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Brain, Mind and Computers
267 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1989
2 people are currently reading
77 people want to read
About the author
Stanley L. Jaki
115 books38 followersStanley L. Jaki, a Hungarian-born Catholic priest of the Benedictine Order, was Distinguished University Professor at Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. With doctorates in theology and physics, he has specialized in the history and philosophy of science. The author of almost forty books and nearly a hundred articles, he served as Gifford Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and as Fremantle Lecturer at Balliol College, Oxford. He has lectured at major universities in the Unites States, Europe, and Australia. He was a honorary member of the Pontificial Academy of Sciences, membre correspondant of the Académie Nationale des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts of Bourdeaux, and the recipient of the Lecomte du Nouy Prize for 1970 and of the Templeton Prize for 1987. He was among the first to claim that Gödel's incompleteness theorem is relevant for theories of everything (TOE) in theoretical physics.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 29, 2012
Fantastic.
June 23, 2023
Though it was written in 1969, Stanley Jaki’s ‘Brain, Mind, and Computers’ is a timely book for our day when the supposed marvels of “artificial intelligence” and “thinking machines” are championed more than ever before. In the midst of two extremes - the fanatical cult-like rhetoric of a coming transhumanist “singularity” of digital self-consciousness or the fear-driven paranoia of machines becoming self-aware and overperforming and thereby enslaving all of us - it seems the basic, common sense and intuitive questions around the concept of A.I. are all going undiscussed. Specifically, whether ChatGPT’s algorithmic sentence-making or the uncanny “paintings” of AI art templates servicing our commands actually qualify as “intelligence” or “thinking”, in any real and human sense of the term, is completely missing from the public conversation. Jaki’s book demonstrably proves why the advocates of A.I. avoid such conversations – because it reveals the fantastical delusions and the sleight of hand that is at the foundation of their entire enterprise.
While he is backing up his argument with statements, experiments and data from scientists and cyberneticians of the mid-20th century, the essential argument of Jaki’s book is timeless and resonates just as strongly today. He reveals that at the heart of the project to create thinking machines and artificial minds is an ideological crusade; specifically, a physicalist reductionism that reduces all human intelligence and consciousness to mechanistic data processing and the biological functions of the brain. This physicalist explanation of human thought is necessary to facilitate the very idea that machines can think. The fact that no human person in their own subjective life experiences their consciousness in a purely mechanistic fashion, and the fact that all scientific attempts to explain human thought and emotion through the physical operations of the brain have been found wanting and riddled with contradictions and mysteries, have not stopped the advocates of A.I. from pursuing their end. These ideologically-driven voices have increasingly drowned out the more level-headed thinkers in the world of computer science, the latter of whom have acknowledged time and again (and are quoted frequently in Jaki's text) that while computers can be a great aid to human intelligence, they can never possess this intelligence themselves, at least in any genuine sense of the term. Thus, at the heart of Jaki’s critique of artificial intelligence is its role in the heresy known as “scientism,” in which bold ideological assertions, not empirically verified observations of the material world, have become the guiding light of modern science.
In the final section of the book Jaki demonstrates what should be becoming obvious to many of us, that the real danger of A.I. is not a Terminator-style apocalypse where machines become self-aware and declare lordship over us, but rather the danger of A.I. is the denigration of the uniqueness of the human being, a denigration which is so key to the very belief in artificial minds. Only if the consciousness, thoughts, emotions and innermost longings of the human person can be reduced to nothing more than mechanistic data processing can the outcomes of A.I., no matter how awe-inducing, actually be genuinely labelled “intelligence”. The real heart of the A.I. project is above all to deprive the human person of his unique dignity, and only thereafter is he now prepared to let ChatGPT do all his thinking for him.
This is an absolute must read for anyone interested in a serious discussion of A.I. that exposes the intellectual blindness at the root of so much of its advocacy and promises. To tie Jaki’s argument into the context of the 21st century, it is crucial we step back from all the accomplishments of A.I. now before our eyes, and ask whether the fact that A.I. programs can compose a novel for us in a nanosecond or paint with a digital brush any absurd combination of words to our liking is a sign of machines actually achieving a human-level of intelligence. Or is this rather a marvel of the powers of immense data collection, and the capabilities of algorithmic machine-imitation based on that data collection, that is now possible after so many decades of home computers and smartphones compiling all of our usage of them into the digital hive mind.
While he is backing up his argument with statements, experiments and data from scientists and cyberneticians of the mid-20th century, the essential argument of Jaki’s book is timeless and resonates just as strongly today. He reveals that at the heart of the project to create thinking machines and artificial minds is an ideological crusade; specifically, a physicalist reductionism that reduces all human intelligence and consciousness to mechanistic data processing and the biological functions of the brain. This physicalist explanation of human thought is necessary to facilitate the very idea that machines can think. The fact that no human person in their own subjective life experiences their consciousness in a purely mechanistic fashion, and the fact that all scientific attempts to explain human thought and emotion through the physical operations of the brain have been found wanting and riddled with contradictions and mysteries, have not stopped the advocates of A.I. from pursuing their end. These ideologically-driven voices have increasingly drowned out the more level-headed thinkers in the world of computer science, the latter of whom have acknowledged time and again (and are quoted frequently in Jaki's text) that while computers can be a great aid to human intelligence, they can never possess this intelligence themselves, at least in any genuine sense of the term. Thus, at the heart of Jaki’s critique of artificial intelligence is its role in the heresy known as “scientism,” in which bold ideological assertions, not empirically verified observations of the material world, have become the guiding light of modern science.
In the final section of the book Jaki demonstrates what should be becoming obvious to many of us, that the real danger of A.I. is not a Terminator-style apocalypse where machines become self-aware and declare lordship over us, but rather the danger of A.I. is the denigration of the uniqueness of the human being, a denigration which is so key to the very belief in artificial minds. Only if the consciousness, thoughts, emotions and innermost longings of the human person can be reduced to nothing more than mechanistic data processing can the outcomes of A.I., no matter how awe-inducing, actually be genuinely labelled “intelligence”. The real heart of the A.I. project is above all to deprive the human person of his unique dignity, and only thereafter is he now prepared to let ChatGPT do all his thinking for him.
This is an absolute must read for anyone interested in a serious discussion of A.I. that exposes the intellectual blindness at the root of so much of its advocacy and promises. To tie Jaki’s argument into the context of the 21st century, it is crucial we step back from all the accomplishments of A.I. now before our eyes, and ask whether the fact that A.I. programs can compose a novel for us in a nanosecond or paint with a digital brush any absurd combination of words to our liking is a sign of machines actually achieving a human-level of intelligence. Or is this rather a marvel of the powers of immense data collection, and the capabilities of algorithmic machine-imitation based on that data collection, that is now possible after so many decades of home computers and smartphones compiling all of our usage of them into the digital hive mind.
May 9, 2025
Of course, in technical fields there are some eements which are outdated, but he has very strong arguments theologically and is exceptionally great in finding ways to create new diaglogues between natural sciences, theology and philosophy. I definitely recomment this to read.
October 9, 2009
He tosses around names by the myriads, most of whom I haven't read, though he writes as though assuming the reader has. So it wasn't easy reading. I think I followed the main arguments, which were good, and I liked the book, if for no other reason because it was different.
Want to read
November 29, 2009Recommended by James Schall in Another Sort of Learning, Chapter 13, as one of Six Books by Stanley L. Jaki.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews