The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind by Michio Kaku (PDF)

Description

Michio Kaku, the New York Times bestselling author of Physics of the Impossible and Physics of the Future tackles the most fascinating and complex object in the known universe: the human brain.The Future of the Mind brings a topic that once belonged solely to the province of science fiction into a startling new reality. This scientific tour de force unveils the astonishing research being done in top laboratories around the world—all based on the latest advancements in neuroscience and physics—including recent experiments in telepathy, mind control, avatars, telekinesis, and recording memories and dreams. The Future of the Mind is an extraordinary, mind-boggling exploration of the frontiers of neuroscience. Dr. Kaku looks toward the day when we may achieve the ability to upload the human brain to a computer, neuron for neuron; project thoughts and emotions around the world on a brain-net; take a “smart pill” to enhance cognition; send our consciousness across the universe; and push the very limits of immortality.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Dr. Kaku may be a fine physicist, but I see little evidence that he has engaged in any deep study of the problem of consciousness and its related spheres of perception, memory, cognition and cognitive development. The book is indeed interesting – if only on a semi-surface level – for its tour of developments in neuroscience with its new mapping technologies (e.g., fMRI), genetics and brain regions, massive planned research programs proposing to map the entire neural structure and connections of the brain and ultimately of course, recreate it in silicon. I say “on a semi-surface level” because Kaku does, at points, pull the unbridled optimism and unrealistic time-projections for future AI achievements a little closer to reality than I have seen elsewhere. Despite this, by the end, he is not far from the same optimism – one that belies any deep understanding – a mindset surely supported by the unhesitating reductionism displayed throughout the book, towards the end manifesting by simply assigning NDE’s and out-of-the-body experiences as simply “generated” by the brain, in a treatment that nicely ignores all the problematic phenomena reported that might indicate an objective status to these experiences. The book holds an interesting discussion of various brain imaging methods, their strengths and limitations, and therefore the fact that these are far from a panacea for research. As Kaku examines the topic of using raw computer power to simulate brains, to include Kurzweil’s invocation of Moore’s law with its projected doubling of computer power each year, he notes a brick wall that is about to block this tech-advance via quantum-physical limitations – an interesting point. In his discussion of plans to “download” memories or transfer them to other brains/devices, he does reveal that in reality there is no understanding today as to how the brain actually stores experienced events, noting the standard view that fragments or features of the event are stored in various spots in the brain, but that it is not known how these are reassembled in a remembering operation. This is not a usual admission. As he explores the future in creating an artificial human with the ability to act intelligently in the concrete world, he does some serious acknowledgement of the problem of “common sense knowledge” and AI’s failures on this hitherto, and he projects that this will take much longer than writers like Kurzweil and others suppose. These are some welcome notes of caution, rare in this literature. The problem is that these latter two problems go far more deeply than Kaku realizes, so deep that they question the entire information processing paradigm in which his book is framed. That little problem of how experience is actually stored in the brain stems directly from the fact that there is no theory of perception, i.e., how we see a coffee cup “out there,” on the table surface, with its coffee being stirred by a spoon. Yes, this scene/event has “qualia” that must be accounted for, for given that the information from the external world has been transduced to neural-chemical flows (or for computers, changing bit patterns) which look nothing like the external world, we must explain how, from such an homogeneous architecture, we account for the “whiteness” of the cup, the “clinking” of the spoon, the smell of the coffee. The “qualia” formulation is Chalmers’, and Kaku, following Dennett (who is far from accepted in philosophical circles), simply rejects as a problem how we explain the way the brain architecture, or any AI architecture, accounts for qualia. The difficulty is this: Chalmers’ formulation has been misleading; the deeper problem is explaining the origin of the image of the external world – not only the cup with its “whiteness,” but the kitchen table with its wood-grained surface, the spoon stirring, coffee swirling, steam twisting and rising, the floor stretching in every direction with its tiles … The “forms” in the image, and more obviously forms dynamically changing over time – rotating cups, twisting leaves, gently waving kitchen curtains – are themselves qualia, and equally non-computable. The origin of the image as a whole is the problem, and this image (of our kitchen with cup) is equally our “experience.” This is why the problem is more critical than any AI-type theorist wants to realize: If you have no theory of the origin of our image of the external world, then you have no theory of experience, and in turn therefore, you can have no theory of the “storage” of this experience; your theory of memory is totally ungrounded, and this despite the current confidence, echoed by Kaku, that only a “subset” or a selected set of elements/features of this “experience” is stored – a current, widely held theory by the way with absolutely no in-principle method of the selection of what “parts” or “elements” or “features” of the coffee-stirring event will be stored, let alone of how this dis-assembly/reassembly would work – either in the real time required while the coffee stirring event is ongoing, or at a later time for retrieval of the experience. Ungrounded too then is any theory of cognition, therefore of that problematic “common sense knowledge,” reliant as this knowledge is on the retrieval and use of our experience. Abstract “computations” in themselves (and this is entirely the framework in which Kaku works) are simply insufficient to explain consciousness (our qualia-laden experience). There is a possibility concerning the nature of the brain that should give Kaku – particularly in his physicist persona – some pause: What if the brain, along with its computations or statistical/network analyses (same thing) is at the same time, and actually more importantly, sustaining a real, concrete dynamics – as real, for the sake of example, as an AC motor generating an oscillating electric field of force. Yes, knowing its equations, one can “simulate” the AC motor via a computer, but the computer is not generating the oscillating field of electric force; it is not even running a tiny light bulb. For this, one needs a device whose construction and function is to generate a real, concrete dynamics. One would need to engage in real engineering. This in fact was the thesis of Bergson (Matter and Memory, 1896). Bergson had presciently seen the essence of holography in 1896 (making his theory incomprehensible to his contemporaries). He viewed the universal field, in which we all are embedded, as holographic – a vast interference pattern, a field intrinsically non-image-able. Effectively, he saw the brain (with all its underlying quantum dynamics) as a modulated reconstructive wave passing through this holographic field, selecting out information in the field related to the action systems of the body, and in this becoming “specific to” a subset of the field – now, by this process, an image of aspects of the field, e.g., the kitchen with its tables, its chairs and cup. In other words, we are explaining how perception is limited, not how it arises. This image of the external world, due to the brain’s dynamics (with its underlying chemical velocities) is specified at a scale of time – a fly “buzzing” by the coffee cup, his wings oscillating at 200 cps, is seen as a blur in our normal scale of time. Drop in a catalyst into this dynamics – the brain/modulated wave is now specific to a heron-like fly slowly flapping his wings and equally now specific to a new possible action of the body, e.g., picking the fly out of the air by a wing, for as the selection of a subset of the field is made in relation to the action systems of the body, then, as Bergson stated succinctly, perception is virtual action. If the brain is actually such a device – a modulated reconstructive wave – all the future brain-mapping projects Kaku is discussing will be proceeding under the wrong assumptions, and the goal of rebuilding all this as a device in silicon, as purely sustaining computations, is utterly misguided. For all this, Bergson’s model requires a quite different model of time, where the flow of time is indivisible or non-differentiable, and it demands a re-conception of the relation of subject and object, for the difference between, and the relation of each, is in terms, not of space, but of time. But one will find in Kaku but a trivial discussion of the problem of time in relation to mind, namely the role of consciousness as planning for future events, and this is in reality the great problem of explicit memory or the localization of events in time, something requiring the development of the symbolic function – an extremely complex trajectory of development requiring the human child several years, long ago discussed in great depth by Piaget – of all of which Kaku (and AI as well for that matter) is apparently unaware, but a trajectory that would need to be replicated by his AIs. One finds nothing in Kaku on the origin of our scale of perceptual time, or the form of memory that supports the ongoing perception of rotating cubes or stirring spoons, or the support of invariance laws defined only over time. One will find nothing of the problem of subject and object. In Bergson’s conception, since the brain is specific to sources within the external field (as an image) perception/experience is not occurring solely within the brain (nor is it simply “generated” by the brain), therefore experience cannot be solely stored there, yet our experience is retrievable by the same reconstructive wave process. The fact that a konk on the head produces retrograde amnesia does not mean that experiences are stored in the brain and are destroyed – as opposed rather to there now being damage to the mechanisms responsible for modulating the retrieving reconstructive wave. (Similarly, a successful artificial retinal implant supporting vision – one of many advances noted by Kaku that appear to support the computational metaphor – does not imply more than achieving partial support of the overall, very concrete dynamics supporting vision). Obviously this is a quite different theory of memory retrieval; it is inherently supportive of analogical retrieval – a phenomenon basic to thought, to include analogy in general. Hofstadter in his vast consideration of the subject of analogy (

⭐) clearly has no idea (and appears to harbor doubts) as to how to implement this operation in a computer (or neural net). Yet analogy – the foundational operation of thought as Hofstadter shows – is at the heart of common sense knowledge: I am given a 12″ cubical box, rubber bands, pencils, toothpicks, string, razorblade, staples, cheese, etc., and asked to create a mousetrap. I make a “crossbow” using the box, pencil and rubber bands, or a “beheader” using the box, pencil, razorblade and rubber bands. I am doing analogy via my stored experience. This is why that problematic issue of common sense knowledge is so deceptively difficult – it is bound to the entire problem of conscious perception or experience (with the “qualia” problem as a subset) and the memory “storage” of this experience. (For the sake of those interested in a deeper discussion of Bergson and these issues, as I know of none other, one can search (on Amazon) for “Collapsing the Singularity.”) The failure of current science/AI to solve (or admit) the hard problem, properly understood as the more general problem of the image of the external world, is an index into the possibility that the entire framework in which Kaku, AI and neuroscience are working is badly wrong. But this is just a glimpse – when we write of projected feats such as “downloading memories,” “transferring consciousness,” or “AIs as or more intelligent than humans” – of the tremendous scope and depth of the issues surrounding these topics that Kaku has presumed irrelevant. For an interesting tour of projects and developments, the book is good. As I have grown tired of these shallow analyses of the issues involved, I can only give so many stars.

⭐The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind by Michio Kaku”The Future of the Mind” is a fascinating book on the future of the mind. Best-selling author, popular science personality on TV, and theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku provides the public with a popular-science treat. What sets Kaku apart is the combination of his prodigious knowledge and innate ability to convey such complex topics in an engaging conversational tone. This captivating 400-page book includes fifteen chapters and is broken out into the following three parts (books): I. The Mind and Consciousness, II. Mind Over Matter, and III. Altered Consciousness.Positives:1. A treat to read. Popular science at its best.2. The fascinating topic of neuroscience in the masterful hands of Dr. Michio Kaku.3. Kaku is a theoretical physicist but is so well connected in the science community that is able to share great insights from some of the best minds. It’s the future of the mind from the physicist’s perspective.4. Great use of popular culture that connects with the audience. Kaku’s mastery of the topic and the ease with which he conveys such complex topics justifies his popularity.5. The book is logically broken out into three main parts. The first part surveys the history of the brain. The second explores the new technology developed to study the brain; and the third part investigates alternate forms of consciousness.6. Presents landmark studies in neuroscience that shows how damaging specific parts of the brain causes behavioral problems. Throughout the book, Kaku presents an idea or a concept and follows it up with great examples and references to leading scientists in the field.7. Love how the book explains the structure of the brain; from the reptilian, mammalian to the cerebral cortex.8. Explanation of consciousness and the levels of consciousness. “Human consciousness is a specific form of consciousness that creates a model of the world and then simulates it in time, by evaluating the past to simulate the future. This requires mediating and evaluating many feedback loops in order to make a decision to achieve a goal.”9. The accomplishments of DARPA. So much for government failure. “DARPA has been a key player in a series of inventions that have altered the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including cell phones, night-vision goggles, telecommunications advances, and weather satellites.” And of course, the precursor to the Internet, Arpanet.10. How memories are stored. “So far, scientists have identified more than twenty categories of memories that are stored in different parts of the brain, including fruits and vegetables, plants, animals, body parts, colors, numbers, letters, nouns, verbs, proper names, faces, facial expressions, and various emotions and sounds.”11. Thought provoking questions throughout the book. “Is genius a function of our genes, or is it more a question of personal struggle and achievement?” Einstein as a case study.12. An interesting look at the nature of dreams.13. Debunks popular myths popularized by movies. “On the contrary, people under the influence of sodium pentathol, like those who have imbibed a few too many, are fully capable of lying.”14. Fascinating look at altered states of consciousness. “Dr. V. S. Ramachandran estimates that 30 to 40 percent of all the temporal lobe epileptics whom he has seen suffer from hyperreligiosity.”15. Mental illness. “Scientists from the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital analyzed sixty thousand people worldwide and found that there was a genetic link between five major mental illnesses: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, major depression, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Together they represent a significant fraction of all mentally ill patients.”16. The intriguing topic of robots and consciousness. Stimulating discussion.17. The quest to build a brain; the three approaches to the brain.18. Is there a more interesting topic than out-of-body and near-death experiences? “Dr. Olaf Blanke and his colleagues in Switzerland may have located the precise place in the brain that generates out-of-body experiences.”19. So what is aging? “Basically, aging is the buildup of errors, at the genetic and cellular level.” Thank you.20. Concludes with an interesting section on philosophy and neuroscience. “We are just wetware, running software called the mind, nothing more or less. Our thoughts, desires, hopes, and aspirations can be reduced to electrical impulses circulating in some region of the prefrontal cortex. That is the Copernican Principle applied to the mind.”21. Excellent supplemental material: suggested reading material, notes and an appendix on the question of quantum consciousness.Negatives:1. Oversells science. I love Dr. Kaku and his enthusiasm for science, one which I share, but sometimes I wonder if such passion leads him to overvalue what science can reasonably accomplish. Too optimistic. “One day, perhaps sometime in the next century, we will be able to transmit the consciousness of our brains throughout the solar system by placing our entire connectomes onto powerful laser beams.”2. Since the book’s focus is on the future; it spends a lot of time in areas of speculation or what many may consider science fiction.3. A summary of what future technologies of the mind are most likely to occur.4. More visual material would have added value. Timelines, graphs, diagrams…5. What is a soul? What characteristics does a soul possess that would enable you to empirically define it let alone define how it works?In summary, this book exemplifies why I love science so much. Dr. Kaku inspires us to dream while keeping our feet on the ground. This is what a popular-science book should be all about. Dr. Kaku shares what we currently know and speculates what is in store for the future of the mind. Perhaps too optimistic but this book is about inspiring young minds to pursue one of the greatest quests in all of science. I highly recommend it!Further recommendations: ”

⭐” by the same author, ”

⭐” and “The Singularity is Near” by Ray Kurzwell, ”

⭐” by Michael S. Gazzaniga, ”

⭐” by Rita Carter, ”

⭐” by David Eagleman, ”

⭐” by V.S. Ramachandran, ”

⭐” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat” by Oliver Sacks, ”

⭐” by Daniel H. Pink, ”

⭐” by Eric R. Kandel, ”

⭐” by Antonio Damasio, and “The Mind” edited by John Brockman.

⭐Although slightly longer (about 340 pages) than some of Kaku’s other books, this book is probably one of his easier books to comprehend. Kaku does an excellent job in explaining scientific principles so that even the lay person should be able to follow the gist of what Kaku is trying to say within the book. Having said this, a background in science, especially neuroscience, would help the reader to gain a deeper understanding of this book. The book focuses upon how technological innovation over the course of the next century will lead to an enhancement of the human brain. Augmented humans will be able to communicate with each other telepathically, use telekinesis, manipulate avatars, upload dreams / memories, raise their I.Q., induce O.B.E’s and become immortal. Other themes explored within the book include mapping the human brain, treating mental illness, allowing the disabled to walk again, mind control, hypnosis, allowing society’s rulers to create a pliant population, A.I, robots, cyborgs, space travel and aliens. Kaku explores these ideas with reference to sci-fi books / films; he often provides a brief synposis of them just in case you’ve never seen the films or read the books. This clearly aids the reader’s comprehension of the themes that the writer explores within the book. If you’ve read any of Kaku’s other books then you’ll know he often delves deeply into quantum mechanics, relativity and string theory. He does explore this area of physics within this book, predominantly in the last chapter, but it is a short chapter. A blessing for some perhaps, considering its complex subject matter, but I felt personally this chapter could have been a bit longer. Overall, an informative and enjoyable read.

⭐Yet again, Michio Kaku has delivered well. I’m still under the charm of his witty style, endlessly providing food for thought. He is not only a populariser – he is a visioner, and crazy enough at that to make me wonder whether I should perhaps tag his book on Goodreads as ‘fantasy/sci-fi’ instead of ‘natural sciences’. Tagging has its limitations; I can’t create a category for Kaku alone, even though he certainly deserves it.One thing that did not sit well with me while reading this book was Kaku’s tendency to look at humans in distinctly different terms than at the rest of the animals. Other animals do things simply ‘by instinct’; humans are directed by ‘unconscious calculations made by their brains’ (I fail to grasp the difference). On a few occasions, Kaku’s way of phrasing indicates that he doesn’t see other animals as capable of feeling pain or distress. I believe it’s just a careless phrasing, because he contradicts it elsewhere in the book, but that lack of care should not have taken place there. We are not as far removed from the other mammals as Kaku indicates. I think it is important to understand that if we want to take Kaku’s advice and start merging with machines and artificially boosting our intelligence.One paragraph made me laugh out loud as I realised that even such a brilliant mind as Kaku’s lives in its own bubble. He complains a bit throughout the book that mathematical brilliance does not boost one’s income, and his only hope for an artificially improved mind to make some extra money is to assume that it would also include artistic genius ‘which could conceivably be used to make a comfortable living’. As a wife of a very talented painter whose works far exceed in quality all the amorphous blobs currently in fashion, I can definitely confirm that artistic genius does not generate income any better than mathematical brilliance! 🙂

⭐I always have mixed feelings about Michio Kaku. On the one hand, I read and enjoy his books – and on the other hand, I tend to quite quickly forget them, as if, despite his brilliance and learning and academic contacts and credentials, this is equivalent to watching some intellectual candy floss on the Discovery Channel, or one of those “Horizon” programmes that sound so promising and are then such a let-down. This book is far too littered with pop-culture references, to a wild mixture of concepts from movies, books and TV, some of which are worth it, some of which are just too ridiculous to bring up in the first place. It also includes some great information and fascinating speculation (as well as some speculation from the intellectually or philosophically questionable). On balance, I feel that Mr Kaku is a force for good in the world – not just for knowledge but also for enthusiasm and progress and human potential. We need more people like him rather than fewer!

⭐Check out Dr Kaku’s videos on Youtube, he really isa great teacher. I like this book as it is on a subject I am currently researching on Singularity for.We are at a place where the future of our lives is going to be determined one way or another by robotics, perhaps leading to a situation where replicants of humans will be a part of our society.However, we are sleepwalking into a possible distopia because no one is really asking the important questions or discussing the ethics of this situation. It will either go well for us or be the end of us.This book goes someway to exploring how we can use artificial intelligence to benefit our lives. This is a fascinating work. Also check out Jeff Hawkins, he invented the Palm Pilot, he is looking at how we can learn from the way a human brain works and how this can be applied to robotics.Even paris Hilton has this book!

⭐Useful research for my book on consciousness. Full of astonishing and up-to-date ideas around current neurological research and its possible applications. Kaku loses a star because he makes the common error of confusing the brain with consciousness. There’s no evidence that consciousness is produced by the brain, so it’s premature for him to work from that basis, but that is the current (albeit incorrect) paradigm, so perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on him. Very well written and a nicely produced book, as you’d expect from Penguin. Arrived promptly.

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