About The Author

John Gregg I was born in 1965 and grew up in New England. I now live in a suburb north of Boston, Massachusetts, in the USA. I worked for decades as a computer programmer, and once wrote a surprisingly accessible and entertaining book about Boolean algebra, the logic used inside computer chips.

I have a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and no further degree. As an undergraduate, I became interested in artificial intelligence. Like many student programmers, with the hubris often found in undergraduates, I thought that I should be able to program a computer to think. I no longer think that I will ever write such a program. Now I'd settle for a good essay about how the mind works or, barring that, an essay about exactly why we will never know. Some time ago I decided that the problem of consciousness is a deeper and more interesting problem than that of functionally realizing artificial intelligence. Further, I now suspect that we will have to understand consciousness before we have a realistic shot at AI in the first place.

This book started as a series of essays that I wrote over a long time, and I have attempted to knit them together into a cohesive single work. I have chosen to compose it in raw HTML and make it available online to anyone with a browser, so I guess that makes it a self-published e-book. I hope to turn it into a real book, so it can run and play with the other books.