Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker

[lightreads]

Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Soundbyte: Read Peter Watts's Blindsight instead.

Psychology professor is drawn into the FBI pursuit of his best friend, the sociopath who tortures through neurosurgery. It's a thriller about the implications of the brain as a physical substrate, how love for one's offspring, friendship, empathy are all physical processes that can be hacked and repurposed. It always surprises me how few people really know these facts, and are disturbed by them, because to me they are both obvious and kind of reassuring in a complicated way, but that's a topic for another time.

Mostly it's a book about the blindness of the conscious self known as "I," how we don't ever really have a grasp on sensory data, on other people, on our own decisions. Case in point: the consciousness known as "me" managed to strategically forget again that, oh yeah, I hate thrillers long enough for me to decide to read this one. This book embodies most things I hate about thrillers – unrelentingly awful people, twists made deliberately unfair, that vague desire to shoot myself in the head when it's all over. And it also didn't redeem itself through the treatment of modern consciousness research. Like I said, Peter Watts does a much more thorough, interesting job with this because he takes it to the next logical step – asking what consciousness is actually for, if it's so functionally useless.

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Comments

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Belatedly -- yeah, I've been avoiding the Rifters because I have a thing about sea creatures. They just! With the tentacles! *recoils*.

I hope Blindsight freaked you out in an entirely different way.