I read a lot of books that are over my head.
I don't mean by that that I keep them on a high-shelf.
Rather, they're written by classical scholars, or physicists or neuro-scientists for academics. Despite my many pretensions, I am not an academic. I'm just someone who enjoys learning--and autodidact, maybe--and enjoys, also, the challenge of reading things outside of my field and discovering new things.
Right now, I am slogging like John Bunyan's Pilgrim through "The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience."
Despite an extremely favorable review in The Wall Street Journal including the byte "elegant prose," I'm finding it slow going. My Kindle tells me the chapters are about 30 minutes long, and damn if I can get through one in the hour a day I allot to reading. It's like reading a powerpoint deck on how the latest mayonnaise will change culture.
As the subhead reads, "Brain," is a brain-scan of what human-kind knows about the brain, a history of what we've believed through the last two millennia and what we're learning today.
I picked up "Brain" because I'm sick of all the "that will change everything bushwa" you see in the news, in your feed, from your friends and clients about the alchemical power of artificial intelligence. We're about ten years in from my writing this ad, and I gotta tell you, every bot I interact with, every so-called creative marvel I see (like last week's horrid Volvo fake-ad) every example seems as hollow as a politician's promise about restoring amerika.
In the scheme of human history and for much of the last two-thousand-years, prevailing Western thought believed that health--mental and physical--was the result of our four humours being in balance. Black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood.
The West's best minds since before the time of Christ to about the time of Abraham Lincoln believed that the four secretions listed above dictated how you or I felt. For much of that time, until about the 1600s, the brain was an afterthought. Most thinkers and doctors and philosophers believed that thinking, guidance and all that brain stuff was seated in the heart.
As I read about finds, beliefs, "ideas that will change everything," including "god particles" that give humans the ability to think, I can't help but feeling that despite the Ph.Ds involved, the baroque experiments, the Nobel Prizes, the brilliance and the progress humankind has made, "knowing" the brain is like trying to fill the oceans with a thimble.
What Thomas Wolfe said in "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" almost 100 years ago, we could say about how and why we think today.
The quest is noble. But as futile as counting the sesame seeds on an H&H bagel. There are too many and it will never be done.
The belief that we're getting there is marked by little but hubris.
That's why I don't buy the AI hype, the eating of humanity, the singularity.
The human brain is way too complicated for us to recreate some aspect of it in a bits and bytes parlor trick.
As Cobb writes, "As to the human brain, with its 90 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses and its billions of glia (these figures are all guesstimates), the idea of mapping it to the synapse level will not become a reality until the far distant future."
If humanity does get eaten by anything, it will be by the superrich and the super-greedy and the super-cheap. And the super-tax-avoiders. That's actually what's happening now.
It won't be computers who devour the world, it will be charlatans and the abiding human belief in 'something for nothing-ism.'
And hubris.
That science is mightier than life. That computers trump corpuscles.
Hubris is what's eating the world, our careers and everything else.
All-you-can-eat.
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