Deep thoughts about deep issues—but not for the faint of heart.
Penetrating account of the connections among consciousness and artificial intelligence, cosmology, and quantum mechanics.
Musser, a contributing editor for Scientific American and author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory and Spooky Action at a Distance, obviously has no fear of difficult subjects. This book should not serve as an introduction to human consciousness, but readers who pay attention will learn a great deal. The author begins by pointing out that “we are composed of matter, and we are conscious.” Therefore, he continues, “it must be possible to recognize these two facts.” Scientists specialize in taking things that seem different, such as matter and energy or electricity and magnetism, and showing that “they are essentially the same. Can they do that for matter and mind?” Not yet, notes the author, but they’re making progress, largely by paying close attention to neuroscience, which explores brain function, and computer science, which hit the jackpot last year when researchers demonstrated spectacular AI programs (ChatGPT and DALL-E) that are so creative and communicate so convincingly that experts have concluded only that they are “probably” not conscious. Encountering this conclusion less than halfway through the book, readers may look forward to more insights, and Musser does not disappoint. The difficulty is that consciousness is still an extremely complex problem. A skilled reporter, the author chronicles his travels around the world interviewing experts in many fields (Carlo Rovelli appears throughout the text), showing us how cosmologists muse about the universe; physicists explore information theory and neural networks; neuroscientists wonder how a physical brain produces a mind; and philosophers explore emergence, free will, and causality. Quantum effects are significant, but, like consciousness, no one completely understands them beyond theory. Many consider it possible, in both cases, that we never will.
Deep thoughts about deep issues—but not for the faint of heart.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780374238766
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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