The Brain is Wider than the Sky
Bryan Appleyard
The Brain is Wider than the Sky
Simplicity has become a brand and a cult. People want simple lives and simple solutions. And now our technology wants us to be simpler, to be 'machine readable'. From telephone call trees that simplify us into a series of 'options' to social networks that reduce us to our purchases and preferences, we are deluged with propaganda urging us to abandon our irreducibly complex selves. Dazed by the marketing, we hand over our lives to databases, iPads and smartphones. At the same time, scientists tell us we are 'simply' the products of evolution, nothing more than our genes. Brain scanners have inspired neuroscientists to claim they are close to cracking the problem of the human mind. 'Human equivalent' computers are being designed that, we are told, will do our thinking for us. Humans are being simplified out of existence. It is time, says Bryan Appleyard, to resist, and to reclaim the full depth of human experience. We are, he argues, naturally complex creatures, we are only ever at home in complexity. Through art and literature we see ourselves in ways that machines never can. He makes an impassioned plea for the voices of art to be heard before those of the technocrats.
3.6 out of 5 based on 4 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Society, Politics & Philosophy |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
288 |
| RRP |
£20.00 |
| Date of Publication |
November 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-0297860303 |
| Publisher |
Weidenfeld & Nicolson |
| |
Simplicity has become a brand and a cult. People want simple lives and simple solutions. And now our technology wants us to be simpler, to be 'machine readable'. From telephone call trees that simplify us into a series of 'options' to social networks that reduce us to our purchases and preferences, we are deluged with propaganda urging us to abandon our irreducibly complex selves. Dazed by the marketing, we hand over our lives to databases, iPads and smartphones. At the same time, scientists tell us we are 'simply' the products of evolution, nothing more than our genes. Brain scanners have inspired neuroscientists to claim they are close to cracking the problem of the human mind. 'Human equivalent' computers are being designed that, we are told, will do our thinking for us. Humans are being simplified out of existence. It is time, says Bryan Appleyard, to resist, and to reclaim the full depth of human experience. We are, he argues, naturally complex creatures, we are only ever at home in complexity. Through art and literature we see ourselves in ways that machines never can. He makes an impassioned plea for the voices of art to be heard before those of the technocrats.
Reviews
The Guardian
Simon Ings
"Appleyard's central point is that, in our desire to think great things about our IT "cloud", we're deliberately oversimplifying ourselves. We're hammering ourselves into ridiculously reductive boxes. In our desire to be part of something greater, we're making ourselves small. Appleyard is not alone, but, philosophically, this book is not quite on the same level as last year's You Are Not a Gadget, a work of staggering apostasy by one of cyberspace's founding fathers, Jaron Lanier. A couple of things make Appleyard's work a valuable companion to the debate, rather than a latecomer to the party. First, his breadth of reference. He's interviewed actors in his time, and celebrities, as well as geeks and gurus and scientists, and he treats all his subjects with a critical sympathy that looks easy but takes a career to acquire. Second, he manages to distinguish between the work of individual scientists and the broader philosophical questions science raises."
19/11/2011
Read Full Review
The Sunday Times
James McConnachie
"Appleyard is an admirably sceptical guide, and he has a superb journalist’s eye for detail … For the most part, [he] lets his subjects expose themselves. Jane McGonigal, a gaming researcher, believes online gaming could solve world poverty — if only we could raise the total hours spent doing it from 3 billion to 21 billion a week. Google’s “chilling” Eric Schmidt wants children to have only two states: “asleep or online”. A particularly incisive chapter reveals how the self-deluded quants of the banking industry “lost themselves in a game of machines and fantasy mathematics”. In the original, Jeremiah-like sense of excoriating the vanities of the world, Appleyard is an engaging prophet."
13/11/2011
Read Full Review
The Spectator
Anthony Daniels
"Are laments, such as Appleyard’s, over the deleterious effects of new inventions merely those of ageing people unable to keep pace with a world that they no longer understand, that they fear and dislike? Such lamentations are nothing new; and the world has been going to the dogs in this fashion ever since I can remember. But false alarms do not mean that there are no true alarms; and just because neuroscience fails to pluck out the heart of our mystery, it does not mean that the presuppositions upon which it is based, and its actual findings, will have no serious effect upon us."
12/11/2011
Read Full Review
The Literary Review
Steve Fuller
"As readers have come to expect with Bryan Appleyard, his new book is another literate and sensitive reflection on how science is changing our self-understanding. It evokes and updates a genre of late Victorian writing that rues the loss of our sense of the sacred in nature that accompanies the march of science and industry ... There are points in the text when Appleyard’s earnest questing after authentic being tips over into the vaguely mawkish. But then I might not be on Appleyard’s wavelength — nor he on the wavelengths of some of the people he interviewed. Nevertheless, the book provides extensive enough interviews to enable critical readers to draw different conclusions from Appleyard’s."
01/11/2011
Read Full Review