Oliver Sacks (Photograph: Adam Scourfield) The poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) takes up these questions in a prescient April 1993 New York Review of Books essay occasioned by the Nobel-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman’s book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind but, like every great book review, soaring far beyond the book itself and into the broader questions of consciousness, the nature of the mind, and what it means to be human. Meaning might be the last stalwart of human consciousness in the age of AI - the supreme existential yearning irreducible to computation, the great creative restlessness that foments all our poems and our passions. I read in Milton’s words the intimation that the mind makes meaning, and meaning - which is different from information, different even from knowledge - is uncomputable. “The mind is its own place,” wrote Milton, “and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” But in an age when machines can simulate, with the sheer force of computation, mind-things like poems, is the mind still a sovereign place? What heavenly and hellish creations can it alone make that no algorithm can reproduce or mimic?
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