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This book lacks positive value for almost all people

Revisado: 06-15-24

There is quite a lot of information about the human brain and other nervous systems that is communicated in this book. That would make for an informative but unfocused neurobiological review if not for the information being selected and then the specific chosen information selectively presented to the listener in support of an overall intellectual position that is based on false rationale. My personal opinion of whether people do or do not have free will has changed several times over the past decades. I currently don’t think non-human animals and AI have free will, but that people do. A slight majority of the sociological, brain imaging, and genetic association research results presented in Determined as “really cool facts in support of human behavior being determined by turtles all the way down” are probably either wrong or wrongly interpreted. That lack of valid support for the general message of the book doesn’t really matter, though- it just serves to obfuscate a flawed reasoning through a barrage of selectively presented neuroscience study results. The main problem is that the author takes for granted two things: 1) Humans and other intelligent organisms (things with nervous systems, I guess) have similar molecular and cellular components and so if one one does not have free will, then the other does not also. This seems to be a logical error. There are very important differences between the nervous systems of humans and Aplysia, but that doesn’t really matter because Aplysia do not write books, nor conduct scientific research nor create explanatory knowledge. In ways that are relevant to the question of free will existence in the two species, the space for different choices in intentional choices is more different than the two types of nervous systems are similar. 2) The assumption that ideas do not affect the organization of matter and energy is clearly false. If there are infinite ways to be wrong, and ideas interact with other ideas (through human communication) and ideas influence the physical world, then any time people are present and performing knowledge creation then the possibilities of future available choices available (to people, dogs, and Aplysia) is dependent on human explanatory knowledge created in one nanosecond, one hour, and one century into the past. Although knowledge creation depends on determined physical systems, the knowledge can be more or less wrong in truly infinite ways, and ideas (abstractions) are things that are impossible to perfectly instantiate outside of a person’s mind (e.g. a perfect circle).
The idea that free will can be reduced to a button press choice is wrong if creativity and explanatory knowledge have a role in the question of whether free will exists.
The author of Determined says the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Physics is murky. I suggest that statement reflects an inability to fully understand it, or that statement is made because Many Worlds is discounted because it effectively undercuts the author’s worldview and sense of personal identity.

Instead of this book, I would recommend people read a recent neuroscience text book or a less biased book about the human brain, and to pair that with the following books available on Audible: Fabric of Reality, Beginning of Infinity, The myth of the Framework, and maybe The Science of Can and Can’t.

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Recommend reading for neuroscientists, software engineers and AI scientists, and everyone else.

Revisado: 08-10-23

I highly recommend this book. I think this book includes new ideas about how nervous systems work. It also describes well supported reasons why concepts about how brains work that are commonly held by computer scientists, physicists, non-professional scientists, and most neuroscientists are probably wrong and are holding back progress in understanding mechanisms of brain function. Despite strongly recommending this book, please be aware that I (a fellow neuroscientist) think there are many incorrect statements and conjectures throughout. Central to my disagreements with ideas in this book is lack of acknowledgement that explanatory knowledge is an unbounded, is a real entity, and only grows consistently via human brain activity (as described by David Deutsch in his books). I recommend reading David Deutsch’s books (and be sure to understand them) prior to reading or listening to The Brain From Inside Out. If you proceed in that order, you should recognize that one of the main messages of this book (action as experimentation/criticism) is paramount to understanding brain function, is more correct than current consensus, but conflicts with the idea that knowledge starts with conjecture and is then tested by experimentation (which in turn relies on memory/information and computation). …so this is a highly recommended read after reading Deutsch’s books. Pay attention to and be sure to understand the dialogue about the “cryptoinductionist”. One additional criticism is that the statements in this currently reviewed book- that the human brain has effectively the same hardware component make up as other brains- is not supported by the evidence. In a related issue, it is weird that the author ignores the various types of glia cell types that have been shown to play a critical role in learning, memory, and information processing in the brain of animal models throughout decades of replicated research. It is a bit older, but The Other Brain by D. Fields is available on Audible that describes the state of research on glia in brain function as of about 11 years ago.

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A great history of digital light, important for artists and tech buffs

Revisado: 10-25-22

This book contains so many important explanations and perspectives on images and movies generated with the aid of computers. Despite working in a related field for many years, I learned an incredible amount from listening to this book. It is long but worth the listen for anyone interested in how movies are made, how computers are used to make art, and perhaps get insights into what to expect in the future. I highly recommend this book!

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An informative overview of neuroscience history, biased and myopic view forward

Revisado: 03-26-22

A useful big step back to reassess neuroscience and whether we really know what we think we know. Also included: Many small, hypocritical, and narrow minded steps in what I think are the wrong directions for the current cutting edge and the future of neuroscience.

There are instances in which the author admits to not understanding an idea or hypothesis, and then goes on to dismiss the value of related work. That’s not very cool!

I do strongly recommend this book for physicists and cognitive neuroscientists. Just don’t believe everything you read or hear in the book.

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Very good, recommended for everyone!

Revisado: 03-26-22

I enjoyed this book very much. I enjoyed the stories and the new ideas. Enjoy!

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Highly recommended

Revisado: 03-26-22

I think this book is a must read for scientists in all fields. It may require re-listening to some sanctions a couple of times to really understand some points, but at least for me it seemed important to make sure I understood each part before moving on. At the same time, it was important for me to not dwell too much on things I understood but did not think to be correct at the time because the author later addressed every single such concept- with one notable exception.

That exception is that I do not think the author provides enough coverage of simulation theory. The phyllo dough thought experiment with hotel rooms in English cities seems flawed since the system seems either not truly isolated or, if isolated then does not contain information that support good explanations.

Perhaps a follow up book from Deutsch with deeper integration of ideas from Marletto’s recent book may provide better coverage of the simulation questions (how to think of simulations in our universe and possibility that ours is a simulation).

I recommend this book as pre-reading for scientists who would like to read Marletto’s Science of Can and Can’t in order to provide conceptual support to balance the decades of reductionism and dynamical system thinking that is central to most scientific training.

It’s an intense book but I think very worth reading in its entirety.

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An important and thoughtful consideration

Revisado: 09-10-18

The time spent with the author evaluating future risks posed by intelligence similar to human with ability to proliferate and self-improve is worth while. I strongly encourage everyone to listen to this book- especially those working in areas even remotely related to artificial intelligence. Bostrom clearly approaches the topic in an earnest and fastidious manner. Many concepts and dilemmas put forward by the author may be common in areas such as computer science and philosophy but represent a new angle for me. The excellent logically planned structure of the book keep it mostly easy to continue listening to with some minor hints of repetitiveness in the second-half of the middle section of the book. My own evaluation of the book is impacted by my background as a neuroscientist. I work at the heart of ongoing efforts to understand how the human brain functions and my background is the basis of two minor, related criticisms of the postulates that the author puts forward in the book. The issues mostly impact the beginning and final quarters of the book. The author bases many ideas on the assumption that we have an understanding of how the human brain processes information and stores memory (memory in some form and temporal scale is essential to almost any form of intelligence) that is very likely roughly correct. As a scientist in the field of neurobiology I think that assumption is weak and is the product of listening to a small and vocal group of neuroscientists- many of whom come from a background biased toward computer-science inspired ways of thinking about intelligence. Researchers working in cognitive or computational neuroscience areas have many good ideas but have come to dominate the thinking in the wider field of neuroscience. This leads to a second more specific but related problem: The assumption that number and rate of cognitive processes carried out by the human brain should be based on the number of neurons and/or the number of synaptic connections. There is not space to delve into it here but many smaller parts of the nervous system have properties implicating that molecule-level neural components are almost certainly actively involved with processing information and memory storage in a way that cannot be abstracted out of a simulated nervous system while still retaining the system-level characteristics to an acceptable approximation of whole brain function. I am in the minority with such views but I think computational neuroscience suffers from group-think which is exacerbated by over-representation by former computer science enthusiasts who reinvented themselves (often early in their education) as neuroscientists.
These issues do not take away substantially from this book, but they do lead to a gap in topics discussed. The missing considerations are best expressed in two parts: A) Much of the book examines ways to avoid an existential crisis. However, we do not yet understand ourselves well enough to know what aspects of us to protect though the coming changes. Specifically, I do not think we have a generally correct understanding of how our brain processes information and stores memory and we have not come to a generally accepted concept of biological mechanisms underlying conscious experience, although there are some good ideas currently floating around. B) One way to kill off the human race and perhaps all other animal life is to upload all organisms' nervous systems into a computational simulation with an erroneous understanding of how fine-grained the simulation needs to be.
This represents a major hazard for our next phase of societal development if one accepts that there is even a 5% chance that we are wrong about important aspects of biological intelligence.
So, I think Bostrom missed a few things but what IS in the book is well considered and important to a wide range of readers.
Again, I strongly recommend this audio book.

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My thoughts on The Other Brain

Revisado: 03-27-11

Great book in that it covers a topic to which most people have very little exposure. It is always interesting to hear more about the people and events behind scientific research that do not make it into journal publications or the mainstream news. It was very exciting to hear about what the leaders in this field of study are doing and how they got to that place in their career. I talked a friend who does not have a background in biological research into listening to this book and will encourage him to let me know what he thinks of it and submit a review since, based on one of the other reviews here, it might be too technical for some people to enjoy. The only thing that I did not like was that the narrator pronounced some very commonly used terms in ways that I have never heard them pronounced, which became tiresome for such a long audio book. I recommend this book to anyone interested in neurobiological research.

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