They talked about Plato and Descartes and Marx, they talked about St. Augustine and – when feeling particularly modern and adventurous – Sartre, but if they’d heard of Gödel, Turing, Hamsun or Kim, they refused to admit it. Out of sheer frustration, in an essay on Descartes I suggested that the notion of human consciousness as “software” that could be “implemented” equally well on an organic brain or an optical crystal was in fact a throwback to Cartesian dualism: for “software” read “soul.”
