Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind - Explore the History of Artificial Intelligence & Human Consciousness | Perfect for Psychology Enthusiasts & AI Researchers

Nature has played a grim trick on us humans. We are equipped with a mind and presumably a soul, but human reason is a meager instrument for answering life’s crucial questions about them. Is the brain at birth endowed with trappings such as a conscience, a soul, and an inherent goodness, or are we condemned by original sin? More to the point, does the soul even exist or is it perhaps a metaphor devised by theologians over the centuries to give us hope of immortality, fear of hell, and, not incidentally, to keep us properly submissive to the state? If we do have a soul, how does it differ from the mind, or are soul and mind synonymous? For centuries philosophers have debated the imponderable structure of the mind. What is the relationship between the brain and the mind? Is the brain simply the repository for the thinking mind? Is this lump of gray flesh a machine of some sort as it appears to be in most animals? Is the soul physically located in the brain? Can the answers to these questions best be found through philosophy, medicine, or theology? If you’ve pondered some of these questions you should find this book absorbing; not that the imponderables will be revealed, but the author has compiled a fascinating history of the mind and related issues covering a span of about three centuries. Before The Enlightenment theories of the mind and soul originated with the early Greeks, principally Aristotle, and later with theologians such as Aquinas and Augustine. Then in the mid-17th century Enlightenment philosophers began to question the appropriate relation between religion, medicine, the individual, and the state. Anyone who is intrigued by the theories of philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Spinoza, Hume, Voltaire, and the like will find this account fascinating. Many of their writings are ponderous in the original, but Mr. Makari has summarized them in a highly readable volume. Most of these thinkers wrote copiously on ethics, politics, and the appropriate power of the church and state, but this history focuses on their writing about the mind and soul. The Soul Machine has a cast of hundreds, many of whom are unfamiliar to most of us, but their contributions enliven the discourse. In addition to philosophers these include physicians, quacks, theologians, charlatans, and other miscellaneous characters such as Marquis de Sade, Franz Mesmer, Oliver Cromwell, and Napoleon. Sir Isaac Newton enters the fray with his theories of a mechanistic universe that responds to predictable and invariable laws. How can this deterministic universe be reconciled with the theories of free will, without which no one can be responsible for his actions? The book is divided into three parts that are broadly chronological, but zigzag in time and geography, centering on British, French, and German thinking. The participants developed their pet theories and attacked those with competing theories, many of whom could not defend themselves because they were dead. The debates are further hampered by the lack of direct transference of terms between languages and the fact that they all predated Mendel and Darwin, who explained alternate theories that gradually diminished the necessity for God to take an active role in the universe. I highly recommend this book.