Tuesday, January 6, 2015

120-129: Matters of Life and Death

The 120's encompass both what it means to be human and what happens afterwards: the most popular number is 129, which includes both Heidegger and a Hippo Walk through Those Pearly Gates and, in the children's department, The Fall of Freddie the Leaf, by Leo Buscaglia, which is pretty much exactly as creepy as you might expect.  

Heidegger, of course, is the diametric opposite of creepy, but I just lost patience with it. One of their main points is that you are going to die and you probably are in denial about that, but not me! I am stunningly aware that my life is finite! That's why I'm only reading one book from each decade of the library, not every single book or even one from each number!

So I chose The Most Human Human, an engagingly-written combination stunt memoir and research paper about artificial intelligence and the Turing test, aka the Imitation Game. So far he has explained how he came to participate in the Loebner Prize as a human, and has gone on to discover that one essential element of human conversation is continuity, that it hangs together. Now he's talking about whether logic is overrated. I actually got this book because I thought my husband, who works in computing, would like it, but I think it's really interesting too.

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