Review: Creating a Dialogue Around the Most Important Questions
Great Minds Don’t Think Alike: Debates on Consciousness, Reality, Intelligence, Faith, Time, AI, Immortality and the Human
Great Minds Don’t Think Alike: Debates on Consciousness, Reality, Intelligence, Faith, Time, AI, Immortality and the Human
I had the privilege this year of watching my first Ethics Bowl. If you’re unfamiliar with the competition, as I was, it is what a debate would be if debates were worth having.
Two teams address a moral problem, but instead of trying to destroy one another’s arguments, they augment them. Instead of “Here’s why you’re wrong,” the tone is more, “Have you considered this?”
At the risk of sounding twee, the point of these competitions is so much winning as nudging one another closer to the truth. Being right isn’t necessarily meaningless, only beside the point.
For those of us who have retreated from the scorched earth, black and white discussions that sometimes seem to dominate the culture, the project is hopeful.
Once people have agreed to try and figure something out together, rather than to bully the opposition into submission, the odds of mutual understanding (if not consensus) escalate.
This is the underpinning of the debates in Great Minds Don’t Think Alike: Debates on Consciousness, Reality, Intelligence, Faith, Time, AI, Immortality and the Human, edited by Marcelo Gleiser (Columbia University Press, November 2021).
The Purpose of Debate
It’s funny that “debates” is in the title, and it is easy to forget that confident, intelligent people can speak from oppositional points of view without claiming victory.
That’s not to say that many people won’t be convinced more by one argument or another, only that the effect is to really hammer down the central problems all sides agree have to be addressed in each topic. And the topics are formidable.
I picked up the book expecting a collection of essays written for educated laypeople and was surprised by the editor’s decision to reproduce literal dialogues. Each thinker presents their position then, the two presentations complete, a short dialogue ensues to flesh out the finer points and clear up confusion.
If the book fails at anything it is that it encourages the reader to participate in a dialogue that only makes sense in the context of the conversation.
As with any complex issue, readers can choose to take away what they want from it, but Great Minds Don’t Think Alike seems to invite the reader to take away a more refined understanding of the issues rather than a bundle of facts with which to bludgeon future opponents.
If you liked going to conferences to hear different speakers in college, this book is for you. I’ll admit it took me getting through the first section (The Mystery of Consciousness) before I slid comfortably into the mood.
The Downside of Limited Engagement
I was turned off by the transcript style and if the quality of the conversation hadn’t been the caliber it was, I might not have made my way through it.
I also didn’t have anyone to discuss each of the chapters with, which was a massive downside.
If this were just a book of essays they would be a lot easier to internalize, but this is an active conversation from which I felt banned. Had I attended one of these talks there would have been hours of animated conversation following each.
I would have been able to discuss the experience with another attendee, for example.
A Bagel Manifesto
Stories about coming to terms with belief, culture, and the profound sense of loss that no one really cares about bagels anymore.bit.ly
If the book fails at anything it is that it encourages the reader to participate in a dialogue that only makes sense in the context of the conversation. The arguments and ideas are so compelling it amplifies the solitary act of reading.
The topics are a little esoteric, so there’s no shorthand available to talk about the book with someone who isn’t already reading it.
My takes on the specific dialogues have to remain my own until I bump into someone else who is familiar either with the book or the academics and their positions. It is a mild frustration, but one worth mentioning.
That said, if you are in a nonfiction book club you’re doing yourself and your club a disservice by not considering Great Minds Don’t Think Alike.
Continuing discussions about new insights to fundamental problems challenges the reader to loosen their grip on beliefs held too tightly without reason.
I can imagine this being used as a text in a philosophy class as an overview of what some of the most interesting thinkers have to say on burning cross-discipline topics. It’s the kind of text you leave with more questions than answers and with less confidence you had than before you started.
More important, it leaves you refreshed by having new things to think about and invigorated by some new ways to think about them.
Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his weekly newsletter here.