250
PARTISAN REVIEW
pathways through a person's image of the world that lead to very dif–
ferent conclusions. Sometimes this can be manipulated by propaganda.
Here the goal is to find the perfect sound bite - one that will yield the
proper thought process and opinion. A lot of this is unconscious.
Years ago we wrote a book called
Justice Without Violence.
It
was
written on the premise that you couldn't expect people to give up the
option of violent revolution in cases of extreme injustice, like apartheid
in South Africa, without offering them some alternative, non-violent,
Gandhian strategy for addressing injustice. It was a classic rational
model which one of our advisors challenged. Violence and war are often
irrational. You need to understand the emotional part of consciousness.
Richard Grimm:
I think we are drawing to the end of our allotted time.
I just want to ask Gunther Stent whether he has a response to the very
optimistic prediction of Ray Kurzweil that within the coming decades
we will come rather close to having a fully working model of the human
brain in a sort of a hard-wired version.
Gunther Stent:
I think it is very unlikely that- God forbid !- Ray
Kurzweil's prediction will materialize, precisely because I am an
optimist.
Richard Grimm:
What are the problems with his predictions?
Gunther Stent:
The paramount problem is the complexity of the brain.
Ray Kurzweil seems to believe that if he collects enough data about
neurotransmitter concentrations and electrical activity in the brain and
feeds the whole shebang to a computer, the software will figure it all
out. I don't think that this is in the cards.
Mark Mirsky:
Gunther Stent, you spoke about the actor. One of the
interesting things about being an actor is that part of the brain you refer
to as the autobiographical memory. I am now speaking as a novelist
who has been influenced by Robert Musil's work, particularly
The Man
Without Qualities.
One thing that Musil qualified for me is how many
people we have locked in our heads; and then in that autobiographical
area, we don't necessarily have one autobiography. That is part of the
complexity of trying to reconstitute the human brain. Just in terms of
sight, we have many, possibly infinite, numbers of people and personal–
ities which complicates the whole question of consciousness.
