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Summary
Summary
The holy grail of psychologists and scientists for nearly a century has been to understand and replicate both human thought and the human mind. In fact, it's what attracted the now-legendary computer scientist and AI authority David Gelernter to the discipline in the first place. As a student and young researcher in the 1980s, Gelernter hoped to build a program with a dial marked "focus." At maximum "focus," the program would "think" rationally, formally, reasonably. As the dial was turned down and "focus" diminished, its "mind" would start to wander, and as you dialed even lower, this artificial mind would start to free-associate, eventually ignoring the user completely as it cruised off into the mental adventures we know as sleep.
While the program was a only a partial success, it laid the foundation for The Tides of Mind, a groundbreaking new exploration of the human psyche that shows us how the very purpose of the mind changes throughout the day. Indeed, as Gelernter explains, when we are at our most alert, when reasoning and creating new memories is our main mental business, the mind is a computer-like machine that keeps emotion on a short leash and attention on our surroundings. As we gradually tire, however, and descend the "mental spectrum," reasoning comes unglued. Memory ranges more freely, the mind wanders, and daydreams grow more insistent. Self-awareness fades, reflection blinks out, and at last we are completely immersed in our own minds.
With far-reaching implications, Gelernter's landmark "Spectrum of Consciousness" finally helps decode some of the most mysterious wonders of the human mind, such as the numinous light of early childhood, why dreams are so often predictive, and why sadism and masochism underpin some of our greatest artistic achievements. It's a theory that also challenges the very notion of the mind as a machine--and not through empirical studies or "hard science" but by listening to our great poets and novelists, who have proven themselves as humanity's most trusted guides to the subjective mind and inner self.
In the great introspective tradition of Wilhelm Wundt and René Descartes, David Gelernter promises to not only revolutionize our understanding of what it means to be human but also to help answer many of our most fundamental questions about the origins of creativity, thought, and consciousness.
Author Notes
David Gelernter is the author of eight books and a professor of computer science at Yale University. His 1991 work, Mirror Worlds, not only "foresaw" (Reuters) the World Wide Web but is considered "one of the most influential books in computer science" (Technology Review). Gelernter's research has proved important to several leading Web-search efforts, and has been central in the development of the Java programming language as well as the first modern social network. He lives in Woodbridge, Connecticut.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Those in a state of panic induced by books and articles about the possibility of a "singularity" in which artificial intelligence triumphs over the human race will find comfort in this quite reasonable and decidedly human study of the mind. Gelernter (America-Lite), a professor of computer science at Yale, argues that the current trend in philosophy toward "computationalism" ignores basic, glaringly obvious truths about the difference between brain and mind. For example, he asserts that human intellect and selfhood are not merely the product of the conscious mind. He explores the "spectrum" of thought experienced over the course of a day: the creative haze encountered upon first waking, the focused and rational thoughts of our most productive hours, the daydreaming we engage in while drowsy, the involuntary free association of near-sleep, and finally the opaque and mysterious realm of dreams and the unconscious. The author contends that the "down-spectrum" realms of dreams and fantasies, which are controlled by emotion and memory, allow for the creative thinking that will always separate humans from machines. Quotes about the mind from Proust, Pynchon, Shakespeare, and other literary giants provide welcome reassurance that we've still got something on the robots. Agent: Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, Writers' Representatives. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Everyone agrees that computers do not employ reason; they compute. This harmony dissolves when the discussion turns to the future, where vastly more powerful machines will develop sentience and feelingsor not. In this dense but imaginative meditation on how humans think, Gelernter (Computer Science/Yale Univ.; America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture and Ushered in the Obamacrats, 2012, etc.) marshals philosophers, poets, and authors (J.M. Coetzee's Life Times of Michael K provides one illuminating exploration), but few scientists, in support of his mildly quirky view of human consciousness. According to the author, the mind is a "room with a view" that combines inner thoughts with events in the outside world. He downplays the popular view that thought relates to the brain as software relates to hardware, maintaining that the mind is never in a steady state. All thought processese.g., memory, emotion, reason, and self-reflectionvary along a spectrum that depends on one'sur physical state and the time of day. At the top, where the computer analogy works, focus is intense, reason rules, and memory is subordinate: a source of data. Focus, but not memory, dims as the mind moves down-spectrum to fatigue, drowsiness, and finally sleep. Along the way, memory takes over, but it's pliable human memory, not hard-wired silicon. Perception becomes unreliable; we dream. "Up-spectrum, the mind pursues meaning by using logic," writes the author. "Moving down-spectrum, it tends to pursue meaning by inventing storiesas we do when we dream. A logical argument and a story are two ways of putting fragments in proper relationship and guessing where the whole sequence leads and how it gets there." Eschewing research in favor of literature and Freud, Gelernter delivers a personal, reasonable, nonscientific analysis of the mind. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Gelernter is a cross-disciplinary intellectual who has written highly interesting works of history, memoir, and, now, psychology. He rather boldly asserts a theory of mind that he touts as a radical departure from fashionable conventions, rejecting with gusto the oft-sighted computer analogy of the mind as software running on the hardware of the brain. Instead, Gelernter suggests the mind as spectrum, basing his theory on his reflections on the experience of consciousness, which ranges from high-focus, task-oriented thought to low-focus mind wandering to no-focus dreaming. Consciousness phases from acting on external reality to being immersed in one's internal thoughts, which function through memories and emotions. To persuade readers that his framework is viable, Gelernter takes them through a daily passage up and down the spectrum, inducing them to consider if his observations which he buttresses with quotations from the Western literary canon parallel their own experiences. Since Gelernter's ideas can be self-tested by anyone, this spark for mental exploration may attract a sizable audience.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2016 Booklist
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. xi |
| 1 The Tides of Mind | p. 1 |
| 2 Three Thirds of the Spectrum | p. 20 |
| 3 Every Day | p. 55 |
| 4 A Map | p. 104 |
| 5 Spectrum, Upper Third: Abstraction | p. 133 |
| 6 Spectrum, Middle Third: Creativity | p. 149 |
| 7 Spectrum, Lower Third: Descent into Lost Time | p. 173 |
| 8 Where It All Leads | p. 205 |
| 9 Conclusions | p. 241 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 253 |
| Literary Works Cited in the Text | p. 255 |
| Notes | p. 259 |
| Index | p. 269 |
