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Mind and Mechanism By Drew V. McDermott
2001 | 279 Pages | ISBN: 026213392X | PDF | 3 MB
Mind and Mechanism is an excellent look at the mind-body problem from the viewpoint of a computer scientist. McDermott does a very good job not just explaining his hypotheses, but also showing how they compete with well know philosophical points of view as well. In Mind and Mechanism, McDermott makes the bold, yet not so far fetched, assumption that the brain is simply an enormous computational machine. Thus, all the things that people regard as stemming from their internal "mind" are simply by-products of a self-modeling of the world within our computational structure, the brain. McDermott does an amazing job supporting his thesis with thorough and exhaustive examples, without falling into the pit trap of overextending metaphors. McDermott even includes a section in his book titled "Objections and Replies". This section is brilliant in its placement and content in that it addresses many of my early concerns with his reasoning, allowing me to continue with the second half of the book without dwelling on my objections to the first half of the book. Though the book gets off to a fairly slow start and some material might be a bit too technical for people not familiar with formal computer models to immediately grasp, this is a great read for anyone interested in another point of view on the mind-body problem.
