CONTENTS
Preface xiii
INTRODUCTION: What Is an Intuition Pump? i
I. A DOZEN GENERAL THINKING TOOLS 17
1. Making Mistakes 19
2. "By Parody of Reasoning": Using Reductio ad Absurdum 29
3. Rapoport's Rules 33
4. Sturgeon's Law 36
5. Occam's Razor 38
6. Occam's Broom 40
7. Using Lay Audiences as Decoys 42
8. Jootsing 45
9. Three Species of Goulding: Rathering, Piling On, and the Gould Two-Step 48
10. The "Surely" Operator: A Mental Block 53
11. Rhetorical Questions 55
12. What Is a Deepity? 56
Summary 58
III. TOOLS FOR THINKING ABOUT MEANING
OR CONTENT 59
13. Murder in Trafalgar Square 61
14. An Older Brother Living in Cleveland 65
15. "Daddy Is a Doctor" 68
16. Manifest Image and Scientific Image 69
17. Folk Psychology 73
18. The Intentional Stance 77
19. The Personal/Sub-personal Distinction 86
20. A Cascade of Homunculi 91
21. The Sorta Operator 96
22. Wonder Tissue 98
23. Trapped in the Robot Control Room 102
IV. AN INTERLUDE ABOUT COMPUTERS 107
24. The Seven Secrets of Computer Power Revealed 109
25. Virtual Machines 133
26. Algorithms 140
27. Automating the Elevator 143
Summary 148
V. MORE TOOLS ABOUT MEANING 151
28. A Thing about Redheads 153
29. The Wandering Two-Bitser, Twin Earth, and the Giant Robot 157
30. Radical Translation and a Quinian Crossword Puzzle 175
31. Semantic Engines and Syntactic Engines 178
32. Swampman Meets a Cow-Shark 180
33. Two Black Boxes 184
Summary 197
VI. TOOLS FOR THINKING ABOUT EVOLUTION 201
34. Universal Acid 203
35. The Library of Mendel: Vast and Vanishing 205
36. Genes as Words or as Subroutines 214
37. The Tree of Life 217
38. Cranes and Skyhooks, Lifting in Design Space 218
39. Competence without Comprehension 232
40. Free-Floating Rationales 234
41. Do Locusts Understand Prime Numbers? 236
42. How to Explain Stotting 238
43. Beware of the Prime Mammal 240
44. When Does Speciation Occur? 244
45. Widowmakers, Mitochondrial Eve, and Retrospective Coronations 247
46. Cycles 252
47. What Does the Frog's Eye Tell the Frog's Brain? 256
48. Leaping through Space in the Library of Babel 258
49. Who Is the Author of Spamlet? 260
50. Noise in the Virtual Hotel 267
51. Herb, Alice, and Hal, the Baby 271
52. Memes 274
Summary 277
VII.TOOLS FOR THINKING ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS 279
53. Two Counter-images 281
54. The Zombic Hunch 283
55. Zombies and Zimboes 288
56. The Curse of the Cauliflower 296
57. Vim: How Much Is That in "Real Money"? 299
58. The Sad Case of Mr. Clapgras 302
59. The Tuned Deck 310
60. The Chinese Room 319
61. The Teleclone Fall from Mars to Earth 330
62. The Self as the Center of Narrative Gravity 333
63. Heterophenomenology 341
64. Mary the Color Scientist: A Boom Crutch Unveiled 347
Summary 352
VIII. TOOLS FOR THINKING ABOUT FREE WILL 355
65. A Truly Nefarious Neurosurgeon 357
66. A Deterministic Toy: Conway's Game of Life 359
67. Rock, Paper, and Scissors 370
68. Two Lotteries 375
69. Inert Historical Facts 378
70. A Computer Chess Marathon 384
71. Ultimate Responsibility 393
72. Sphexishness 397
73. The Boys from Brazil: Another Boom Crutch 401
Summary 406
IX. WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A PHILOSOPHER? 409
74. A Faustian Bargain 411
75. Philosophy as Naive Auto-anthropology 414
76. Higher-Order Truths of Chmess 418
77. The 10 Percent That's Good 425
X. USE THE TOOLS. TRY HARDER. 429
XI. WHAT GOT LEFT OUT 431
Appendix: Solutions to Register Machine Problems 433
Sources 445
Bibliography 451
Credits 461
Index 463