The Nature of Explanation

This 120-page essay is magnificent. I came across this book briefly when I was watching Lenore Blum’s YouTube video on Conscious Turing Machines (CTM) at the Simons Institute of Theoretical Computer Science. The reason I mentioned my first introduction to the idea of this book was to slyly encourage the reader to watch Lenore’s video of CTM. That is also an awesome exercise of thought.

Back to the book - I undestood around 30% of the book the first time I read it, and I had to read it a couple of times more to internalize what Craik was trying to convey. It fundamentally questions how we think (how our mental model of the world really works), what science is (it’s a mechanism of probing reality and not reality itself), causality (how we live in a causally connected continuous universe - Sapolsky’s turtles all the way down perspective), math (particularly probability), quantum mechanics (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and quantum indeterminacy), and consciousness as a general theme.