virtualmima's reviews
784 reviews

Title is false advertising. Here we have yet another arrogant pseudo-philosophy book written for popular consumption that follows the capitalist-funded computer-age fad of mechanism and puts a little too much trust in the work of others. Mechanists always reveal their own shortcomings by defending the mechanistic hypothesis; their own attachments to systems and habits are so strong that they can't imagine what life is like for people who don't have that particular weakness. Their ideas are directed by blindness from not having learned how to think in other ways, and that gives them the passion and arrogance that makes them write stuff like this.

People should also stop comparing consciousness to AI. It's a trend that began decades ago with the introduction of computers and programming, but people seem to forget that computers are created by people for people, and AI is programmed by people with the purpose of trying to mimic or improve upon the human brain, based on models of what they think is how the brain works. Somehow a lot of pseudointellectuals have convinced themselves that it's actually the human brain that is based on AI. As of now, the idea of a machine being even a little bit similar to a human is just a myth, because it's never been done before, and if it ever does resemble human speech or behavior it'll still be less human than a very well-trained parrot. If programmers are having this much trouble trying to make robots mimic very average people who try to blend in and copy everyone else, they will never succeed at creating original personalities.

Occasionally some of the stuff here is interesting and informative, but it's written with a false premise in mind. If the author were more focused on finding the truth instead of believing he already has it, this could be better. I can see this being a more sophisticated effort (compared to Ayn Rand at least) by capitalists to win scientists and atheists over to conservatism by convincing them that the world is a machine and we are robots. Instead of reading this, read Phenomenology of Perception. If Dennett had read that book he wouldn't have written this, unless he was paid off to do so or didn't understand what he was reading. Do not read this without a strong background in philosophy, especially phenomenology, existentialism, post-structuralism, and the Frankfurt school, because you might actually get fooled into believing some of this stuff which is really just a more in-depth version of your average pseudointellectual Reddit post.

The transitional object is not a sexual object. It's just training wheels to accustom the baby to independence. There's no reason to put Freudian sex stuff into here. More of a piece to provoke thought than to believe in, because there's a lot of valuable ideas here that unfortunately are polluted by Freud.

It's interesting to see a Muslim historian in 1377 say that the earth is spherical, skin color is based on the intensity of the sun at different latitudes, the harmfulness of being severe to students, and several other things that Europeans hadn't figured out until centuries later, and in some ways still haven't caught up. He also argued against the belief in his time that black people were descended from Ham and cursed to be slaves. That isn't to say that Ibn Khaldun was ahead of his time because he still believed in a racist, social darwinist essentialism. It's white people who were far behind the times. This is an interesting historical document and gives a good view into life in the golden age of Islam.