The Cambridge Quintet takes the unusual route of using fiction as a device to make a discussion about complex ideas more engaging. Casti terms this a work of scientific fiction, which to me sounds promising, although having read the book, I wish he had lived up to this term, and centered less on philosophy within the debate. Sadly, partly because of this flaw, the book doesn't really achieve its lofty aims either on the fictional, or the conceptual realms.

The question at the heart of the book is whether machines can ever truly think, and the fictional setting is an imaginary meeting between various important thinkers of the late 1940's: Ludwig Wittgenstein, the century's leading philosopher, Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computing, Erwin Schrodinger, the Nobel prize winning quantum mechanics pioneer, and JBS Haldane, the geneticist. The dinner is hosted by CP Snow, at a college in Cambridge University.

The fictional angle is flimsy, with the characters seeming only half-drawn and rather stereo-typed. I would imagine most of them, had they lived to read the book, would have felt offended by this simplistic description of their personalities. There are also slightly annoying ways in which the historical Cambridge setting is described, that stick in the throat, rather than allow the fiction to be a vehicle for the discussion. For instance, words like "broiled" are American terms, alien to Britain and especially to Cambridge just after the second world war. However, even with these issues, the fictional aspect does serve at times to liven the material and make it more engaging.

Now onto the other part of the book, the ideas themselves. On the one side is Turing, ever the scientist and obsessed with computations, who argues that the brain is a kind of computer, so of course computers can one day think like humans. On the one side is Wittgenstein, who angrily defends the view that a computer could never have thoughts in any meaningful sense, as for that you need a social group of humans interacting together, in order to generate meaning through language. The others sit somewhere in the middle, and try to offer more nuanced views on occasion, or voice uncertainties. On paper, this setup sounds perfect. Unfortunately, in execution, things aren't as ideal as they could be. The most notable problem is that some of the critical arguments are poorly explained, or rushed. There is also a sense, especially towards the end, for instance when religion is discussed, where Casti is trying a little too hard to cover all the bases in this debate.

The trouble is that, in the 21st century, there really isn't much of a debate to be had anymore. On the one hand, modern neuroscience is so very clear that the brain is a kind of computer. On the other hand, although there is no conscious thought built out of silicon as yet, we no longer struggle to conceive of this happening. My phone is able to translate languages for me, beat me at chess, give me access to encyclopedic knowledge and so on, and all this technology is growing at an incredible pace. We are also familiar, from characters like Data in Star Trek and the replicants from Bladerunner, with artificial beings very similar to us. We don't recoil from such conscious robots at all, and find the whole notion very intuitive. Reflecting this, I constantly felt that Casti was, sensibly, far more sympathetic to Turing than anyone else, but had to stretch the debate, at times rather desperately, into a novel-length book, and had to bring in too much philosophy and too little science because of this. But this merely made me as a reader rather frustrated, and I wasn't really clear at all about the structure or purpose of the entire second half of the book, which just seemed largely superfluous to the main questions.

I am usually reticent to blow my own trumpet, but I can't help seeing Cambridge Quintet as outdated and poorly executed, and for any readers curious about this topic, I would suggest having a look at my own upcoming book, The Ravenous Brain (now available on Amazon, etc.), where I tackle questions of consciousness and artificial life, but mainly in the context of cutting edge neuroscience, instead of mid 20th century views. I also set out the Chinese Room argument (translated to hieroglyphics in Cambridge Quintet) a lot more carefully, and am braver and more thorough in explaining exactly at what point it fails. ( )

Thoroughly enjoyable read. Casti brings together Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Alan Turing, J.B.S.Haldane, and C.P.Snow for a dinner where they discuss the possibility of a computer that can "think" like a human being.

The writing may not be great, but the book does discuss some of the fundamental ideas behind the study of artificial intelligence (AI). ( )

An imaginary dinner conversation among C P Snow, Alan Turing, J B S Haldane, Erwin Schrödinger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein on the possibility of machine thinking. There should be more books written in this style.

Artificial intelligence > Philosophy/Philosophy of mind