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*The Mind is Flat* - Marginal REVOLUTION

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The author is Nick Chater and the subtitle is The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind. I found this to be one of the most interesting books on the mind I have read. Overall the message is that your hidden inner life ain’t what you think: According to our common-sense view, the senses map the outer world into some kind of inner copy, so that, when perceiving a book, table or coffee cup, our minds are conjuring up a shadowy ‘mental’ book, table or coffee cup. The mind is a ‘mirror’ of nature. But this can’t be right. There can’t be a 3D ‘mental copy’ of these objects — because they don’t make sense in 3D. They are like 3D jigsaw puzzles whose pieces simply don’t fit together. The mind-as-mirror metaphor can’t possibly be right; we need a very different viewpoint — that perception requires inference. Take that Thomas Reid! By the way: This perspective has a further, intriguing and direct prediction: that we can only count colours slowly and laboriously…the apparent ri

The author is Nick Chater and the subtitle is The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind . I found this to be one of the most interesting books on the mind I have read. Overall the message is that your hidden inner life ain’t what you think: According to our common-sense view, the senses map the outer world into some kind of inner copy, so that, when perceiving a book, table or coffee cup, our minds are conjuring up a shadowy ‘mental’ book, table or coffee cup. The mind is a ‘mirror’ of nature. But this can’t be right. There can’t be a 3D &#8

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