Today I finished Michio Kaku’s most recent book, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind. A lot of the text is filler, relating familiar ideas and discussing contemporary scientific research and what it implies for the future of the mind, thus closely following the format of Kaku’s book Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100, in which Kaku approaches futurism by reviewing technologies under development in the present, some of which will come to maturity and widespread application in the coming century. (I previously wrote about this in Futurism without Predictions.)
This can be a sound approach to futurism when scientific research is placed in its social context, but in regard to the mind, where conceptual confusion prevails (and this confusion is well represented in the scientific literature), it is a less certain method. I have no doubt that a great many of the developments and research that Kaku reviews will come to maturity and application, giving us some remarkable technologies almost indistinguishable from magic, in consonance with Clarke’s third law, but nearly magical technology is not sufficient to attain an understanding of the mind, and therefore to achieving a science of the mind based on an understanding of how the mind works.
The very fact of this lingering sense of magic about technologies that surprise us by their unexpected efficacy is a sign that our understanding has failed us, even while our technical prowess races ahead, giving us powers we do not fully comprehend. This was an idea that was central to many apocalyptic discussions during the Cold War, when nuclear technology had given us the power to destroy ourselves, but our social and political understanding had not made similar advances. (Kaku touches on this “sorcerer’s apprentice” theme several times in his book, though doesn’t develop it systematically.)
While the greater part of the text had little new to offer – I enjoyed the discussion of the cosmological principle and the anthropic principle in the last chapter, “Concluding Remarks,” but it could have been much better – the appendix, “Appendix: Quantum Consciousness?” (pp. 329-342) was quite good. Here where Kaku is explaining his specialty – quantum physics – to the general reader, he does a great job of summarizing difficult theories in ordinary language, and when he uses these theories and their interpretations as a jumping off point to explore questions of mind and free will, what he was to say is much better, more interesting, and more soundly based in science than what fills the rest of the text.
If I were Kaku’s editor, I would have asked him to jettison the text he wrote, and then expand the appendix into a book-length manuscript. I would suggest that the reader read the last chapter and the appendix, and not bother with the rest.