Readers up to date with the scholarly controversy surrounding consciousness will find this a useful addition to it.
A densely argued investigation of the origins of consciousness.
In this highly, sometimes overly, detailed narrative, Solms, who teaches at the Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cape Town, takes three paths to a theory of consciousness: “the elementary physics of life, the most recent advances in both computational and affective neuroscience and the subtleties of subjective experience that were traditionally explored by psychoanalysis.” These lines of investigation lead him to reject the long-held view that consciousness arises in the cerebral cortex, the locus of intelligence, but instead is to be found in a far more ancient, even primitive part of the brain, deep in the brainstem “that humans share with fishes.” The author’s insight comes from his research into dreams, phenomena that are also shared by other forms of animal life. He examines the mental behavior of hydrocephalic children, who, lacking the cortex, ought in the older theory to lack consciousness but who in fact do not. Solms’ argument, which is often repetitive, can be daunting. In part, this is because of its language, as when he writes, “accurate memory search and monitoring functions turn out to depend in part upon the cholinergic basal forebrain circuits, which constrain the ‘reward’ mechanisms of the mesocortical-mesolimbic dopamine circuit in memory retrieval.” In part, it is because he alternately takes issue with or builds on the work of other scholars of consciousness, such as Antonio Damasio and Bud Craig, familiarity with whose theories is nearly a prerequisite for readers. Still, Solms makes valuable points: He shows that consciousness is “part of nature” and not of “some parallel universe…beyond the reach of science,” and he gives a fruitful account of how memory processing, “cortical consciousness,” automaticity, and other brain functions operate. He concludes, repetitively, that “consciousness is part of nature and it is mathematically tractable.”
Readers up to date with the scholarly controversy surrounding consciousness will find this a useful addition to it.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-54201-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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