He also had a book called “Metamagical Themas.” (Anagram of “Mathematical Games”)
An even better deconstruction of religion was laid out in the Metamagical Themas column, in the January 1983 issue of Scientific American: "Virus-like sentences and self-replicating structures" (https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1983/01-01/). The article was about memes. And it presented religion as a meme: a viral idea that propagates partly through terrorizing the host mind ("If you don't believe, if you don't spread this meme, you'll burn in HELL!" - although it was more nuanced than my one-sentence summary...)
On the thermostat, I get the impression McCarthy was being a bit obtuse just to goad Searle a little. What he was illustrating is that simple systems can exhibit apparent intentionality while remaining simple. A steam governor or a thermostat are great examples. Living creatures, like the Aplysia californica snail studied by Eric Kandel, make use of analogously pretty damn simple mechanisms for reasonably sophisticated behaviour. Following this line of research, we've created remarkably effective systems like the 'syntax-only' Google Translate system, and IBM's Watson. The questions posed by…
Yes, I refer to those. They have been my first contact with Lisp. The Wizard Book (SICP) was useful later on. I did only remember the German title (Metamagicum). Thanks for finding the English one.
Are you referring to Metamagical Themas? That book is a collection of columns he wrote for Scientific American, and only a couple of those have anything to do with Lisp.
There was a book by Hofstadter (of Godel, Escher, Bach fame) which has a nice introduction. Perhaps the book was called Metamagicum.
if you read one book of hofstadter's, make it "metamagical themas", a truly engaging collection of his columns for "scientific american". I also liked "le ton beau de marot", on the art of translation, but that's less of a general appeal book. I have read geb, and it had some nice ideas, but i can't say I was motivated to reread it; it felt overly self indulgent somewhat in the manner of a friend telling you about how their rpg campaign played out without realising that half the interest lay in having been there.