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To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2002 11:22:30 -0400
Subject: [WSFA] Fw: NYT reviews 'Mind Catcher'
From: ronkean at juno.com
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eugen Leitl
Here is a book review from the NY Times:
August 7, 2002
A Boy's Essence Uploaded and Adrift in Cyberspace
By JIM HOLT
Could a human mind enter a computer? It seems unlikely
at first blush. After all, the fastest supercomputer
today is a thousandth as fast as the brain of Homo
sapiens. But what about the Internet? As it happens,
the Internet's total unused computational power
outstrips that of the human brain. If cyberspace were
organized into a giant neural computer — that is, a
computer that mimicked networks of brain cells — one
could in theory "upload" a person's mental software
into it: thoughts, feelings, memories, the works.
Would cyberspace then be the arena of that person's
consciousness, of his very soul?
That is the metaphysical question at the heart of John
Darnton's new thriller, "Mind Catcher." Mr. Darnton, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent who is now
cultural news editor of The New York Times, apparently
dashes off techno-thrillers in his idle moments. With
this one, his third, he proves himself a practiced
hand at the genre. The settings are cinematic and
often memorably creepy; the characters are just
complex enough to engage our sympathy or loathing; the
technical bits — brain surgery, bizarre neurological
syndromes, sinister computer devices — ring authentic;
the plot mechanics are good, keeping the pulse racing
all the way to the denouement.
Fitfully, though, "Mind Catcher" betrays a larger
aspiration: it wants to be a thriller of ideas, a
meditation on the nature of the self. And in this
respect, I think, it's something of a muddle.
Our protagonist is Scott Jessup, a New York
photographer who has lost his wife in a plane crash,
and who is now raising their son, Tyler, alone. But
something gruesome befalls the boy: in a rock-climbing
accident in the Catskills, a metal device pierces his
skull, embedding itself deep in the cortex of his
brain.
The comatose child is rushed to a hospital on
Manhattan's East River, there to be operated on by the
celebrated and monumentally arrogant brain surgeon
Leopoldo Saramaggio. The procedure Dr. Saramaggio has
planned is unprecedented: while Tyler's brain is
connected to a computer that maintains his basic life
functions, the surgeon will extract stem cells,
cultivate them in his lab and then reimplant them to
rebuild the boy's cortex. Whether Tyler will regain
consciousness, let alone his sweet personality, is far
from certain. But since there is no other hope, his
distraught father gives his consent.
Ambitious as Saramaggio's operation is, it doesn't
approach what his collaborator, Dr. Cleaver, is
scheming to do. A skulky little man whose bald dome
makes him look like Lenin, Cleaver is the presiding
physician at a lunatic asylum across the river on
Roosevelt Island. In the basement of this half-ruined
Gothic pile, he experiments on his basket-case
patients, scanning and galvanizing their brains to
verify his pet theories of the mind. Cleaver's guiding
obsession is that a person's essence might be coaxed
out of the body and made to merge with a machine. Now
that Dr. Saramaggio has asked him to handle the
computer part of the brain operation on Tyler, he sees
a chance to realize it on the sly.
Postoperation, "Mind Catcher" gets pretty hard to put
down. While Tyler remains technically alive — his body
suspended in a sterilized room "like an angel frozen
in midflight" — all his brain signals seem to be
issuing from the computer he's wired to. Dr.
Saramaggio is baffled and humiliated. Scott demands
that his son be taken off life support and, after a
violent confrontation at the hospital, he is. But
strange portents develop following the funeral. Scott
becomes convinced that Tyler is somehow alive and
pleading, via the Internet, for his dad to rescue him.
And the only person who thinks he's not boozily
delusional is a new resident surgeon at the hospital,
Dr. Kate Willett: compassionate, honey blond, nose
perhaps a bit long.
Together, Scott and Kate set out to uncover what
actually happened in the aftermath of the operation.
The trail of evidence takes them from the downtown
art-gallery world to an exclusive Connecticut yacht
club and eventually to a commune of computer hackers
in New Jersey. There they encounter a techno-mystic
called Cybedon, who gives them an inkling of where
Scott's son might be.
"The computer is a portal," he says. "Cyberspace is
merely a term to describe a man-made series of
connections between systems of computers, first
through wires and then through space. This is
altogether different. It is clearly not man-made. It
is eternal and it has always been with us. . . . It
might consist of everyone who has ever lived, every
deed that has ever been done, every word that has ever
been spoken."
After taking this supernatural turn, "Mind Catcher"
never looks back. When Scott finally manages to enter
the ethereal mind space (thanks to an elaborately
described "transcranial stimulator-receiver" he
hijacks in Dr. Cleaver's lab), it turns out to be a
mixture of Hades and the Jungian unconscious, a place
of flashing lights, departed souls and childhood dream
images. And when kind Kate, on the one hand, and
heinous Dr. Cleaver, on the other, come in after him,
it becomes the setting for a surreal showdown
involving Tyler, Scott's dead wife, and, horrifically
for Cleaver, one of the mental patients killed in his
experiments.
"Mind Catcher" fully discharges its obligation to
generate suspense. But after putting it down, the
thoughtful reader might wonder: just what is the
mind-catching process that the author is trying to
evoke? Is it really a matter of the brain's software
being uploaded into a computer? That's the fantasy of
the real-life artificial intelligence theorists whose
names crop up in the book, figures like Hans Moravec
and Ray Kurzweil.
But much of what happens in "Mind Catcher" is rooted
in a very different understanding of consciousness,
one going back to Plato. It holds that the seat of
personal identity is an immaterial soul, one that can
exist apart from neurons or silicon chips or any other
physical thing, one that might even wander from the
body during dreams or appear to loved ones at the
moment of death. This mind-body dualism is quite at
odds with the cyber-view that consciousness is a
program requiring some kind of hardware to run on, and
it is logically impossible for both theories to be
right. But enough carping. Good thrillers are rare,
whereas treatises on the philosophy of mind are a dime
a dozen.
.
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