Brains, Machines & Persons

By Donald MacCrimmon MacKay

Book Overview

"Using the comparison of brains with minds, and machines with persons, Dr. MacKay makes the important point that scientific descriptions from the outside and personal descriptions from the inside are... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080281817X
• ISBN13: 9780802818171
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: Wm.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.
• Length: 114 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

I Am Therefore I Think

Draw a circle symbolizing popular science readers, a somewhat limited audience. Draw another circle of readers interested in theology, perhaps an even smaller audience. The intersection of those two sets is decidedly limited. But it was not always so; in the optimistic, seemingly unbounded horizons of the '50s and '60s, when the brave new world held both menace and promise, the reading public voraciously devoured any speculation about the role and impact of science and technology on society, confident that the world of The Jetsons was just around the corner. No one was more qualified to hold forth on this topic than Donald McKay, the British cyberneticist who wrote and spoke widely to audiences who found it endlessly fascinating. MIT Press collected his BBC wartime radio talks under the title, Information, Mechanism and Meaning. But the best distillation of his thought is in this simply, clearly written book based on his own research, and which missed its tiny target audience upon publication, and soon went out of print. While this sort of book often presents theology to science readers, this one goes the other way 'round, drawing ideas from brain research, cybernetics, robotics and bionics and analyzing their impact on our view of Man. In MacKay's view, calling Man "just a machine" or "nothing but" a "naked ape" in no way negates the spiritual view; it's simply a matter of language (which he calls "nothing buttery" and at which level one looks at a given time. Our uniqueness, he concludes, consists not in our being made of some special material or possessing some physical organ, as Descartes maintained, called a "soul" (Descartes located it in the pineal gland), but in our capacity for relationships with other humans, the rest of creation and our Creator. To those untroubled by such questions, it may seem a tempest in a tea pot, but this book hearkens back to the genuine excitement that used to attend pure research, when new theories were daily being prepounded. Before the computer became a black box with an input and output and no one questioning its inner workings, it was an idea on drawing boards in numerous laboratories, with researchers like MacKay at the forefront of the excitement.