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A review by lizshayne
The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force by Sharon Begley, Jeffrey M. Schwartz
3.0
This one gets a solid meh.
The descriptions of psychology are interesting and the narrative he creates out of our intellectual movement from a kind of behavioralist rigid idea of the brain to our contemporary understanding both of neuroplasticity and the mind are compelling.
At the same time, I found the idea of using quantum physics to be productive, though not in the way Schwartz intended. He makes a good argument for a non-deterministic view of the brain (contrary to, say, Daniel Dennett) based on the simple nondeterministic view of the universe. But then he shifts into a kind of "dualism post the discovery of Buddhism in the West" that never properly explains, for example, WHY the idea of the mind as emergent is impossible. His insistence on the mind as such and on keeping the Cartesian boundaries he claims to knock down was just unsatisfying, more so because the idea of quantum indeterminacy as the answer to free Will was actually really cool.
Long story short, he mistakes the ideology with which he makes sense of the phenomenological world as an accurate explanation for those experiences, but fails to provide enough evidence for this reader, at least, to believe that said ideology is a response to the data rather than to the author's own theology. The individual claims are fascinating right up to the end, but the overall thesis needs work.
The descriptions of psychology are interesting and the narrative he creates out of our intellectual movement from a kind of behavioralist rigid idea of the brain to our contemporary understanding both of neuroplasticity and the mind are compelling.
At the same time, I found the idea of using quantum physics to be productive, though not in the way Schwartz intended. He makes a good argument for a non-deterministic view of the brain (contrary to, say, Daniel Dennett) based on the simple nondeterministic view of the universe. But then he shifts into a kind of "dualism post the discovery of Buddhism in the West" that never properly explains, for example, WHY the idea of the mind as emergent is impossible. His insistence on the mind as such and on keeping the Cartesian boundaries he claims to knock down was just unsatisfying, more so because the idea of quantum indeterminacy as the answer to free Will was actually really cool.
Long story short, he mistakes the ideology with which he makes sense of the phenomenological world as an accurate explanation for those experiences, but fails to provide enough evidence for this reader, at least, to believe that said ideology is a response to the data rather than to the author's own theology. The individual claims are fascinating right up to the end, but the overall thesis needs work.