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This entry is in memory of Howard Eavenson Boyer, Jr., who, today’s New York Times informs us, was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 26, 1943, and in his youth studied the 17th-century metaphysical poets.
Later in life, Boyer worked for Harvard University Press, where he edited science books, including Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988), by Hans Moravec.
Boyer died at 61 on May 4, 2005.
From Log24.net on Sept. 9, 2003,
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January 9, 1989, is the date of The New Yorker’s review of Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press).
Brad Leithauser, reviewing Mind Children, says that if Moravec “is correct in supposing that human minds will be transferred into or otherwise fused with machines, it seems likely that traditional religious questions — and traditional religions themselves — will either melt away or suffer wholesale metamorphosis. Debates about Heaven or Hell — to take but one example — would hold little relevance for an immortal creature.”
Au contraire. Immortal creatures– such as, according to Christianity, human beings– are the only creatures for whom such debates hold relevance.
For an example of such a debate, see
The Contrasting Worldviews of
Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis,
by Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi.
For more on Nicholi, see my entry
of August 19, 2003,