A Conversation with William Paley

Listen to (or read) this fascinating fictional conversation between the English clergyman William Paley (1743-1805) and contemporary philosopher Dennis Hackethal. It is based on the first few chapters of Paley's book "Natural Theology," which he first published in 1802.

Paley made essential contributions that later found their way into the theory of evolution. Both his criterion of design and focus on replication are arguably among the most critical building blocks of neo-Darwinism still today.

In this conversation, Hackethal agrees with Paley that any appearance of design requires a special kind of explanation, and clarifies why Paley's argument that design requires a designer is nonetheless wrong. Paley is skeptical at first but eventually opens up to the idea. When Hackethal convinces Paley that even our thoughts have the appearance of design, Paley's views about evolution and the mind change in ways he never imagined...

This conversation is highly relevant to the project of AGI (artificial general intelligence). You will learn more about how one could potentially build it by reading or listening to this conversation than in any machine-learning course.

The audio track is read by the wonderful voice of Brian Holsopple. The ebook contains beautiful illustrations and photographs. The PDF (which comes with the ebook as part of the written package) comes in landscape format to give the graphics maximum effect.

Credits

Written by Dennis Hackethal
Read by Brian Holsopple
Cover based on photograph by Sai Balaji Varma Gadhiraju on Unsplash

Copyright

© Dennis Hackethal 2020. All rights reserved. Both audio track and ebook and parts of either may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the author.

References

Dawkins, Richard. 2016. Apple Books.

Deutsch, David. 2012. New York: Penguin Press.

Hackethal, Dennis. 2020. . Cupertino: self-published. Amazon.

Paley, William. 1813. United Kingdom: J. Faulder.

Popper, Karl. 1983. Oxford: Oxford University Press.