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The Mind is Flat
The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and The Improvised Mind | Nick Chater
Most of us assume that our thoughts, desires and behaviour arise from the murky depths of our minds, and, if only we could access this inner world, we could truly understand ourselves. For more than a century, psychologists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists have struggled, using methods from psychotherapy to brain scans, to discover what lies below the surface of our minds. In a profound reappraisal of how the mind works, pre-eminent behavioural scientist Nick Chater reveals that this entire enterprise is misguided: that we have no mental depths to plumb. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience, behavioural psychology and perception, The Mind is Flat shows that we have no inner library of beliefs, values and desires lying with us, but instead generate them in the moment, and base them entirely on our past experiences. As the reader discovers - through eye-opening experiments and mind-bending visual examples - we are all characters of our own creation, constantly improvising our behaviour, rather than the playthings of unconscious currents within us. Boldly original and utterly convincing, The Mind is Flat forces us to reconsider just about everything we thought we knew about ourselves, and shows that the result can be liberating.
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Moray_Reads
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Panpan

Except it doesn't. Chater frames his argument as a fundamental attack on traditional ideas of consciousness and perception, except I've never seen people argue for the positions he's attacking except in qualified ways or discredited fields. He appears to build straw men so that he can demolish them with interesting but hardly iconoclastic rejoinders ⬇️

Moray_Reads The idea of self-creation, gaps in perception and humans as constantly-evolving products of their own experience isn't really that groundbreaking. The writing is also maddeningly repetitive so that it seems Chater is trying to convince himself as much as the reader by constantly reinterating his basic premise. His insistence that his approach is wildly divergent just highlights the inconsistencies and weaknesses. 6y
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