The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness
by david gelernter
liveright, 320 pages, $26.95
What in the end makes The Tides of Mind a brave and exemplary book is not so much Gelernter’s conclusions as his method. It has become fashionable among computationalists and others to argue that subjectivity, consciousness, and selfhood are illusions, the mind a mere side effect of routine neuronal activity. Tortured and narrow, this view is born of hubris—if I don’t understand it, it must not exist—but it speaks to the easy misanthropy of our robotic times. By reminding us of the value and necessity of careful, methodical introspection, of the revelatory power of the subjective eye, Gelernter also returns us to common sense. The Tides of Mind, as he makes clear, takes its inspiration and its approach from the great twentieth-century phenomenologists, such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who saw that an understanding of life has to begin with a painstaking examination of the experience of being. Like his intellectual forebears, Gelernter shows us that subjectivity and objectivity need not be antagonists.
