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Well, I am simply in love with Kurzweil. How could I not be? This was one of the best books on Philosophy of Mind that I could imagine reading. Early on in the book, Kurzweil respectlfully disagreed with Steven Pinker, and imo, setting himself apart from the good genes crew (Dawkins et. al.). He went on to take his lucky reader on a tour of the future of the mind, teaching them about everything that has been done to date to try to create a mind.

In 2008, I took a cognitive science class that featured a lot of Kurzweil's work, as well as many other things included in this book. I later took two courses in Philosophy of Mind. All of these courses focused heavily on AI. I loved those classes so very much and this book brought everything flooding back.

You will be treated to the role Hidden Markov Models (HHMs) play in speech dictation. In fact, this very book was written not by hand, but was dictated using Dragon Dictation (which is a product of HMMs). Kurzweil also provided his reader with a short but excellent history of Philosophy of Mind by including Jackson's Mary (The Knowledge Argument), Searle's Chinese room, Chalmers zombies, and Dennett's ideas about all of that. I was sad that he didn't include Andy Clark, but even with that oversight, it was one of the best and most relatable summaries of Philosophy of Mind that I have read. He took out the jargon and, instead, made every concept easy enough for a middle schooler to grasp, yet interesting enough for academics.

Kurzweil chose the most interesting bits of neuroscience to include in this book, all of which are still exciting in 2016. I can only imagine what I would have felt like if I had read this book in 2012. I would have been blown away.

The efforts to create a mind have been ongoing for decades. There is not stopping it, much to the chagrin of many. If you want to be informed about how this process works, read this and Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable. They pair nicely with one another.