels "uncomfortable with the nerd culture that centers on computers". He admits that "a large fraction [of his audience] seems to be those who are fascinated by technology", but when it was suggested that his work "has inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence" he replied that he was pleased about that, but that he himself has "no interest in computers."^[19][20] In that interview he also mentioned a course he has twice given at Indiana University, in which he took a "skeptical look at a number of highly-touted AI projects and overall approaches."^[7] For example, upon the defeat of Kasparov by Deep Blue, he commented that "It was a watershed event, but it doesn't have to do with computers becoming intelligent".^[21]

Provoked by predictions of a technological singularity (the hypothetical moment at which artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence), Hofstadter has both organized and participated in several public discussions of the topic. At Indiana University in 1999 he organized such a symposium, and in April 2000, he organized a larger symposium entitled "Spiritual Robots" at Stanford University, in which he moderated a panel consisting of Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Kevin Kelly, Ralph Merkle, Bill Joy, Frank Drake, John Holland, John Koza. Hofstadter was also an invited panelist at the first Singularity Summit, held at Stanford in May 2006. Hofstadter expressed doubt about the likelihood of the singularity coming to pass in the foreseeable future.^{[22][23][24][25][26][27]}

In April 2009, when asked about his Wikipedia article, he commented, "[It] is filled with inaccuracies, and it kind of depresses me." When asked why he didn't correct it, he replied, "The next day someone will fix it back."^[28] In Aug. 2011 Hofstadter said he is happy with the article and the only inaccurate part of his Wikipedia entry was the previous sentence because the inaccuracies were subsequently fixed.^{[citation needed]}

In 1988 Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos created a docudrama about Hofstadter and his ideas entitled Victim of the Brain based on The Mind's I. It includes interviews with Hofstadter about his work.^[29]

In 2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke's first sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 is described by Dr. Chandra as being caught in a "Hofstadter-Möbius loop".

Hofstadter's book Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought was the first book ever sold by Amazon.com.^[30]

Columnist[link]

When Martin Gardner retired from writing his "Mathematical Games" column for Scientific American magazine, Hofstadter succeeded him in 1981–1983 with a column entitled Metamagical Themas (an anagram of "Mathematical Games"). An idea he introduced in one of these columns was the concept of "Reviews of This Book", a book containing nothing but cross-referenced reviews of itself which has an online implementation.^[31] One of Hofstadter's columns in Scientific American concerned the damaging effects of sexist language, and two chapters of his book Metamagical Themas are devoted to that topic, one of which is a biting analogy-based satire entitled "A Person Paper on Purity in Language", in which the reader's presumed revulsion at racism and racist language is used as a lever to motivate an analogous revulsion at sexism and sexist language.^[32] Another column reported on the discoveries made by University of Michigan professor Robert Axelrod in his computer tournament pitting many iterated prisoner's dilemma strategies against each other, and a follow-up column discussed a similar tournament that Hofstadter and his graduate student Marek Lugowski organized. The "Metamagical Themas" columns ranged over many themes, and included, to name just three, one on patterns in Frederic Chopin's piano music (particularly the études), another on the concept of superrationality (choosing to cooperate when the other party/adversary is assumed to be equally intelligent as oneself), and one on the self-modifying game of Nomic, based on the way in which the legal system modifies itself, and developed by philosopher Peter Suber.^[33]

Personal life[link]

Hofstadter was married to Carol Ann Brush. They met in Bloomington, and married in Ann Arbor in 1985. They had two children, Danny and Monica. Carol died in 1993 from the sudden onset of a brain tumor – glioblastoma multiforme – when their children were five and two. The Carol Ann Brush Hofstadter Memorial Scholarship for Bologna-bound Indiana University students was established in 1996 in her name.^[34] Hofstadter's book Le Ton beau de Marot is dedicated to their two children and its dedication reads "To M. & D., living sparks of their Mommy's soul".

Hofstadter has composed numerous pieces for piano, and a few for piano and voice. He created an audio CD with the title DRH/JJ, which includes all these compositions performed primarily by pianist Jane Jackson, but with a few performed by Brian Jones, Dafna Barenboim, Gitanjali Mathur and himself.^[35]

Hofstadter is related by marriage to the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould: Hofstadter's paternal aunt was married to Gould's maternal uncle.^{[citation needed]}

The dedication for I Am A Strange Loop is: "To my sister Laura, who can understand, and to our sister Molly, who cannot."^[36] Hofstadter explains in the preface that his younger sister Molly never developed the ability to speak or understand language.^[37]

Hofstadter is a vegan.^[38]

Published works[link]

Books[link]

The books published by Hofstadter are (the ISBNs refer to paperback editions, where available):

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (ISBN 0-465-02656-7) (1979)
• Metamagical Themas (ISBN 0-465-04566-9) (collection of Scientific American columns and other essays, all with postscripts)
• Ambigrammi: un microcosmo ideale per lo studio della creatività (ISBN 88-7757-006-7) (in Italian only)
• Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (ISBN 0-465-02475-0)
• Rhapsody on a Theme by Clement Marot (ISBN 0-910-15311-6) (1995, published 1996; volume 16 of series The Grace A. Tanner Lecture in Human Values)
• Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (ISBN 0-465-08645-4)
• Eugene Onegin: A Novel Versification (ISBN 0-465-02094-1)
• I Am a Strange Loop (ISBN 0-465-03078-5) (2007)
• The Discovery of Dawn (ISBN 9780847831098) (2007) (a translation of a novel by Walter Veltroni)
• That Mad Ache, co-bound with Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation (ISBN 9780465010981) (2009)
• Surfaces and Essences, co-authored with Emmanuel Sander (ISBN 0465018475) (expected on Sept. 11, 2012)

Papers[link]

Hofstadter wrote, among many others, the following papers:

• "Energy levels and wave functions of Bloch electrons in rational and irrational magnetic fields", Phys. Rev. B 14 (1976) 2239.
• "A non-deterministic approach to analogy, involving the Ising model of ferromagnetism", in E. Caianiello (ed.), The Physics of Cognitive Processes. Teaneck, NJ: World Scientific, 1987.
• "To Err is Human; To Study Error-making is Cognitive Science" (co-authored by David J. Moser), Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, 1989, pp. 185-­215.
• "Speechstuff and thoughtstuff: Musings on the resonances created by words and phrases via the subliminal perception of their buried parts", in Sture Allen (ed.), Of Thoughts and Words: The Relation between Language and Mind. Proceedings of the Nobel Symposium 92, London/New Jersey: World Scientific Publ., 1995, 217-267.
• "On seeing A's and seeing As", Stanford Humanities Review Vol. 4, No. 2 (1995) pp. 109–121.
• "Analogy as the Core of Cognition", in Dedre Gentner, Keith Holyoak, and Boicho Kokinov (eds.) The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press/Bradford Book, 2001, pp. 499–538.

Hofstadter also wrote over 50 papers that were published through the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition.^[39]

Involvement in other books[link]

Hofstadter wrote forewords for or edited the following books:

• The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (co-edited with Daniel Dennett) (ISBN 0-465-03091-2 and ISBN 0-553-01412-9) (ISBN 0-553-34584-2) 1981
• Sparse Distributed Memory by Pentti Kanerva (Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1988). (ISBN 0262111322)
• Are Quanta Real? A Galilean Dialogue by J.M. Jauch (ISBN 0-253-20545-X) 1989 Indiana University Press; Hofstadter wrote the foreword.
• Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. (Preface)
• Gödel's Proof (2002 revised edition) by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, edited by Hofstadter (ISBN 0-8147-5816-9). In the foreword, Hofstadter explains that the book (originally published in 1958) exerted a profound influence on him when he was young.
• Who invented the computer? The legal battle that changed computing history. (2003) by Alice Rowe Burks.
• Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker by Christof Teuscher (Editor)
• Jason Salavon: Brainstem Still Life (ISBN 981-05-1662-2) 2004 (Introduction)
• Masters of Deception: Escher, Dali & the Artists of Optical Illusion 2004 by Al Seckel. Hofstadter wrote the foreword.
• King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry by Siobhan Roberts, Walker and Company, 2006. Hofstadter wrote the foreword.

Students[link]

Some of Hofstadter's former students include:

• David Chalmers – philosopher of mind
• Harry Foundalis – creator of Phaeaco, an architecture to solve Bongard problems^{[citation needed]}
• Robert M. French – cognitive scientist
• Scott A. Jones – inventor of voicemail
• Melanie Mitchell – computer scientist and complexity theorist

See also[link]

• American philosophy
• BlooP and FlooP
• Egbert B. Gebstadter
• Hofstadter's butterfly
• Hofstadter's law
• List of American philosophers
• Platonia dilemma
• Hofstadter points

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Douglas Hofstadter

• Stanford University Presidential Lecture - site dedicated to Hofstadter and his work
• List of publications from the DBLP Bibliography Server.
• Profile at c2.com
• Profile at Resonance Publications
• NF Reviews - bibliographic page with reviews of several of Hofstadter's books
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk

This article's lead section may not adequately summarize its contents. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of the article's key points. (May 2012)

Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil
Born	(1948-02-12) February 12, 1948 (age 64) Queens, New York, United States
Occupation	Author, entrepreneur and futurist
Spouse	Sonya R. Kurzweil
Children	Ethan, Amy

Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (/ˈkɜrzwaɪl/ KURZ-wyl; born February 12, 1948) is an American author, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.

Life, inventions, and business career[link]

Early life[link]

Ray Kurzweil grew up in the New York City borough of Queens. He was born to secular Jewish parents who had escaped Austria just before the onset of World War II, and he was exposed via Unitarian Universalism to a diversity of religious faiths during his upbringing. His father was a musician and composer and his mother was a visual artist. His uncle, an engineer at Bell Labs, taught young Ray the basics of computer science.^[1] In his youth, he was an avid reader of science fiction literature. In 1963, at age fifteen, he wrote his first computer program.^[2] Later in high school he created a pattern-recognition software program that analyzed the works of classical composers, and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles. In 1965, he was invited to appear on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret, where he performed a piano piece that was composed by a computer he also had built.^[3] Later that year, he won first prize in the International Science Fair for the invention;^[4] he was also recognized by the Westinghouse Talent Search and was personally congratulated by President Lyndon B. Johnson during a White House ceremony.

Mid-life[link]

In 1968, during his sophomore year at MIT, Kurzweil started a company that used a computer program to match high school students with colleges. The program, called the Select College Consulting Program, was designed by him and compared thousands of different criteria about each college with questionnaire answers submitted by each student applicant. When he was 20, he sold the company to Harcourt, Brace & World for $100,000 (roughly $500,000 in 2006 dollars) plus royalties.^[5] He obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Literature in 1970 from MIT.

In 1974, Kurzweil started the company Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. and led development of the first omni-font optical character recognition system—a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font. Before that time, scanners had only been able to read text written in a few fonts. He decided that the best application of this technology would be to create a reading machine, which would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them aloud. However, this device required the invention of two enabling technologies—the CCD flatbed scanner and the text-to-speech synthesizer. Development of these technologies was completed at other institutions such as Bell Labs, and on January 13, 1976, the finished product was unveiled during a news conference headed by him and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind. Called the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the device covered an entire tabletop. It gained him mainstream recognition: on the day of the machine's unveiling, Walter Cronkite used the machine to give his signature soundoff, "And that's the way it is, January 13, 1976." While listening to The Today Show, musician Stevie Wonder heard a demonstration of the device and purchased the first production version of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, beginning a lifelong friendship between himself and Kurzweil.

According to former Kurzweil Computer Products employees, the Kurzweil Reading Machine's designer was engineer Richard Brown, a KCP employee at the time^{[citation needed]}.

Kurzweil's next major business venture began in 1978, when Kurzweil Computer Products began selling a commercial version of the optical character recognition computer program. LexisNexis was one of the first customers, and bought the program to upload paper legal and news documents onto its nascent online databases.

Two years later, Kurzweil sold his company to Lernout & Hauspie. Following the bankruptcy of the latter, the system became a subsidiary of Xerox formerly known as Scansoft and now as Nuance Communications, and he functioned as a consultant for the former until 1995.

Kurzweil's next business venture was in the realm of electronic music technology. After a 1982 meeting with Stevie Wonder, in which the latter lamented the divide in capabilities and qualities between electronic synthesizers and traditional musical instruments, Kurzweil was inspired to create a new generation of music synthesizers capable of accurately duplicating the sounds of real instruments. Kurzweil Music Systems was founded in the same year, and in 1984, the Kurzweil K250 was unveiled. The machine was capable of imitating a number of instruments, and in tests musicians were unable to discern the difference between the Kurzweil K250 on piano mode from a normal grand piano.^[6] The recording and mixing abilities of the machine, coupled with its abilities to imitate different instruments made it possible for a single user to compose and play an entire orchestral piece.

Kurzweil Music Systems was sold to Korean musical instrument manufacturer Young Chang in 1990. As with Xerox, Kurzweil remained as a consultant for several years. Hyundai acquired Young Chang in 2006 and in January 2007 has appointed Raymond Kurzweil as Chief Strategy Officer of Kurzweil Music Systems.^[7]

Later life[link]

Concurrent with Kurzweil Music Systems, Kurzweil created the company Kurzweil Applied Intelligence (KAI) to develop computer speech recognition systems for commercial use. The first product, which debuted in 1987, was an early speech recognition program.

Kurzweil started Kurzweil Educational Systems in 1996 to develop new pattern-recognition-based computer technologies to help people with disabilities such as blindness, dyslexia and ADD in school. Products include the Kurzweil 1000 text-to-speech converter software program, which enables a computer to read electronic and scanned text aloud to blind or visually impaired users, and the Kurzweil 3000 program, which is a multifaceted electronic learning system that helps with reading, writing, and study skills.

Raymond Kurzweil at the Singularity Summit at Stanford in 2006

During the 1990s Kurzweil founded the Medical Learning Company.^[8] The company's products included an interactive computer education program for doctors and a computer-simulated patient. Around the same time, Kurzweil started KurzweilCyberArt.com—a website featuring computer programs to assist the creative art process. The site used to offer free downloads of a program called AARON—a visual art synthesizer developed by Harold Cohen—and of "Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet", which automatically creates poetry. During this period he also started KurzweilAI.net, a website devoted towards showcasing news of scientific developments, publicizing the ideas of high-tech thinkers and critics alike, and promoting futurist-related discussion among the general population through the Mind-X forum.

In 1999, Kurzweil created a hedge fund called "FatKat" (Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies), which began trading in 2006. He has stated that the ultimate aim is to improve the performance of FatKat's A.I. investment software program, enhancing its ability to recognize patterns in "currency fluctuations and stock-ownership trends."^[9] He predicted in his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, that computers will one day prove superior to the best human financial minds at making profitable investment decisions. In 2001, Canadian rock band Our Lady Peace released an album, titled Spiritual Machines, based on Kurzweil's book. Kurzweil's voice was featured in the album, reading excerpts from his book.

In June 2005, Kurzweil introduced the "Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader" (K-NFB Reader)—a pocket-sized device consisting of a digital camera and computer unit. Like the Kurzweil Reading Machine of almost 30 years before, the K-NFB Reader is designed to aid blind people by reading written text aloud. The newer machine is portable and scans text through digital camera images, while the older machine is large and scans text through flatbed scanning.

Kurzweil made a movie called The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future^[10] in 2010 based, in part, on his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near. Part fiction, part non-fiction, he interviews 20 big thinkers like Marvin Minsky, plus there is a B-line narrative story that illustrates some of the ideas, where a computer avatar (Ramona) saves the world from self-replicating microscopic robots.

In addition to his movie, an independent, feature-length documentary was made about Kurzweil, his life, and his ideas called Transcendent Man. Filmmakers Barry Ptolemy and Felicia Ptolemy followed Kurzweil, documenting his global speaking tour. Premiered in 2009 at the Tribeca Film Festival,^[10] Transcendent Man documents Kurzweil's quest to reveal mankind's ultimate destiny and explores many of the ideas found in his New York Times bestselling book, The Singularity Is Near, including his concept of exponential growth, radical life expansion, and how we will transcend our biology. The Ptolemys documented Kurzweil's stated goal of bringing back his late father using AI. The film also features critics who argue against Kurzweil's predictions.

In 2010, an independent documentary film called Plug & Pray premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival, in which Kurzweil and one of his major critics, the late Joseph Weizenbaum, argue about the benefits of eternal life.^[11]

Kurzweil frequently comments on the application of cell-size nanotechnology to the workings of the human brain and how this could be applied to building AI. While being interviewed for a February 2009 issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Kurzweil expressed a desire to construct a genetic copy of his late father, Fredric Kurzweil, from DNA within his grave site. This feat would be achieved by exhumation and extraction of DNA, constructing a clone of Fredric and retrieving memories and recollections—from Ray's mind—of his father.^[12]

Family[link]

Kurzweil is married with two children. His wife, Sonya, is a child psychologist while his son works as a venture capitalist and his daughter as a choreographer.^[13]

Books[link]

Kurzweil's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was published in 1990. The nonfiction work discusses the history of computer AI and also makes forecasts regarding future developments. Other experts in the field of AI contribute heavily to the work in the form of essays. The Association of American Publishers' awarded it the status of Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990.^[14]

Next, Kurzweil published a book on nutrition in 1993 called The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life. The book's main idea is that high levels of fat intake are the cause of many health disorders common in the U.S., and thus that cutting fat consumption down to 10% of the total calories consumed would be optimal for most people.

In 1998, Kurzweil published The Age of Spiritual Machines, which focuses heavily on further elucidating his theories regarding the future of technology, which themselves stem from his analysis of long-term trends in biological and technological evolution. Much focus goes into examining the likely course of AI development, along with the future of computer architecture.

Kurzweil's next book published in 2004, returned to the subject of human health and nutrition. Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever was co-authored by Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, a medical doctor and specialist in alternative medicine.

The Singularity Is Near was published in 2005. The book was made into a movie starring Pauley Perrette (NCIS).^[15]

In February 2007, Ptolemaic Productions acquired the rights to The Singularity is Near, The Age of Spiritual Machines and Fantastic Voyage including the rights to Kurzweil's life and ideas for the film Transcendent Man. The feature length documentary was directed by Barry Ptolemy.

Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever,^[16] a follow-up to Fantastic Voyage, was released on April 28, 2009.

Kurzweil's newest book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, is scheduled for release on October 2, 2012. ^[17]

Recognition and awards[link]

Kurzweil was referred to by Forbes as "the ultimate thinking machine."^[18]

Kurzweil has received many awards and honors, including:

• First place in the 1965 International Science Fair^[4] for inventing the classical music synthesizing computer.
• The 1978 Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. The award is given annually to one "outstanding young computer professional" and is accompanied by a $35,000 prize.^[19] Kurzweil won it for his invention of the Kurzweil Reading Machine.^[20]
• The 1990 "Engineer of the Year" award from Design News.^[21]
• The 1994 Dickson Prize in Science. One is awarded every year by Carnegie Mellon University to individuals who have "notably advanced the field of science." Both a medal and a $50,000 prize are presented to winners.^[22]
• The 1998 "Inventor of the Year" award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[23]
• The 1999 National Medal of Technology.^[24] This is the highest award the President of the United States can bestow upon individuals and groups for pioneering new technologies, and the President dispenses the award at his discretion.^[25] Bill Clinton presented Kurzweil with the National Medal of Technology during a White House ceremony in recognition of Kurzweil's development of computer-based technologies to help the disabled.
• The 2000 Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology.^[26] Two other individuals also received the same honor that year. The award is presented yearly to people who "exemplify the life, times and standard of contribution of Tesla, Westinghouse and Nunn."
• The 2001 Lemelson-MIT Prize for a lifetime of developing technologies to help the disabled and to enrich the arts.^[27] Only one is meted out each year to highly successful, mid-career inventors. A $500,000 award accompanies the prize.^[28]
• Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002 for inventing the Kurzweil Reading Machine.^[29] The organization "honors the women and men responsible for the great technological advances that make human, social and economic progress possible."^[30] Fifteen other people were inducted into the Hall of Fame the same year.^[31]
• The Arthur C. Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award on April 20, 2009 for lifetime achievement as an inventor and futurist in computer-based technologies.^[32]
• Kurzweil has received seventeen honorary doctorates between 1982 and 2010.^{[citation needed]}
• In 2011, Kurzweil was named a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council.^[33]

Involvement with futurism and transhumanism[link]

Kurzweil is generally recognized as a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements, due to his stances on life extension technologies, his efforts to forecast future advances in technology, and his interest in the concept of the technological singularity. At the same time, he has attracted significant criticism from scientists and thinkers.

Kurzweil's central argument is derived from the predictions of Moore's Law that the rate of innovation of computer technology is increasing not linearly but rather exponentially. According to Kurzweil's argument, since growth in so many fields of science and technology depends upon computing power, these improvements translate into exponentially more frequent advances in non-computer sciences like nanotechnology, biotechnology, and materials science. Kurzweil refers to this concept as the "Law of Accelerating Returns", and has asserted that this is supported by a number of metrics.

Kurzweil has forecast a number of specific technological advances with specific dates in his books, stating that before 2050 medical advances will allow people to radically extend their lifespans while preserving quality of life through the use of nanobots,^[3][34] that a computer will pass the Turing test by 2029, that the first strong artificial intelligence will be a computer simulation of a human brain generated by nanorobotic brain scanning, sentient artificial intelligences will exhibit moral thinking and respect humans, and that the line between humans and machines will blur as machines attain human-level intelligence and humans start incorporating more technology.

Kurzweil's application of his law to forecasting innovations have been disputed by other scientists and writers.^[35]

Kurzweil's standing as a futurist and Transhumanist has led to his involvement in several Singularity-themed organizations. In December 2004, Kurzweil joined the advisory board of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.^[36] In October 2005, Kurzweil joined the scientific advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation.^[37] On May 13, 2006, Kurzweil was the first speaker at the Stanford University Singularity Summit.^[38]

In February 2009, Kurzweil, in collaboration with Google and the NASA Ames Research Center, announced the creation of the Singularity University training center for corporate executives and government officials. The University's self-described mission is to "assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges".^[39] Using Vernor Vinge's Singularity concept as a foundation, the University offered its first nine-week graduate program to forty students in June, 2009.

Stance on nanotechnology[link]

Kurzweil is on the Army Science Advisory Board, has testified before Congress on the subject of nanotechnology, and has advocated that nanotechnology could solve significant global problems such as poverty, disease, and climate change, viz. "Nanotech Could Give Global Warming a Big Chill ".^[40] In media appearances, Kurzweil has stressed the extreme potential dangers of nanotechnology,^[3] but argues that in practice, progress cannot be stopped, and any attempt to do so will retard the progress of defensive and beneficial technologies more than the malevolent ones, increasing the danger. He suggests that the proper place of regulation is to make sure progress proceeds safely and quickly.

[edit] The Law of Accelerating Returns

In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines Kurzweil proposed "The Law of Accelerating Returns", according to which the rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems (including the growth of technologies) tends to increase exponentially.^[41] He gave further focus to this issue in a 2001 essay entitled "The Law of Accelerating Returns", which proposed an extension of Moore's law to a wide variety of technologies, and used this to argue in favor of Vernor Vinge's concept of a technological singularity.^[42]

Predictions[link]

[edit] The Age of Intelligent Machines

Kurzweil's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, presented his ideas about the future. It was written from 1986 to 1989 and published in 1990. Building on Ithiel de Sola Pool's "Technologies of Freedom" (1983), Kurzweil claims to have forecast the demise of the Soviet Union due to new technologies such as cellular phones and fax machines disempowering authoritarian governments by removing state control over the flow of information. In the book Kurzweil also extrapolated preexisting trends in the improvement of computer chess software performance to predict correctly that computers would beat the best human players by 1998, and most likely in that year. In fact, the event occurred in May 1997 when chess World Champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue computer in a well-publicized chess tournament. Perhaps most significantly, Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet use that began in the 1990s. At the time of the publication of The Age of Intelligent Machines, there were only 2.6 million Internet users in the world,^[43] and the medium was unreliable, difficult to use, and deficient in content. He also stated that the Internet would explode not only in the number of users but in content as well, eventually granting users access "to international networks of libraries, data bases, and information services". Additionally, Kurzweil claims to have correctly foreseen that the preferred mode of Internet access would inevitably be through wireless systems, and he was also correct to estimate that the latter would become practical for widespread use in the early 21st century.

Kurzweil also claims to have accurately forecast that, by the end of the 1990s, many documents would exist solely in computers and on the Internet, and that they would commonly be embedded with sounds, animations, and videos that would inhibit their transfer to paper format. Moreover, he claims to have foreseen that cellular phones would grow in popularity while shrinking in size for the foreseeable future.

[edit] The Age of Spiritual Machines

In 1999, Kurzweil published a second book titled The Age of Spiritual Machines, which goes into more depth explaining his futurist ideas. The third and final section of the book is devoted to elucidating the specific course of technological advancements Kurzweil predicts the world will experience over the next century.

[edit] The Singularity is Near

While this book focuses on the future of technology and the human race as did The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil makes very few concrete, short-term predictions in The Singularity Is Near, though longer-term visions are present in abundance. He recently discussed the singularity with Vice Magazine.^[44]

Solar Power and Grand Challenges of the 21st Century[link]

In 2008, Ray Kurzweil said in an expert panel in the National Academy of Engineering that solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth's people in 20 years.^[45]

Work on nutrition, health, and lifestyle[link]

Kurzweil admits that he cared little for his health until age 35, when he was diagnosed with a glucose intolerance, an early form of type II diabetes (a major risk factor for heart disease). Kurzweil then found a doctor that shares his non-conventional beliefs to develop an extreme regimen involving hundreds of pills, chemical i.v. treatments, red wine and various other methods to attempt to live longer.

Kurzweil ingests "250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea" every day and drinks several glasses of red wine a week in an effort to "reprogram" his biochemistry.^[46] Lately, he has cut down the number of supplement pills to 150.^[47]

Kurzweil joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company. In the event of his death, Kurzweil's body will be chemically preserved, frozen in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to revive him.^{[citation needed]}

Kurzweil has authored three books on the subjects of nutrition, health and immortality: The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever and TRANSCEND: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever.^[48] In all, he recommends that other people emulate his health practices to the best of their abilities.

Kurzweil and his current "anti-aging" doctor, Terry Grossman, MD., now have two websites promoting their first^[49] and second book.^[50]

Stance on religion[link]

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Though Kurzweil's parents were Jewish, they raised him as a Unitarian Universalist and exposed him to many different faiths during his youth. Kurzweil presented sermons at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Diego in January 2000 upon publication of The Age of Spiritual Machines. He gave a 2007 keynote speech to the United Church of Christ in Hartford, Connecticut, alongside Barack Obama, who was then a Presidential candidate. In The Singularity is Near he expresses his belief in a need for a new religion based on the principle of mutual respect between sentient life forms, and on the principle of respecting knowledge. This religion would not have a leader, instead being purely personal to adherents.

The documentary Transcendent Man (2009) reveals some aspects of Kurzweil's spiritual beliefs. He discusses how he was raised, saying that recent exciting events, whether they were scientific discoveries, inventions, or something sociological or something else, were often topics that came up at the dinner table. He says that human knowledge was highly respected in his family, and particularly the ability for humans to overcome challenges. He says this respect for human knowledge was personalized even, and was part of the religion, if you will, of his family.

Parts of the film discuss the vast level of superiority computers already have versus humans at most basic tasks, such as math. Some say that the artificial intelligences we may build in the future will be gods, or god-like. Kurzweil seems to indicate however that the AIs paving the future will actually be us, man merged with machine, rather than (or perhaps in addition to) separate robot entities apart from ourselves.

At the end of the film, Kurzweil talks more about his ideas about the future and particularly about this unification of all people on Earth, followed by an expansion of our civilization and consciousness outward into the universe (after the singularity takes place), "waking up" things in its path (bringing consciousness).

His abridged way of saying it is that "it will be the universe waking up." After this, the loud, triumphant music that had been accompanying the scene cuts out, and the camera focuses back on Kurzweil, who then finishes the film by saying:

"So you might ask 'Does god exist?' Well, I would say not yet."

Criticism[link]

This article's Criticism or Controversy section may compromise the article's neutral point of view of the subject. Please integrate the section's contents into the article as a whole, or rewrite the material. (April 2010)

Kurzweil's ideas have generated much criticism within the scientific community and in the media. There are philosophical arguments over whether a machine can "think" (see Philosophy of artificial intelligence). Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, has called the notion of a technological singularity "intelligent design for the IQ 140 people...This proposition that we're heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different—it's fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me."^[51]

VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has been one of the strongest critics of Kurzweil’s ideas, describing them as “cybernetic totalism”, and has outlined his views on the culture surrounding Kurzweil’s predictions in an essay for Edge.org entitled One Half of a Manifesto.^[52]

Pulitzer Prize winner Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, has said of Kurzweil's and Hans Moravec's books: "It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid."^[53]

Although the idea of a technological singularity is a popular concept in science fiction, some authors such as Neal Stephenson^[54] and Bruce Sterling have voiced scepticism about its real-world plausibility. Sterling expressed his views on the singularity scenario in a talk at the Long Now Foundation entitled The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole.^[55][56] Other prominent AI thinkers and computer scientists such as Daniel Dennett,^[57] Rodney Brooks,^[58] and David Gelernter^[59] have also criticized Kurzweil’s projections.

Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, agrees with Kurzweil's timeline of future progress, but thinks that technologies such as AI, nanotechnology and advanced biotechnology will create a dystopian world.^[60]

Daniel Lyons, writing in Newsweek, criticized Kurzweil for some of his predictions which turned out to be wrong; such as the economy continuing to boom from the 1998 dot-com through 2009, a US company having a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion, a supercomputer achieving 20 petaflops, speech recognition being in widespread use and cars that would drive themselves using sensors installed in highways; all by 2009.^[61] To the charge that a 20 petaflop supercomputer was not produced in the time he predicted, Kurzweil responded that he considers Google a giant supercomputer, and that it is indeed capable of 20 petaflops.^[61] In 2009 however IBM announced the commencement of its development of the IBM Sequoia for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administrations, which is capable of 20+ petaflops and is expected to be delivered in 2011,^{[non-primary source needed]} two years after Kurzeil's prediction.^[62]

Biologist P. Z. Myers has criticized Kurzweil's predictions as being based on "New Age spiritualism" rather than science and says that Kurzweil does not understand basic biology.^[63][64]

See also[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

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• Kurzweil Companies web site
• Raymond Kurzweil's IP – all of Raymond Kurzweil's US patents & patent applications
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • In Depth interview with Kurzweil, November 5, 2006
• Ray Kurzweil on Charlie Rose
• Raymond Kurzweil at the Internet Movie Database
• Ray Kurzweil at the Notable Names Database
• Works by or about Ray Kurzweil in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal, Lev Grossman, Time, February 10, 2011

v t e Life extension Issues Anti-oxidants · Calorie restriction · Cryonics · Exercise · Free-radical theory · Gerontology · Glycation · Indefinite lifespan · Index of life extension-related articles · Longevity · Mind uploading · Rejuvenation · Senescence · Stem cell treatments · Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence · Suspended animation People Bill Andrews · Aubrey de Grey · Terry Grossman · Leonard Hayflick · Denham Harman · Saul Kent · Ray Kurzweil · Marios Kyriazis · Durk Pearson · Sandy Shaw · Roy Walford · Michael D. West Organizations Alcor Life Extension Foundation · Alliance for Aging Research · American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine · American Aging Association · American Cryonics Society · Cryonics Institute · Cryonics Society · Immortalist Society · Immortality Institute · KrioRus · Life Extension Foundation · Methuselah Foundation · SENS Foundation · Sierra Sciences Books Life Extension (1982) · The First Immortal (1998) · Fantastic Voyage (2004) · Ending Aging (2007) Categories Life extension

Rudolf Steiner

Born	Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner 25(27?) February 1861 Murakirály, Austria-Hungary (now Donji Kraljevec, Croatia)
Died	30 March 1925 (aged 64) Dornach, Switzerland
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Phenomenology, Holism, Monism
Main interests	Metaphysics, Epistemology, Philosophy of science, Esotericism, Christianity, Spiritual Science, Freemasonry
Notable ideas	Anthroposophy, Anthroposophical Medicine, Biodynamic Agriculture, Eurythmy, Spiritual Science, Waldorf Education
Influenced by Helena Blavatsky, Franz Brentano, Wilhelm Dilthey, Fichte, Eduard von Hartmann, Hegel, Goethe, Nietzsche, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Max Stirner
Influenced Owen Barfield, Hugo Bergmann, Josef Beuys, Martin Buber,[1] Alan Chadwick, Wassily Kandinsky, Albert Schweitzer, Richard Tarnas

Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner^[2] (25/27 February 1861^[3] – 30 March 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and esotericist.^[4][5] Steiner gained initial recognition as a literary critic and cultural philosopher. At the beginning of the 20th century, he founded a spiritual movement, Anthroposophy, as an esoteric philosophy growing out of idealist philosophy and with links to Theosophy.

Steiner led this movement through several phases. In the first, more philosophically oriented phase, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and mysticism;^[6] his philosophical work of these years, which he termed spiritual science, sought to provide a connection between the cognitive path of Western philosophy and the inner and spiritual needs of the human being.^[7]:291 In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, the movement arts (developing a new artistic form, eurythmy) and architecture, culminating in the building of a cultural centre to house all the arts, the Goetheanum. After the First World War, Steiner worked with educators, farmers, doctors, and other professionals to develop numerous practical initiatives, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophical medicine.^[8]

Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual component. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang Goethe's world view, in which “Thinking … is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.”^[9] A consistent thread that runs from his earliest philosophical phase through his later spiritual orientation is the goal of demonstrating that there are no essential limits to human knowledge.^[10]