Daniel M. Wegner

How do you know that your friends and family aren't mindless zombies? Does your cat love you like you love it? Does God ever get hungry?

This book won't answer those questions but it will make you think outside of the box and ask even more questions which in my opinion is awesome. The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters by Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray was a fun ride. These two psychologists look at what makes up a 'mind' and who should be entered into the mind club (e.g. show more plants wouldn't be included). In the opening chapter, there was a little chart which represented how mind is measured by agency (mental abilities such as self-control, morality, communication, etc) and experience (capacity to feel hunger, pain, desire, pride, etc). I had never looked at the world in this kind of framework before and it was fascinating to see that God has a lot of agency (He is seen as all powerful and knowing) but no experience (God doesn't crave a cheeseburger or a nap). This had never occurred to me before but now it seems obvious that humans consider God to be a member of the mind club but he is not a full member like we are because he has no experience. Each chapter investigates a different mind to see if they warrant entry into the mind club. The chapters cover such topics as animals, the silent (those in vegetative states or locked-in), the dead (yes, dead people), robots (THE SINGULARITY IS NIGH), and at the very end of the book the self (that's us). The book was chock full of data from studies conducted by those that the authors worked with as well as from other academic sources. I liked this because it shows that they weren't just theorizing without anything to back them up. However, if you're going into this looking for concrete answers about what makes up the 'mind' then you're barking up the wrong book. Much like philosophy, the book reads like a thought experiment where many things are posed but nothing has a definitive answer. And that's fine! The book was fun and fascinating. I'm definitely going to comb through the Notes to get some more book recommendations (my one complaint was that the Notes weren't more expansive...it's just a standard bibliography where I'm accustomed to annotations). If you like thought experiments and/or you're interested in the psychology of the mind then this book is right up your alley. XD show less

This is the sort of book that many psychologists wish they had written. Wegner's achievement was to collect separate bits of research and put them together in an organized whole, providing impressive support for the notion that the subjective feeling of freely willed actions and thoughts is an illusion. It is an illusion that is constantly with us, and only by examining the research Wegner describes and analyzes, can the illusion be unmasked. Although the book is now much admired within show more psychology, over time it will be further recognized as a major achievement. I suspect that these basic ideas will eventually find their way into the public consciousness in some form, where it will have continuing repercussions, including in the literary, visual and performing arts. show less

The book is well written, even with some sense of humor. I just have an issue with some of the experiments cited. They leave some room for improvement. I will cite Iain McGillchrist: just because we can be fooled in some carefully devised situations, does not mean that we would be fooled in real life. He said that in relation to Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, but I think it applies here too.

An interesting book that invited me to consider a new perspective on consciousness, though it'd didn't quite reach the depth I'd expected.