Farhad Taghibakhsh

One of the best books I have ever read!

Revisado: 07-31-24

The story brought back to life the conditions I used to grow up in, although mine had been a few years later when things had gotten a bit better. Nevertheless, listening to the horrific things the writer had gone through, so early in life, was a testament to what I used to hear here and there, and often second handed!
The book is a story of survival through hope and hard work, the story of success through learning, focus, drive and decisiveness, and the story of transformational growth through reflections and holding onto values and ultimately becoming part of the driving force to make this world a better place for all.

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With knowledge it helped a bit, with wasting time it helped a lot!

Revisado: 09-12-23

I didn’t give this book a low rating because I’m against the presented materials in it, but because the book suffers from two main issues most discussions on consciousness suffer from:
1) pack of clarity in problem definition: It tries to discuss a matter (consciousness) and yet does not present a clear definition of the problem first
2) Forging assumptions as thought experiments! A great number of presented “thought experiments” are basically simple assumptions. Like the zombie model.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

The hard problem of letting go of the faith!

Revisado: 04-23-22

It was a very informative book for me personally, I learned a lot about the anatomy of the brain, neurological activities and their relations to our physical behavior / actions. Specifically I was fascinated by the mentioned method of measuring / quantifying consciousness in brain damaged patients. However, I didn’t find the book necessarily helpful (again, for me) on the subject of consciousness!
I found the description of the IIT (integrated information technology) incomplete (without explaining how consciousness can emerge from integrated information), sort of hoping that consciousness miraculously emerges when a computing system can integrate high level data, explores and finds relations between them!
Additionally,
Nevertheless, I found the content of the book matching its title: confessions of a hopeless scientific mind loosing its faith to scientific discoveries and objectiveness of the physical world, yet hoping there is a meaning to the life and universe!
I strongly believe this book is absolutely useful for people of the faith and those who believe in metaphysical world, because the writer patiently walks you out of many illusions graciously easier the way he helped himself, the hard way.
— Remarks on a technical matter: the writer believes consciousness is a property built into a whole system and therefore you cannot simulate consciousness using digital computer, the same way simulation of a black hole won’t wrap the space-time around the simulating computer [Nature 2018]. I found this argument bizarre and the analogy utterly wrong! This argument, I think, attest on the writer believe that he thinks consciousness is something on top of a system like a mind or spirit that emerges from it, and not a result of information processing. The way I understand it he’s saying since the brain is an analog system, you cannot simulate it using a digital computer. But this contradicts his adherence to the IIT! Also, if consciousness is the result of information processing, the information being analog or digital would not matter (incomparable to simulation of gravity in a computer). After all, all analog signals are digital in nature … so, it’s a matter of resolution. Will a digital computer built based on multi-value logics capable of simulating consciousness, but not a binary computer?!

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Amazingly good

Revisado: 03-11-18

I really enjoyed the content and narrative ... very informative on the history & nature of human; highly recommended.

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