Complex science lightly delivered; a pleasure for anyone comfortable with the thought that knowing others’ minds will...
Do the dead have thoughts? The late Harvard psychology professor Wegner (The Illusion of Conscious Will, 2002, etc.), assisted by neuroscientist Gray (Mind Perception and Morality/Univ. of North Carolina), ponders that ethereal question and much more.
I think, therefore I am. I know I am—but what about you? We scarcely know our own thoughts, it seems, but we accord other humans, and other beings, respect and agency because we acknowledge that they have thoughts, that they have mind. Never mind that we may be wrong about how much respect we accord others; for instance, as the authors write in a move guaranteed to tick off cat lovers, we “extend more protection to kittens than crows, despite the fact that corvids are much smarter.” Yes, they are, demonstrably and measurably, but our view otherwise grants kittens slightly more capital in the animal rights department. And what of dead people? What, particularly, of a dead you? Write the authors, with admirable clarity, “trying to perceive your dead mind is paradoxical, because you have to perceive a state that is incapable of perception—which is impossible while you are currently perceiving.” The authors’ approach to understanding the minds of others—whether those minds are those of people we consider enemies or people who for whatever reason cannot express themselves—is a touch softer than the hard-core neuroscience of, say, Antonio Damasio. Still, they look at some very tough questions: how do we sort our thoughts about the minds of others in such a way that we can rationalize torture? (The answer hinges on levels of empathy.) What kind of mind does God have, if God exists? (A provocative hint: “God is perceived as being very high in agency but relatively low in experience.”) And so forth, all leading to the wise if unsettling thought that “our perceptions are all we have.”
Complex science lightly delivered; a pleasure for anyone comfortable with the thought that knowing others’ minds will improve our own.Pub Date: March 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-670-78583-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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