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A review by branch_c
The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind by Michio Kaku
1.0
I hadn’t read anything by Kaku previously, and perhaps this wasn’t the best one to start with. He certainly seems to be a creative thinker, but his specialty is physics, not psychology or neuroscience. He may have thought that all that’s needed to write a book is having a reasonably sharp mind and ability to do some research and interview some experts. That may be the case in theory, but in my opinion, he hasn’t demonstrated it here.
It also could be that I’m not the target audience of this book. It’s pop science with an emphasis on the pop, and comes across as too sensationalist for me. In an attempt to evoke the promise of future developments in science and technology, he resorts to incessant references to Star Trek, Avatar, The Matrix, Inception, and practically every other well-known work of speculative fiction you might randomly think of, sometimes numerous examples on a single page. He relies on hyperbolic hooks like “Houdini believed that telepathy was impossible. But science is proving Houdini wrong.” (p. 63) and then proceeds to provide details showing that science is doing no such thing.
The writing is generally clear, but the wording is occasionally awkward - or at least imprecise - and often overly simplistic. To give just a couple of examples, there are “solar flares shot from the sun...” (p. 94) (as opposed to those other kinds of solar flares?) and later we read that “Of these base pairs, only eighteen mutations were altered since we became human.” (p. 153) (??) It reads a bit like an essay written by a fairly competent college student rather than a book by an accomplished scientist and author. There are numerous examples of imprecision in terminology resulting in statements that are just silly, or worse, messy logic and conclusions that don’t follow.
I found the narrative style vaguely irritating; the first person “interview recounting” approach that works well in the hands of an expert science journalist such as Carl Zimmer is less effective here, coming across as name dropping. And speaking of Zimmer, Kaku incorrectly refers to him as a biologist, even calling him Dr. Carl Zimmer (p. 58), which makes me suspicious of how well Kaku knows and represents the views of the many other experts he cites. He also later misstates the title of a Philip K. Dick book (p. 335), throwing doubt on the accuracy of the content in general.
Kaku’s “space-time theory of consciousness” incorporates a strange definition of consciousness, involving processes that could certainly be carried out unconsciously, and completely missing the point of what is mysterious about being conscious, in the sense of being self-aware and having an experience of the world.
In his discussion of AI, in fact, Kaku conflates self-awareness with intelligence (p. 216) and startlingly misrepresents Chalmers’ concept of the Hard Problem of consciousness, calling it instead a category of “Hard Problems” that “involve creating machines that can understand feelings and subjective sensations...” (p. 239). He then proceeds to quote Dennett on the topic and incorrectly concludes “there is no such thing as the Hard Problem” (p. 240). In the same chapter, Kaku promotes the ridiculous ideas that robots must be programmed to be able to lie (p. 234) and experience pain (p. 235).
There are some interesting concepts, such as the possibility that the ability to form long term memories evolved in service of the ability to simulate and predict the future (p. 114), and the potential to activate “savant skills” by medical treatments that could “dampen the forgetting process” (p. 148). Most of these ideas don’t appear to originate with Kaku, but will be of interest to those who haven’t encountered them elsewhere.
There are endless speculations here, on everything from artificial intelligence and alien intelligences to transmission of consciousness by light beam, and while it can be fun to think about such things, the real value is in pursuing them logically. Kaku, in contrast, throws out the idea like a pitch for an SF movie, and instead of doing the work of elaborating on the idea, he jumps to a conclusion that’s more absurd than thoughtful and leaves it there as if he’s said something truly profound.
It’s a rare book that doesn’t get at least two stars from me just for the effort. But in this case I can’t really justify it. Unfortunately, it’s not a good example of professional writing, and Kaku seems like someone who knows better than to have produced it.
It also could be that I’m not the target audience of this book. It’s pop science with an emphasis on the pop, and comes across as too sensationalist for me. In an attempt to evoke the promise of future developments in science and technology, he resorts to incessant references to Star Trek, Avatar, The Matrix, Inception, and practically every other well-known work of speculative fiction you might randomly think of, sometimes numerous examples on a single page. He relies on hyperbolic hooks like “Houdini believed that telepathy was impossible. But science is proving Houdini wrong.” (p. 63) and then proceeds to provide details showing that science is doing no such thing.
The writing is generally clear, but the wording is occasionally awkward - or at least imprecise - and often overly simplistic. To give just a couple of examples, there are “solar flares shot from the sun...” (p. 94) (as opposed to those other kinds of solar flares?) and later we read that “Of these base pairs, only eighteen mutations were altered since we became human.” (p. 153) (??) It reads a bit like an essay written by a fairly competent college student rather than a book by an accomplished scientist and author. There are numerous examples of imprecision in terminology resulting in statements that are just silly, or worse, messy logic and conclusions that don’t follow.
I found the narrative style vaguely irritating; the first person “interview recounting” approach that works well in the hands of an expert science journalist such as Carl Zimmer is less effective here, coming across as name dropping. And speaking of Zimmer, Kaku incorrectly refers to him as a biologist, even calling him Dr. Carl Zimmer (p. 58), which makes me suspicious of how well Kaku knows and represents the views of the many other experts he cites. He also later misstates the title of a Philip K. Dick book (p. 335), throwing doubt on the accuracy of the content in general.
Kaku’s “space-time theory of consciousness” incorporates a strange definition of consciousness, involving processes that could certainly be carried out unconsciously, and completely missing the point of what is mysterious about being conscious, in the sense of being self-aware and having an experience of the world.
In his discussion of AI, in fact, Kaku conflates self-awareness with intelligence (p. 216) and startlingly misrepresents Chalmers’ concept of the Hard Problem of consciousness, calling it instead a category of “Hard Problems” that “involve creating machines that can understand feelings and subjective sensations...” (p. 239). He then proceeds to quote Dennett on the topic and incorrectly concludes “there is no such thing as the Hard Problem” (p. 240). In the same chapter, Kaku promotes the ridiculous ideas that robots must be programmed to be able to lie (p. 234) and experience pain (p. 235).
There are some interesting concepts, such as the possibility that the ability to form long term memories evolved in service of the ability to simulate and predict the future (p. 114), and the potential to activate “savant skills” by medical treatments that could “dampen the forgetting process” (p. 148). Most of these ideas don’t appear to originate with Kaku, but will be of interest to those who haven’t encountered them elsewhere.
There are endless speculations here, on everything from artificial intelligence and alien intelligences to transmission of consciousness by light beam, and while it can be fun to think about such things, the real value is in pursuing them logically. Kaku, in contrast, throws out the idea like a pitch for an SF movie, and instead of doing the work of elaborating on the idea, he jumps to a conclusion that’s more absurd than thoughtful and leaves it there as if he’s said something truly profound.
It’s a rare book that doesn’t get at least two stars from me just for the effort. But in this case I can’t really justify it. Unfortunately, it’s not a good example of professional writing, and Kaku seems like someone who knows better than to have produced it.