Jim Baggott, the author, is one serious head-case and I mean that as a compliment. He's the philosophy teacher you wish you had back in college. He actually reminds me of my teacher on Philosophy of Art, who, to get us to understand the "science" of art went on a 45-hour rampage on the golden mean, fleece, whatever you want to call it. 45 hours of 1.618 sounds intense, but it was my favorite class—and we never did get around to talking about art in truth.
Jim Baggott loves his philosophy, dines on quantum particles and sips the nectar of strings. He dishes it out relentlessly and you better take notes. But boring he's not. He's also very down-to-earth and a pop-culture-junkie god amongst other pop-culture junkies. He makes so many references to pop-culture classics and little jokes here and there that you can't help but admire him. And I have to mention the little comment he makes after explaining how to collapse a wave function. He states:
Readers with an appetite for vicious circularity might at this point like to return to the beginning of chapter 5, and keep reading until they disappear in their own cloud of probability.
Yeah, nerdy joke, but I love nerdy jokes as much as the dirty ones. And it's more effective once you've read the context.
Where Jim leaves me cold is his materialist world-view. But I can't blame him; he's a scientific philosopher more than a metaphysical philosopher. As an IT specialist and amateur philosopher, I often use the computer-to-brain/mind comparison when having such discussions. Where as I try to locate the user (or the thinker, the doer, in Buddhist terms), Jim leaves it to the ONs and OFFs of circuitry, the ones and zeros. He believes that our mere being is only the result of simple brain states. He reduces sentient beings to simple sensory enabled machines just bouncing off the walls of reality. This is where I disagree. A computer has no purpose, no reason of being if there's no one to use it. No user, the computer would not have reason to be. I believe the universe to be intelligence and we are its manifestations. But this is best left to a debate, not a review.
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