Kluge by Gary Marcus

Humans have, in less than ten-thousand years, transformed themselves from sparse bands of hunter-gatherers, who committed the whole of their short lives to just surviving in a hostile world, into a global civilization of seven billion souls that has conquered its rivals, its environment and many of its own weaknesses in an unstoppable surge towards a coherent understanding of ourselves and the universe. Everything we use we've invented, adapted. Nothing was given to us. But Mr. Marcus has no time for these inconvenient truths. To hear him tell our tale, we're nothing more than the accretion of evolution's mistakes.

The human mind, Mr. Marcus argues in Kluge is an assemblage of systems cobbled together to defend us from existential threats that no longer plague us. From our contextual memories, to our anxious emotions, to our self-centered worldviews, the reader is escorted on a tour of the mind's major processes. First, plausible explanations are provided for how memory, emotion and reasoning evolved then Mr. Marcus, a research psychologist, suggests how our minds could have functioned had they evolved differently. One example of this is his comparison of computer memory with human memory. The former is comprised of a series of logically numbered addresses, each of which contain discrete and knowable bits of information. The latter, meanwhile, is a hodgepodge of experiences which do not appear to be stored in any logical way.

Kluge makes a number of disturbing assumptions which undermine its argument. While it's true that the human mind has spent infinitely more time adapting to an ape's world of predatory threats than it has adapting to our world of human civilization, and while this may burden us with certain unnecessary weaknesses, this completely misses the point. The primary virtue of humanity is its ability to adapt to anything. Poor recall, emotional fragility, and defective reasoning are not failures of the mind, they are failures of instruction. Our civilization has not yet figured out the ideal way to teach its youngest, its clean slates, how to think, how to be emotionally stable, how to remember. We haven't come close to maximally wiring the human mind, training up its strengths and minimizing its weaknesses. What's more, it's far from clear that we are capable of handling all of the improvements Mr. Marcus so casually yearns for. Certainly, Jill Price would argue that Mr. Marcus' Postal Code memory is a quick way to drive oneself insane. More over, Mr. Marcus failed to convince me that his Postal Code memory would not deprive the human mind of the experience-based insight and intuition we rely upon to make progress in our world. Nowhere in these 210 pages does Mr. Marcus seriously consider the possible, negative consequences of his improvements. He just assumes evolution built the human mind up from the scraps it had to hand, not considering that it may have bestowed the human mind with all it could handle. He may be right, but his failure to consider any alternative explanations, much less to explore the consequences of his improvements, makes Kluge not much more than one man's gnashing over human imperfection. That's novel.

This is engaging and provocative work, but its over-eagerness to point out how the human brain could be improved leads it to breezy and shallow conclusions. (2/5 Stars)