La mente è piatta

Q: Literary depths, mental shallows. (c) An apt description of this book. I've never been able to grab someone's belief, that's about the only thing I agree with in this book. I don't think anyone else ever did. Well, maybe someone did but they chose not to tell the tale to the rest of us. This seems Leggi tutto

Good for: rethinking perception if you know little about it After finishing this book I had an impression that I am living a life of a fictional character in a fictional world. My body is nothing else but a signal processing system, striving cycle by cycle to impose meaning of sensory input. The mean Leggi tutto

Este puede ser uno de los libros más importantes del siglo XXI en el mundo de la psicología. El autor lleva más allá las ideas de Daniel Dennett sobre la consciencia y acumula una gran cantidad de pruebas que muestran que el inconsciente tal y como lo concebimos, simplemente no existe. No hay profund Leggi tutto

This might transpire to be a successful application letter to give TED talks, but it's ultimately disappointingly vapid. It isn't so much that the assertions here, so far as they go, are incorrect - but the writing is boring in the same way atheistic treatises are boring. Everything is "remarkable", Leggi tutto

Nick Chater’s central claim is that mental depth is an illusion. The claim is not new of course – Georges-Louis de Buffon’s “the style is the man himself” , Friedrich Nietzsche’s “there are no beautiful surfaces without terrible depths” , and more recently, Aaron Haspel’s “it’s surface all the way do Leggi tutto

I think the name of the book is a meta play, because the book convinces you of just that -"the mind is flat". It is also the most convincing case I have read against AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), even while showing why we have had successes in narrow AI. Before you think it's an AI book, it Leggi tutto

The illusion is .. that this book has any depth. To be fair, though, if you haven't read much (any) psychology this would be a good way to get introduced into a truly fascinating subject - the human mind. This is not a text book but the author does take the reader through a series of fairly well-kno Leggi tutto

Tim Harford raved about this book so I had high expectations but I was disappointed. For a start it's not very well written and rather repetitive (and poorly copy-edited with a clutch of typos). I found the idea that my mind has no depth, and that my brain is constantly hoaxing me that it does, rathe Leggi tutto

The mind is flat an intriguing thesis, that our minds are constant improvisers that have no underlying depth to them - no thought but the stream of consciousness. But it is let down by a blunt argument that does not consider with any seriousness potential objections except to dismiss the preexisting Leggi tutto