Book Review: The Mind is Flat!

The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind, by Author Nick Chater

Not very often do we hit upon a book which tries to redefine pretty much everything we know about our mind, our existence. The Mind is Flat, by Nick Chater is one book which aims to do it and does so, quite convincingly!

In this blog, my goal is to just build enough curiosity about the book that you pick one up and start reading, because it is worth every bit of your time reading it.

I will try to do so by posing some questions about our mind and will also provide answers to some of those questions from the framework the author tries to define, to understand a human mind and its working. I will leave you with most of the questions unanswered so you head to the book for finding them out yourself! :)

Here are the questions, take a moment to think about them before moving on to the next ones,

Do you think that all the decisions you take are based on your beliefs and principles? Do beliefs and principles really exist?

Do you think you see the world in full colour and detail, all at once? Do you think you remember the world you see in all the colour and detail you saw?

Should you trust your feelings? Are your choices really yours?

What is a thought? How does a thought originate? What is the cycle of a thought?

What is consciousness? What is sub consciousness? Does it really exist?

How does your brain operate? Do you have the ability to really multitask?

What is a society? What is a culture? What are traditions? What are principles?

Finally, Who are you?!

Such are the type of questions the book tries to answer or rather, provide a framework to answer them. The Author proposes that the mind does not have any depth that we have been conditioned to think. He proposes that the Mind is Flat and the concepts we relate to the depth in our minds, like beliefs, principles, sub concious thought, sub concious mind are all a myth. And he does a good job in convincing that too!

The Author also goes on to propose that our minds rather operate from the “Surface”, in that, our decisions, choices, feelings are “invented” by our minds on the fly, instantly based on the past precedents/training rather than based on deep thought, principles, beliefs.

One argument he makes in his defence is that the earlier attempts to build/model intelligent systems based on rules, human beliefs, principles were all a failure for the same reason that these simply dont exist and thats not how a human mind works in real life. But the more recent attempts at building Intelligent systems with Deep Learning, where one trains a small network of neurons extensively with past data, have seen a remarkable success and this is how he proposes that the human minds operate too, but at a much larger scale!

Finally, he also goes on to answer questions like,

What are the true abilities of a human mind? What sets it apart from the modern Artificially Intelligent Systems? How can you leverage these abilities to your benefit?

The above summary does answer some of the question I put forth initially.
But I hope that I am leaving you curious enough that you go and find the rest of the answers yourself. It is a book worth reading and the framework the author proposes definitely helps in shaping up a very pragmatic view our mind, the world we live in and interact with and our role in the same.

Happy Reading! :)