In this book, David Eagleman provides a broad overview of different functions in the brain. The book is pretty interesting, with many high level stories of the oddities which exists in neuroscience. I found certain sections more interesting than others. I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in a high-level overview about cool things in the brain.

Eagleman claims that the brain is a team of rivals. Within these rivals can exist, for example, more racist versions of yourself, along with more rational sections (explained using an example of Mel Gibson’s racist remarks during a DUI). He claims that sometimes your brain can lean one way or the other, but overall, the majority solution of the brain leads to your decisions. He provides evidence through split-brain examples, where some people have one hand buttoning up a shirt, while the other unbuttons or fights the conscious part of the brain.

This resembles Marvin Minsky’s thought’s on the topic: that the human mind consists of a large number of small, interacting subagents. These agents build up to create a “society of mind”, and competition within the society creates your decisions. Because of these examples, Eagleman believs a team-of-rivals framework trained in an evolutionary appoach will lead to a new age of bio-inspired AI. My qualms with this is that training through evolutionary means is extremeley compute inefficient, especially if you’re attempting to optimize both a team-of-rivals and various types of subagents.

Eagleman also questions the legal system’s assumption that all people are equal. He argues the law is pretending that all brains are equal, when they are definitly not. Currently, if you’re 18 or have an IQ of 70, you get the death penalty, but if you’re one day away from 18 or have an IQ of 69, you live. These are crude ways to distinguish when someone isn’t fully in control of their actions; however, many undiagnosed mental or genetic correlations have been found in certain crime categories, many of which are potentially treatable. Eagleman thus proposes a personalization of the law such that the punishment is aligned with neuroscience. He states we should throw away the biased intuitions about blameworthiness with a fairer approach. Although these sound agreeable, he also pushes for warehousing people who will not be changed by punishment. This feels low-key dystopian, and reminds me of the anime Psycho Pass (which I watched when I was a kid), where those who were more inclined to commit crimes were imprisoned before any crime had been commited. My primary issue with these kinds of approaches is that it’s probably difficult to guarantee without a doubt someone is unlikely to change, thus dishing out varying level of punishments are somewhat unfair.

At the end of the book, Eagleman makes an argument against reductionism. He states that when systems begin to have many smaller parts, you should stop looking into the tiniest of granularities, but rather focus on the larger pieces. The interaction of these larger pieces can create emergent properties which can create more relevant outputs. I feel like in the realm of AI resarch, there has been a slight shift away from reductionism (building low-level models). Instead we’re focusing on the presence of large amounts of data (which Yuval Noah Harari labels as dataism in Homo Deus), and modifying existing models to work with the data.