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Article 1761 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: smoliar@hilbert.iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar)
Subject: Re: The Philosophical Foibles of John McCarthy
Message-ID: <1991Nov30.030024.27968@nuscc.nus.sg>
Summary: metamathematics and Bach
Sender: usenet@nuscc.nus.sg
Organization: Institute of Systems Science, NUS, Singapore
References: <5705@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1991Nov28.173516.5976@husc3.harvard.edu> <5755@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, 30 Nov 1991 03:00:24 GMT

In article <5755@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>
>Before the Dept. of AI, there were some other interesting names.
>There are books in the library marked "Bionics Lab" and others marked
>"Metamathematics".  There was meta-maths letterhead paper in my desk
>when I first came here (in 1983).  Their interests were fairly broad
>in those days.  For instance, the AI library contains books of
>Bach fugues and preludes.  (This was before the GEB book.)


You can thank Christopher Longuet-Higgins for those books.  If you want me to
dig out references to some of the papers that ensued, I shall blow the dust off
those files;  but I suspect you can find a fair number of pointers there in
Edinburgh.  While I have had many disagreements with Christopher on matters
of both music perception and aesthetics, there is no doubt in my mind that
his few papers say far more of substance about Bach and mind than Hofstadter
was able to muster in his prize-winning tome.  Furthermore, given how much
of Christopher's work DOES pre-date Hofstadter's book and how thorough
Hofstadter's bibliography APPEARS to be, I find the lack of any reference
to Christopher's papers to be absolutely unforgivable.  (If you want to
go hunting for charlatans, Mikhail, sometimes it helps to start with the
really big prize-winners!)
-- 
Stephen W. Smoliar; Institute of Systems Science
National University of Singapore; Heng Mui Keng Terrace
Kent Ridge, SINGAPORE 0511
Internet:  smoliar@iss.nus.sg


