Brain Is Wider Than the Sky: Why Simple Solutions Don't Work in a Complex World

Synopsis

Simplicity Has Become A Brand And A Cult. People Want Simple Lives And Simple Solutions. And Now Our Technology Wants Us To Be Simpler, To Be 'machine Readable'. From Telephone Call Trees That Simplify Us Into A Series Of 'options' To Social Networks That Reduce Us To Our Purchases And Preferences, We Are Deluged With Propaganda Urging Us To Abandon Our Irreducibly Complex Selves. Dazed By The Marketing, We Hand Over Our Lives To Databases, Ipads And Smartphones. At The Same Time, Scientists Tell Us We Are 'simply' The Products Of Evolution, Nothing More Than Our Genes. Brain Scanners Have Inspired Neuroscientists To Claim They Are Close To Cracking The Problem Of The Human Mind. 'human Equivalent' Computers Are Being Designed That, We Are Told, Will Do Our Thinking For Us. Humans Are Being Simplified Out Of Existence. It Is Time, Says Bryan Appleyard, To Resist, And To Reclaim The Full Depth Of Human Experience. We Are, He Argues, Naturally Complex Creatures, We Are Only Ever At Home In Complexity. Through Art And Literature We See Ourselves In Ways That Machines Never Can. He Makes An Impassioned Plea For The Voices Of Art To Be Heard Before Those Of The Technocrats. Part Memoir, Part Reportage, Part Cultural Analysis, This Book Is A Dire Warning About What We May Become And A Lyrical Evocation Of What Humans Can Be. For The Brain Is Indeed Wider Than The Sky. Machine Generated Contents Note: 1.a Divided Man -- 2. Father's Day -- 3. Henry -- 4.a Signature Science -- 5. Countdown To The Singularity -- 6. Hitting Zero -- 7. Men Without Chests -- 8. Pimp My Ultrasound -- 9. It's All In The Game -- 10. Money Men -- 11. Now Neuroaesthetics -- 12. The New Found Land -- 13. The Age Of Complexity -- 14. The Paris Hilton Problem. By Bryan Appleyard. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.