Ball, Philip: The Book of Minds

"In this book, popular science writer Philip Ball surveys a range of sciences to map our answers to a big, philosophically rich question, one with practical and ethical consequences for today. How do we even begin to think about minds that are not human? Sciences from astronomy to biology, computer science to neuroscience, are mapping the mind in their own disciplinary territories, and Ball pulls the pieces together so that we can appreciate the full picture-the "mindscape" or "space of possible minds." This map makes plain what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. By plotting properties of mind without prioritizing the human, he sheds welcome, new light on a host of fascinating questions: What moral rights should we afford animals? Can we communicate with them? Should we worry that AI is going to take over and run society according to its own agenda? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how would we know? Could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the mindscape also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary science: What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will? Before Ball turns to other minds, however, he addresses the human mind: what is it? Is it different from the brain? From one person to the next? In this fascinating book of minds, we come to better know our own"--

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster whose many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and the wider culture include Bright Earth, Curiosity, Patterns in Nature, How to Grow a Human, The Modern Myths, and, most recently, The Elements, all also published by the University of Chicago Press. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol, and he was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He lives in London.