Skip to main content

The Book of Minds - Philip Ball ****

It's fitting that this book on the nature of minds should be written by the most cerebral of the UK's professional science writers, Philip Ball. Like the uncertainty attached to the related concept of consciousness, exactly what a mind is, and what makes it a mind, is very difficult to pin down. Ball takes us effectively through some of the difficult definitions and unpacking involved to understand at least what researchers mean by 'mind', even if their work doesn't not necessarily enlighten us much.

A lot of the book is taken up with animals and to what extent they can be said to have minds. Ball bases his picture of a mind on a phrase that is reminiscent of Nagel's famous paper on being a bat. According to Ball, an organism can be said to have a mind if there is something that is what it is like to be that organism. (You may need to read that a couple of times.) At one end of the spectrum - apes, cetaceans, dogs, for instance - it's hard to believe that there are no minds involved, though few would probably argue that, say, a bacterium has one (some do).

A mechanism Ball uses is to consider 'Mindspace' - a conceptual multidimensional space with axes corresponding to the different factors that seem to go together to make up the idea of 'mind' - things like experience (meaning depth of feelings, rather than life encounters), agency (the ability to do things and exercise control while doing so), intelligence (whatever that means) and consciousness (ditto). It's an interesting approach, though ideally we need more than the page's two dimensions at a time - and even deciding where different entities fit in this space seems to involve a lot of guesswork. There's even a position given by some for dead people and God.

Unexpectedly, for me, the two most interesting parts of the book were not about the more predictable subject of animal minds, but rather about the potential for artificial intelligence and aliens to have minds. As Ball points out, it's almost impossible not to keep coming back to an anthropomorphic understanding - when, for instance, we think of the mind of an alien, it's very difficult not to give it a nature that is like what it feels like to be human, because our whole concept of 'mindedness' is based (inevitably) on human experience.

I enjoyed this book, and, as is always the case with Ball's writing, it stimulated me to think more about the topic. Even so, I found the book a touch over-long. This isn't helped by the sheer quantity of ideas about minds and their nature that seems to be unsupported by any good scientific evidence. At one point, Ball writes 'some researchers believe...' and this seemed to me to highlight the problem. Much of the discussion of minds isn't really science, but philosophy. It's what people believe to be the case (often holding wildly conflicting views) and there seems to be little chance for evidence to ever untangle the reality.

If we come down to the tag line of the book 'how to understand ourselves and other beings' (I'm aware the author doesn't always write this), it's a bit of a fail - a more accurate description would be 'how to understand that it's pretty much impossible to understand ourselves and other beings.' Despite this (and a couple of references to HAL 2000, which I can only assume was the younger cousin of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001, A Space Odyssey), this is a worthwhile and interesting book, particularly where Ball does go beyond animal minds to explore the more exotic possibilities.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more