Reflections on Stephen Wolfram's 'A New Kind of Science'
by Ray Kurzweil
In his remarkable new book, Stephen Wolfram asserts that cellular automata operations underlie much of the real world. He even asserts that the entire Universe itself is a big cellular-automaton computer. But Ray Kurzweil challenges the ability of these ideas to fully explain the complexities of life, intelligence, and physical phenomena.
And I've spent a bit of time on this already:
Theory Gets a Reality Check:
Philosophy, Economics, and Politics as if Verisimilitude Mattered
BY JEFFREY FRIEDMAN
A critique of Rawls (A New Theory of Justice) and Nozick (Anarchy, State and Utopia). (Note that both books top this list.)
