October 03 2023 at 11:16AM
The Review: The Mind Club
The Mind Club
By Alejandro Fernández (Linkedin)
Who thinks, What feels and Why it matters.
- Wegner
- Gray
Welcome to the Mind Club. Everyone who has a mind is eligible to join. Becoming a member of this club will grant you the incomparable benefit of having conferred rights. There are no rights in any form for the mindless.
How will we determine who has a mind? Will pets, intelligent machines, or even fetuses be entitled to membership? These are the questions that Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray are raising in this book.
In the book, the mind perception is measured on two dimensions: experience and agency.
Experience is the ability to have an inner life, to have feelings like pain, fear, or pleasure. The experience comprises a set of skills that make us feel the external world.
Agency is composed of mental abilities like self-control, morality, communication, planning, thought, etc. These capacities are not oriented to sensing and feeling but rather to thinking and doing.
Throughout the book, the authors analyze several entities: animals, machines, patients with brain damage, groups, God, or the self, and rate them in both dimensions. To support their rates, they will share the results of many psychological experiments that probe experience or agency. However, the experiments also explain common human behaviors like the tendency to look for a guilty agent when a bad thing happens or the human inclination to procrastinate.
Discussions about the mind are as complex as passionate, but Wegner & Gray approach the topic with amazing clarity. It is impossible to fully decipher a mind, but this book will help you better understand a tiny portion. Remember that all your projects are run by minded entities.
Please enjoy it!
The Mind Club
ISBN-10 9780143110026 ISBN-13 978-0143110026 400 pgs
Daniel M. Wegner was an American social Psychologist. He taught at Harvard University and was a fellow of the American Association of Advanced Science and the American Association of Arts and Science. Wegner originated several significant theories in modern psychology, like: The Irony Theory, also called the white bear theory or the illusion of conscious will theory. Wegner passed away in 2013, affected by ALS. After his death, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology gave his name to his annual prize for theoretical innovation.
Kurt Gray is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina. He studies mind perception and morality. He received the Janet Spencer Award from the Association for Psychological Science. D. Wegner was his late mentor, and they wrote the book together during the last years of Wegner's life.
