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How To Create A Mind: The Secret Of Human Thought Revealed (2012)

by Ray Kurzweil(Favorite Author)

3.95 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0670025291 (ISBN13: 9780670025299)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Viking Adult

review 1: Kurzweil is not for everyone, but he is for me. He covers a wide range of topics from how the brain works, quantum physics, logical positivism and Ludwig Wittgenstein up to what does it really mean to be human.I get a little glossy eyed during the description of the brain and its interactions, but he explains them as good as anyone and I could follow them but not well enough to repeat it to others, but when he's talking about what constitutes a thinking human is where he really excels and excites and I can and will repeat to others his thoughts on that stuff.The narrator really added to the books enjoyment. I thought he was narrating the book exactly the way the author would have been while he was writing the book.
review 2: I really want to like this book, and... more to believe in Kurzweil's predictions, but I honestly don't. First, the content of the book is insufficient to learn how to create a mind, so it loses a star on the title alone. Much of the book is focused on predictions and their justifications, with Kurzweil claiming a 2% failure rate. That's all skirting the issue, which is whether consciousness can be crafted, and the arguments here just aren't very convincing. Even if every structure of the brain could be replicated in machine hardware, the essence of consciousness would remain elusive. The algorithmic kernel of learning, much less consciousness, has yet to be discovered. The structure of a brain is no more a mind than a neighborhood is a community. The ethereal "something" needs to be described and replicated, and this book doesn't explain how to do that.What the book does explain, especially in its first third, is the structure of the neocortex and how it stores information as lists of lists. The more interesting, at least to me, topics of software and computer hardware dominate the remainder of the book, with Kurzweil describing the techniques employed for his previous successes in OCR and natural language processing. He then moves into the philosophy of consciousness and the ethics of sentience. All fascinating stuff, and Kurzweil's brilliance and track record are themselves justification for giving his ideas their due, but in the end I have to place them alongside alien visitation and life-after-death as prospects for which I have more hope than faith. less

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